Advice for the Lovelorn

Five tips to make Valentine’s Day shopping sweeter for your site

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, people’s thoughts are turning to love. Immediately after that, they turn to the…Internet? Yep, and that’s where you come in. With searchers heading online to find the perfect Valentine’s gift, now’s the time to create Valentine’s Day campaigns, or add Valentine’s copy to your existing campaigns.

Here are a few pointers that should help your Valentine’s Day campaigns hit the target in a way that might make Cupid himself just a little bit jealous:

Same-Day Delivery—When it comes to love, timing counts. If you sell flowers or gift baskets and offer same-day delivery, be sure to mention that in your titles and descriptions.

Promotional Language—If you got it, flaunt it. Be sure and call out any Valentine’s Day perks you may offer, such as free shipping, coupon codes or gift wrapping.

Scope of Offerings—Show users all of “the chocolates in the box.” Ads for broad keywords do not perform well when the ad results are too narrowly focused. For example, an advertiser bidding on the general keyword “valentine gift” should avoid specific titles and descriptions, such as “Experience GPS like never before, the gift they will always remember.” (Unless, of course, you truly do believe that GPS is the gift that someone is likely to always remember.)

Specificity—Get down to the heart of the matter. Ads that contain the keywords people are searching on outperform those that don’t. Yahoo! offers a keyword insertion feature that adds the search term used by the searcher in your ads. If you’re going to use keyword insertion, make sure you use ALT Text to ensure that your Titles and Descriptions appear the just the way you want them to.

Title and Description Quality—Love may be blind, but searchers aren’t. Make sure your titles and descriptions are clear, cogent and concise, with no spelling or grammatical errors.

Show a little love to your campaigns with the tips above, and they will love you back with better performance and greater results.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst/Gangster of Love

Photo courtesy of Sharann Hansen