Valentine’s Day: PPC Campaign Preparation Tips, Tools and Downloadable Keyword Lists

The Beatles’ sage declaration of “Can’t Buy Me Love” is just as true today as it was the day those lyrics were penned… but that won’t stop love struck online shoppers from trying come Valentine’s Day.  According to the National Retail Federation, Valentine’s Day spending in 2009 accounted for about $14.6 billion[1] in the United States.

While Valentine’s Day is typically most lucrative for florists, jewelers and chocolatiers, there’s a wide range of options for showing the object of your affection how you feel.  From dinners in five-star restaurants to romantic weekend getaways to gift cards geared towards your better half’s hobbies and interests; the choices are limitless. 

With such variety in the purchases made for Valentine’s gifts comes the opportunity for adCenter advertisers to leverage Bing’s growing user base of more than 85 million unique searchers[2] in the U.S. alone, coupled with SearchIgnite's recent report showing average orders on Bing are 21% higher than across all other engines[3].

If you already have Valentine’s Day campaigns set up in adCenter, visit Justin Vanning’s post, Optimize Your Campaigns for Valentine’s Day for insights specific to Valentine’s Day to help you get the most out of your SEM efforts.  If you don’t have campaigns set up in adCenter yet, but you do have campaigns you can import from other engines, you can do so quickly and easily with Microsoft adCenter Desktop^Beta.

As we’re midway through January now, here are some things you can do now to get your campaigns set up for success:

• Research and expand keywords with Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
• Create and launch your Valentine’s Day-specific ad copy
• Monitor and adjust your bidding strategy to maintain top position and solid performance history
• Set up demographic targeting to capture age and/or gender-specific audiences
• Add a Content Ads campaign to your marketing mix (site targeting is available on MSNBC)

Our partners in Media Analytics Services put together some downloadable keyword lists relevant to popular Valentine’s day search queries, but use them with caution: these lists are not intended to be uploaded “as is”.  You must review these terms and remove any that are not relevant to the products/services featured on your web site  Failure to do so could result in not only editorial disapprovals, but a poor experience both for you as an advertiser and for potential customers who visit your site and don’t find what they were looking for.

[1] National Retail Federation, Holiday Spending Totals 2009, [2] comScore Q Metrics, November 2009, [3] SearchIgnite, Mid-Q4 Report, December 2009

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