In the business of online advertising we often focus so much on ‘CPMs’, ‘CPCs’ and ‘CTRs’ we overlook that behind these acronyms we’re dealing with actual people, not just numbers and letters.
Sometimes real world events happen beyond our control and what one day was your best performing ad is next as slow as a Sunday driver. For example, thousands will be interested in tickets to sold out Kanye West tours, until something goes wrong and he cancels all his gigs.
Far from lamenting in the changeable nature of our world, how can we take advantage of this as online advertisers?
Taking a look at travel insurance
The insurance industry has unpredictability at its very foundations - you’re basically entering a bet with a private company that something awful and unexpected is going to happen to you. This means that real world events have a dramatic effect on demand for insurance.
The digital agency I work for recently conducted in-depth research into how Australians search for travel insurance. We looked at two major global events.
As the above chart shows, searches for ‘travel insurance France’ dropped significantly following the Paris attacks on the 13th of November. This goes against the year-on-year trend, as this significant a drop at this time had not occurred for almost 10 years.
Positive events can also affect short term search trends. For example, the chart above shows how the 2016 Rio Olympics caused worldwide searches for ‘travel insurance Rio’ to skyrocket during the games.
The effect that real world events have on search demand is clear - but how can we capitalise on this?
Use paid media to boost organic traffic
On June 17 Searchmetrics revealed a big shakeup to the Google algorithm that made changes to how sites rank for trending keywords and hot topics. They found that big media sites regularly producing fresh and newsworthy content were benefiting hugely but in short periods, so they named the update “News-Wave”.
The theory is that Google is now using data both from the Twitter firehose, which it gained access to in March 2015, and real time search data to give short bursts of organic visibility to sites ranking for trending keywords.
How is this of use to sites that aren’t big media companies? Well, it seems that non-news-related keywords can become ‘newsworthy’ - and hence boosted in the SERPs - when something ‘newsworthy’ happens around that related topic. So anyone targeting the right keywords, in the right way, at the right time, should benefit.
Where does paid media come in? The key here is to boost traffic to newsworthy articles on your site with a view to raising the page’s authority through increased exposure. If it’s a good article, more exposure should result in more shares and backlinks to that article, helping it rank better organically.
Which keywords should you target?
Importantly, the keywords most affected are from the ‘shorthead’ - short, information based keywords that are either one or two words long, such as “Rio olympics” or “Paris attacks”.
Remember, the update is called Google Wave for a reason - there are repeated swells, but they last for a short amount of time. So the key is to spot the trends and be as quick off the mark as possible. To do this you must diligently monitor Google Trends and social listening platforms. Setting up Google alerts for your niche would also help.
Which platforms should you consider?
In an ideal world the platform of choice would be the one that produces the highest quality of traffic for the lowest CPCs. By quality I mean visitors that are engaging with the content and preferably sharing - it’s important to have your analytics set up correctly to track this.
Unfortunately, as we’re talking short time frames, you may not have the luxury to properly test multiple platforms. It therefore makes sense to target Twitter as this is the platform that Google seems to be using to identify these trends. It’s likely that if you can get a ton of people tweeting your article including the trending hashtag that this will hugely boost organic visibility.
Make it mobile friendly
A recent study by Canberra University into the online consumption of news showed that 47.3% of Australians use their mobile phones as the main way they access news, rising to 64.9% for 18-24 year olds.
So it’s absolutely crucial that your landing pages are mobile optimised!
Also, as the majority of Twitter users are between 18 and 29 years old you may want to consider narrowly targeting your Twitter ads to mobile users in this age range - although, this should be flexible depending on the content you’re promoting.
By Nick Chowdrey, content & PR manager at international travel marketing agency In Marketing We Trust.