In a few short weeks, the back-to-school frenzy will begin. Parents and students will be on the prowl for the newest “must have” items such as trendy folders, writing accessories, apparel, electronics and more. With the years’ second largest shopping season on the horizon and an approximate $70 billion to be spent during the next few months, how do make sure your site is ready?

Follow the tips below to keep guests onsite longer and sell, sell, sell during the busy back-to-school weeks:

Add New Keywords:  Research new keywords for your pay-per-click campaign. Try using specific products and model numbers in order to capture those already searching for your products. Then, keep costs down and relevancy high by utilizing different match types and adding expanding negative keyword lists.

Try Including Promos In Ad Text:  Attract the attention of penny-savers by promoting sales and specials in the ad text. Remember, parents aren’t the only back-to-school shoppers in the family so get creative to catch the attention of teens, tweens and college students alike.

Target Smartphones: In 2011, 27% of shoppers compared prices directly on their smartphone during the back-to-school season. Give yourself a competitive edge by creating a mobile targeted campaign. Be sure to offer special incentives and bid wisely to keep ads “above the fold.” Doing so could entice in-store comparison shoppers to abandon their real life shopping carts and purchase directly from their mobile device.

Have Fun With Your Landing Page: Create a unique landing page showcasing products, prices and popular items. Then, segment sections of the page into different audiences such as parents, elementary, high school and college students in order to develop customized shopping paths for each.

Experiment With Remarketing: Capture the attention of previous buyers or those who abandoned their shopping carts through a remarketing campaign. Placing a simple code on your site can track those shoppers and enable you to target them with unique ads encouraging them to complete a purchase or even buy more.

Utilize Your Fan Base: Encourage your existing fan base to purchase items from your website by engaging them on popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Google+. Try offering exclusive incentives, fun contests and more to get the conversation flowing and eventually feet in the “door” and onto your website.

Not sure how to implement these suggestions on your own? That’s why we’re here! Be sure to speak with an Account Manager today to prepare your online marketing efforts in time for the back-to-school rush.

Long before the end of June, stores and businesses nationwide will be decked out in red, white and blue stripes and stars. Across the nation, people get ready for cookouts and fireworks; traditions that, throughout the years, have remained largely unchanged. The 4^th of July is a huge holiday, not only for the nation to celebrate its independence, but for retailers as well; the entire month of July is known for mid-year sales and clearances. With preparation and planning, advertisers can make the most of this holiday that presents ample opportunity to announce seasonal clearances, as well as make room for the new season’s merchandise. But remember not to lose sight of your customers; think about what they want to accomplish over the holiday and help them find everything they need for the perfect 4th of July.

Online Advertising

• Include a patriotic color theme in your advertisements, including red, white and blue, as well as stars, fireworks (and even Uncle Sam!) If you want your sales/promotions to be the main focus of the messaging, add your messaging in large red font.
• Reference 4^thof July and Independence day in your ad copy and email marketing. Some examples from 2010 include:
  • Fingerhut: Answer this 4th of July Trivia + Get a FREE Gift!‏
  • Banana Republic: Happy July! Take a fourth off sale items + free shipping.
  • Old Navy: Patriotic Styles As Low as $5! Go Fourth & Save!
• Try targeting July 4^th keywords through your pay-per-click campaigns. For some verticals it’s a chance to get ads in front of audiences searching for occasion-specific products/services. If you’re in the travel/tourism industry, this can be promoted over a month in advance to capture searches for 4^th of July vacation ideas, hotel specials etc.
• Utilize remarketing campaigns to promote your discounts and coupon codes to previous site visitors. This works especially well when offered to existing customers.
• Consider partnering with Groupon or Living Social or any of these daily deal companies to offer discounts during this time and promote awareness of your products/services.

