How to prepare your AdWords campaigns for Easter

Easter is an important holiday for all Romanians, whether we are talking about traditions, its significance or festive preparations. For this reason, the Romanians’ general behaviour during Easter time also has a strong echo in their online behaviour.
In other words, people began to develop “digital habits” during this period, which can now be tracked, year after year, and predicted.

Because trend analysis and consumer behaviour are the basis of any successful PPC campaign, we wanted to find out more. An important source of our research was a live podcast made by Google Partners Romania.

The podcast presented in detail the search trends in Romania specific to the Easter period. A series of trends, which were reconfirmed in 2017, provide an interesting picture on how digital searches will look like this year as well, supported, of course, by Google data. Below is an overview of the main ideas, along with some recommendations.

The mobile phone is the main device used for Easter-related searches

The mobile phone maintains its position as an indispensable assistant during the holidays, representing 60% of the search volume, followed by the desktop (37%) and the tablet (2%). It is important to keep these statistics in mind as we prepare to optimize our mobile campaigns during this time, so that we can bring and retain as much of this traffic as possible.

An important aspect to mention is that there are situations where this relationship is reversed between the mobile phone and the desktop. Device references in relation to digital media show us that when the average duration of a shopping session is longer, users prefer the desktop.

The chart below best illustrates this, and it is easy to see how people prefer the mobile version when using Facebook, Instagram or Google and the desktop version for YouTube, Pinterest or Mail.

We use our mobile phone as a personal assistant

When it comes to Easter preparations, we can observe a strong user behaviour: the mobile phone is always handy and, as a result, is used in all situations, with rare exceptions, for online searches. Some of these situations are: traditional food recipes, themed decorations, tutorials, music and lyrics, curiosities, offline stores opening hours etc.

The importance of the mobile phone is given by the ease with which consumers access DIY (Do It Yourself) content. An example is the cooking content category, where recipe searches are very popular in both written and video formats (YouTube). Mobile recipe searches outnumber desktop and tablet searches up to four times in the week before Easter, and YouTube searches increase by 60%. Equally interesting is that this period begins with a curious behaviour, in which Romanians look for informative content about the holiday itself, traditions and customs, about two weeks before Easter.

• The first graphic shows the main searches of users when it comes to the Easter period. Depending on the industry you are part of, the communication strategy and the campaigns’ objectives, it is recommended to include these words in order to reach users.
• The second graphic shows the volume of searches during the Holy Week. Surprisingly, the maximum search volume for this period is reached on Saturday, and a recommendation in this regard is to make sure that your campaign budgets are optimized to capture as much of this traffic as possible or that the traffic brought on the website matches the target audience of the campaign.

The searches for each industry are different when it comes to the Easter period

Interestingly, we can notice that there are two types of search trends, the constant and the segmented. For example, in the table below we can see how the searches for recipes, cartoons, decorations, and those on the Easter holiday do not change significantly during the two weeks. Instead, the search period for gifts is very specific and limited to a few days, and details about shopping or offers are searched mainly on weekends.

This difference in search volumes is an important decision factor for campaigns optimization. It is also proof that, through such data, we can get a much more detailed picture that can help us when we segment the budget distribution for a certain period, but also when we create the bidding strategy.

For further details on the trends observed in this period or a more detailed segmentation on industry level, you can access this link, where you will find the podcast.

Do you have any questions for us? Go ahead and ask, using the comments section below.

About Optimized

At Optimized we are specialized in e-commerce PPC campaigns (Google Ads and Facebook Ads). Unlike other local agencies, our portfolio only includes online stores and our approach is based on clear performance objectives (CPA, ROAS). Our team consists of PPC specialists and certified Google trainers, as well as people with hands-on experience in e-commerce.

Our strategies are not generic, but strictly applied to e-commerce. We work with stores that want to profitably scale PPC campaigns, with clear objectives, aware that marketing is an investment.