New Year’s Resolutions 2012: Tips to Optimize your Health and Fitness Search Campaigns

Amongst the top New Year’s resolutions for 2012 are:

• Become more physically fit

• Improve one’s financial condition

• Improve health

• Weight loss

This year, resolutions related to overall health and fitness increased in priority over weight loss and other goals, signaling a possible shift from previous years. (1)

In any case, January is a crucial month for advertisers who promote products or services related to a healthier lifestyle. With three out of four top resolutions being health and fitness related, advertisers in the health vertical have a unique opportunity to start 2012 strongly by optimizing their adCenter accounts early.

In the world of paid search, weight loss still seems to be one of the most popular goals. comScore reported more than 583 million searches just for the term “weight loss” in January 2011 across all search engines. This was a 105% increase compared with the previous month. (2)

This trend was certainly reflected in adCenter as well. A look at adCenter data from 2011 shows a small, but vital, window of opportunity. Though impression counts stayed consistently high throughout February and March, clicks peaked in January. (3) This makes sense, as people are more determined to achieve their goals when the new year starts, but the desire to take action fades over time.

However, the most important takeaway for advertisers is that costs-per-click (CPC) were the lowest in January.

Though there is no guarantee 2012 will be identical to the 2011 trends, we do expect there will once again be a very narrow time frame to run a successful campaign on products related to New Year’s resolutions.

In January of last year, the majority of clicks for weight loss products happened in week one of the year with clicks decreasing each passing week.

Optimization Guidelines

Timelines and Budget:

• Be prepared to launch your campaigns by the end of December.
• Plan for growth and ensure your budget is sufficient for the first month of the year.
• Expect the highest demand in the very first week of the year.

Keywords:

• Create your keyword list in December. Review our list of suggested terms*.
• If you sell pharmaceutical products, upload your terms even earlier to clear any editorial obstacles that may occur.
• Use all match types and avoid bidding on broad match only. We recommend using your highest bids on exact match.

As you can see in the charts below, exact match type generated by far the most clicks and also the highest click-through-rate (CTR). (4)

Ad Copy:

• Create ads that include references to a New Year’s resolution, for example “2012 Weight Loss Programs.”
• Use incentives, such as free shipping or discounts.
• Have a clear call to action, for example “Try it now for 30 days” or “Order online today.”
• Highlight the unique advantages of your product, for example “Average weight loss of 25 lbs in 6 months” or “Safely lose up to 5 lbs per week.”

Targeting:

• Small businesses can leverage incremental bidding to boost bids for specific age groups and gender.

• 59% of queries for the keyword weight loss are conducted by women, the age groups 35-49 and 50-64 combined for 63% of searches. (5)
• If your business has a physical location – such as fitness studios, vitamin shops – use radius targeting to focus in on searchers who are near your store address.

Other health & fitness industries likely to benefit from New Year’s resolutions campaigns include:

• Fitness studios and fitness equipment sellers
• Programs to help people quit smoking

As an advertiser, one of your first resolutions should be to have your campaigns prepared for the expected peak in early January.

Happy New Year and best of luck in 2012 from all of us at adCenter!

Thanks for reading

Peter Haubold, Vertical Specialist

NOTE: Be sure to review all keywords for applicability to your own campaigns before uploading them -- failure to do so could result in editorial disapprovals.

1) PRWEB; November 2, 2011

2) comScore Term Profile: July 2010 to Sept. 2011

3) adCenter internal data: Vertical Analysis, Oct 2010 to March 2011 (based on 76 accounts)

4) adCenter internal data: Keyword Analysis, January 2010

5) Microsoft Ad Intelligence: Demographic report, October 2011