On Your Website/In-store

• Get in the spirit – decorate your store and website with red, white and blue and create patriotic retail signs.
• Add a banner to your homepage or design store signage to emphasize your sales, making sure to include the specific dates of your sale if applicable.
• Highlight patriotic-themed products through banners and in-store displays
• Highlight items your customers would need for theirJuly 4^th events such as cookouts and party hosting, themed home decorating  etc. to help them find everything they need for the holiday. This also presents an opportunity to bundle/up-sell products.
• Design a banner with your top clearance items. This is a great way to grab customers’ attention and promote your best deals.

Through Email/Social Media

• Promote your discounts or coupons. This is particularly effective when marketing to existing customers.
• Promote contests and giveaways with such things as 4^th of July trivia quizzes – everyone loves free stuff and this is a great way to increase customer interaction.
• Email your customers or post to your social accounts, 4^th of July ideas such as where to watch the fireworks, upcoming parades and events in your area and even your favorite 4^th of July recipes and barbecue tips – little things your customers might appreciate. This is also an opportunity to include suggestions for relevant products/services you offer.

Please also keep in mind your ad agencies when planning your promotions. This is a busy time of year for marketers and agencies so the more notice you give, the better they can plan for your 4^th of July campaigns.

When it comes to PPC advertising and Google Adwords, the one metric that will make or break your campaign is Quality Score (QS). Every single one of your keywords has its own Quality Score, so when you’re stuck with a low Quality Score problem and you’ve done everything you can to ensure relevancy between the landing page, ad copy, and keywords, then it’s usually easier to just increase your bids and move on to bigger and better keywords. In some cases, however, it is worth taking the time to troubleshoot a few of your keywords, especially when there’s potential for high conversion value.

In April 2012, Google updated the Quality Score dialog box with new Quality Score indicators: Expected clickthrough rate, Ad relevance, and Landing page experience. This dialog box is accessible by hovering your cursor over the dialog box icon in the status column, which pops up a tooltip that includes these indicators. While Google uses these factors and several more to determine your Quality Score, clickthrough rate is considered to be the most important factor—after all, if your ad is relevant to the targeted keyword, then a large percentage of those searchers should be clicking on your advertisement. But what do you do when both your CTR and your landing page are non-problematic, yet you’re still getting a low Quality Score?

With these aforementioned changes to Google’s Quality Score indicators, you can now discern whether or not your ad copy is what is causing your low Quality Score. For example, when you open up the dialog box of a low QS keyword, the ad relevance indicator might say, “Below average,” and now you know the low QS is most likely due to a perceived mismatch between the ad copy and the keyword.

Sometimes this perceived mismatch is not apparent to us and is only apparent to Google’s algorithms. Sometimes, even when you use keyword insertion, making your ad copy include the exact same keyword the searcher typed in, you are still presented with a low Quality Score. This is because there are other words besides the actual keyword itself that can affect the QS. Discovering and adding these semantically related keywords can boost your Quality Score in many situations. Today I’m going to show you 3 simple techniques to find semantically related keywords to include in your ad copy in order to fix your low Quality Scores issues.

1. The Tilde Operator

The tilde command is an advanced Google search operator that searches for synonyms of your keyword along with the actual keyword itself. You can tell what these synonyms are by looking at the bolded keywords on the search engine results page.

E.g. Your search query is: ~yacht

Some of the bolded keywords on the first couple of pages are: yacht, yachts, yachting, boats, boat, and sailing.

Now let’s take this one step further and add the same keyword, but as a negative search term.

E.g. Your search query is now: ~yacht -yacht

Now you can see ONLY the synonyms of the keyword “yacht.” Not only do you get to see terms that you may not have seen in your first search, but you also get an idea of which keywords Google considers to be the same as the keyword “yacht,” such as “yachts” and “yachting,” due to the fact that they haven’t shown up.

Now that you know the search terms that Google considers related to your keyword that are not the keyword itself, you can start making a list of keywords to consider including in your ad copy. Furthermore, you can string out your search query multiple times, each level giving you more and more related keywords.

