Bing and Decide on Halloween Costumes: Tips and Keywords for Costume Retailers

This morning I checked in on my Facebook news feed and found a status update from a friend asking if it’s too early to start decorating her house for Halloween.  Given the number of responders assuring her it’s not, it occurred to me that now is a good time to address our costume-related retailers here on the blog.

Because this time of year sees the most dramatic seasonal spike for costume and masquerade-related advertisers, competition is fierce.  Here are some tips to make sure your Microsoft Advertising adCenter campaigns are set up for success:

1.)    Campaign Structure – Set your adCenter campaigns up in a way that will make sense when you pull a report.  If you lump everything together in one ad group, it will be more difficult and time-consuming to pull insightful data from your campaign's metrics.  Consider how the different types of costumes are grouped either on your web site or in your store and perhaps mimic that in your ad groups (infants, kids, women, men, couples, etc).  Doing so will allow you to review your reports to spot trends that may be helpful in adding negative keywords, adjusting budgets, setting targeting or all three. 

2.)    Ad Copy – Make sure your ads are as specific as possible, highly relevant and include a specific “call to action”… that’s marketing-speak for telling your potential customers what you want them to do: “compare and save”, “buy now”, “shop all sizes”, “outfit the whole family”, etc.

3.)    Keywords – As I mentioned before, competition is fierce for costume suppliers during this time of year.  If your keyword list is not as robust as it possibly could be, you may miss out on opportunities to get your ads in front of potential customers.  In an effort to help you beef up your existing list, I’m attaching a list of 47,470 suggestions provided by our partners in Media Analytics Services that may be helpful.  Most fields are populated with suggestions (ad group names, keywords, bids), but you can and should tweak them to fit your own needs.

NOTE: Because there are so many suggested keywords on the attached list, not all of them will apply to your business. Before loading anything into your campaigns, be sure to review this list for relevancy and remove anything that does not align to your costume offerings!  Failure to do so could result in editorial disapprovals or potential customers clicking on your ads, only to realize you don’t carry what they’re looking for, thereby creating a poor experience for both you and your disappointed visitor.

Good luck!