How The New year Holiday Effects Search Engine Marketing.

admin 01.05.2010

I wanted to share some data about how holiday search patterns affect PPC/SEM efforts.

Holidays like July 4th, Christmas, & Labor Day – and really, any long weekend, too – usually wreak havoc on Pay Per Click marketing campaigns.  It’s not that they’re across-the-board bad; it’s just that traffic levels are so volatile as to engender huge swings.  Some of our clients had their best days every over the eight days from December 24th to the 31st; some had their worst days in recent memory.

We wanted to take a closer look at this, company-wide, so we graphed out the total Cost Per Lead/App/Phone Call/Sale, by day, from November 1st through January 3rd.   We took total client media spend, and total leads/sales, etc…) and divided it by the total leads for all of our clients.  The Mason interactive company-wide CPL is $32.36.  Some have a >$100 Cost Per Lead; some pay $1.25, but the weighted average is $32.36.

This data is a little misleading because A) our biggest client paused all of their advertising from 12/24 to 12/31, and B) it mixes in leads, sales, phone calls, and other assorted data.  That being said, the data is pretty clear.

The graph plots out the company-wide % variance from the weighted $32.36 figure.  For example, a 0% – the center blue line – means that the total client CPL was $32.36 for that day.  You can see steady peaks and valleys throughout the two months: There’s a trough around 11/8, where the average Cost Per Action  dipped by -23%, for example, and a peak on 12/12 where the over-all CPA was 12% higher than average, at $37.90  But over-all, there’s nothing too crazy going on.

But take a look at 12/27 – the over-all Cost per Action was $42.43, or 31% above the average.  And on 12/31, it dropped to a Quarterly low of $22.65, or -30%.

And this happened despite our hedging against it – so the lesson is that we can expect huge swings on Holidays, despite our best efforts.