E.g. ~yacht -yacht -boat –sail

Not only can this technique help you fix your low Quality Score, but it’s also great for SEO purposes and gives you insight into Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for specific search terms.

2. Google Sets Feature in Google Docs

Google Sets was a Google Labs tool that was shut down in September 2011, but it is still available as a feature in Google Docs spreadsheets. In order to use the feature, simply type in 3-5 related keywords down one column, highlight them, and then Ctrl + drag the corner down to generate a list of related words. This is a great method to build a wide set of keywords for keyword research purposes, as well as for generating a list of related keywords for your ad copy troubleshooting.

3. Contextual Targeting Tool

With Google’s Contextual Targeting Tool in Adwords, you are able to generate related keywords by entering one or more seed keywords. Not only that, but the tool also generates these keywords and organizes them into themed ad groups.

While the tool is intended to be used to help you build display campaigns, it also provides another level of insight for finding what Google considers to be semantically related keywords—something that is especially important with new search terms that pop up which have not existed before, due to the fact that Google has less data to go off of. In cases like these, it may be beneficial to go ahead and check for what Google “knows” about a particular keyword because it’s still going to affect Quality Score if there’s a perceived lack of relevancy by the engine, even if we as humans can see that our ad is relevant to the keyword.

While it would be too time consuming to use these techniques for every single low Quality Score case, these are great options for making the most out of the current keywords in your Adwords campaigns and improving your QS by including semantically related keywords in the ad copy. Use all three methods in conjunction with each other rather than relying on any single one. By using all three methods, you’ll be able to find reoccurring keywords and patterns that will allow you to make better decisions about how you should change your ad and the direction you should take when creating fresh ad copy.

Not-yet-breaking-news!  Be prepared to spend more time working in your AdWords account, because Google is soon to release a change to keyword match types that will require a lot more attention to previously low-risk keywords.

One of the first things you learn as a PPC analyst is the difference between match types in Google AdWords.  You’ve got your exact match: safe, reliable, no-frills, thrills, or surprises…you get exactly what you pay for.  You’ve got phrase match, which adds a little intrigue to the mix, opening up new possibilities, letting you test your balance with training wheels on.  And then there are the broad matches, the wild card risk takers of the keyword world.  All essential players in an optimized PPC account, all requiring their own unique strategy for management.

But now Google is throwing us a curve ball, known as “near-exact” and “near-phrase” match types, coming soon to an AdWords account near you.  What does this mean?  With near exact and near phrase match types, your keywords will match with plurals, acronyms, abbreviations, and misspellings of your keywords.  What continues to distinguish this matching from the two forms of broad matching is that your near phrase and near exact keywords will not show for synonyms of your keywords as they do for broad match.

As a long time PPC geek, this *addition* to the AdWords match type arsenal is quite welcome.  Gone will be the days of racking our brains for every plural, misspelled, or mis-typed possibility for a keyword to add to an account.  This should save some time in keyword list building and will easily open up the reach of our keywords, allowing for higher impression and click volume potential.

That being said, there are certainly some words of caution to be heeded before going full speed ahead with near-phrase and near-exact.  The increased liberality of these match types (beyond traditional phrase and exact) will mean that advertisers should be paying more attention than ever to their search query reports, diligently making sure that these broader match types are continuing to deliver quality traffic and not showing ads for low relevancy search queries.

Another rumored aspect of this match type switch up from AdWords is that, while it will initially be a feature that you can opt out of using, eventually *all* accounts will be transitioned to near-phrase and near-exact…meaning that traditional phrase and exact match types will no longer be available to AdWords users.  My guess is that a forced migration such as this would be quite disappointing to the PPC community, this geek included.  Additions to the arsenal for paid search success are always welcome.  On the other hand, sweeping changes aimed, ultimately, at increasing advertising spend and profit for the advertising platforms without regard to the impact on the many small and medium sized businesses utilizing the platform…not so welcome.

Stay tuned to the Leverage Lowdown as this story breaks!