Last Updated on 23 April 2024 by Stu Edwards
At GMM HQ, our wine consumption has sky-rocketed in the past few weeks.
What with the horrible news, massive global economic uncertainly, and the fact I can only buy 6 eggs at a time – there’s no wonder wine-o-clock is getting a bit earlier every day.
And I’m not alone.
With pubs and bars closed and Corona beers being the only thing left on the supermarket shelves, searches in English-speaking countries around the world focused around getting your favourite tipple delivered have absolutely skyrocketed in the past few weeks.
I read an article last week about a meteoric surge of people looking for ‘wine delivery’ in the US. So I thought it warranted a bit of further investigation.
Looking at Google Trends for ‘Wine Delivery Service’ – from 1st April there’s been an +850% increase around the term ‘Wine Delivery Service’ in the past 30 days.
Looking deeper and layering in a couple of other similar terms around beer and alcohol, you can see some pretty large spikes around booze in general.
We pulled data for:
- Beer Delivery
- Wine Delivery
- Alcohol Delivery
How Can Alcohol Retailers Better Understand The Current Google Ads Climate
By the time this post goes live, the initial wave might have died down.
The peak according to Google Trends certainly looks like it’s flattened out for now.
We thought we’d share a few scenarios from we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks across a few different ecommerce-focused Google Ads accounts.
Massive spikes in Impressions?
As other advertisers pull their PPC budgets, you’ll likely see an increase of impressions and clicks as there’s now more ad inventory available for your bids.
If your market is getting more competitive with advertisers seeing the same opportunities, as you can see with our ‘Wine Delivery Service‘ example, there are now 850% more impressions available for those terms.
Search lost impression share (budget)
Track your Search lost impression share (budget) for your campaigns closely and more frequently.
If you’re seeing large increases and getting good results, you’re leaving money on the table by not increasing the budgets to compensate for the demand.
At the campaign level, you can segment by Time > Day to see a breakdown of your metrics by your time frame.
What are your competitors up to?
Keep a close eye on your Auction Insights.
If you’re up to speed on your competitors’ usual activities, you can see if they’re being reactionary by increasing or decreasing their actively by tracking Impression share, Position Above Rate and Outranking Share metrics.
More junk keywords creeping in?
In the past few weeks, we’ve seen a huge increase of new, broader terms creeping into our search term reports as the volume increase becomes available, especially for Shopping Ads.
Advertisers should safeguard their ROAS by increasing their search term checks for negative junk terms and to spot opportunities for new keywords for your search ads.
Think outside the box
We’ve seen a large increase of ‘send’ related terms creeping into our search term reports – clearly people looking to help out loved ones.
Consider layering in some of these terms into your keyword targeting, ads, and landing page copy.
How Alcohol Retailers Can Improve Their Google Ads Results
With an increase in competition and demand, ads need to stand out.
If you’re a local alcohol delivery service, layer in relevant location-related terms into your ad copy to skyrocket your CTR and improve the relevance for your target user.
Make sure your ads are triggering for the correct terms. If you don’t offer same-day delivery, you might wanna negative those terms. Mine those search term reports guys…
Other quick wins and things to think about
- Consider refreshing your Ad Extensions (Callouts, Site links)
- Use a discount code to hook new customers
- Be clear and transparent about shipping and delivery time
- If you’re using automated bidding strategies, Google’s AI is going to throw it’s toys out the pram when sales suddenly drop off when the inevitable lockdown is lifted. So watch your CPCs, especially if you’re using Maximum Conversions, and adjust your Target CPA/ROAS accordingly and wait for everything to mellow out.
Rolling With The Punches
Like many other PPC agencies out there in the interwebs, when the pandemic news broke, we collectively thought the same thing, that advertising and marketing budgets are the first things to be culled as businesses go into financial lockdown and wait for everything to magically go away.
While scaling back and hibernating is the case for some businesses – other consumer-focused businesses are having Black Friday levels of online sales activity in line with the demand, due to everyone’s eagerness to enjoy the simple pleasures, and perhaps having that extra glass of wine or beer with their frozen pizza and binge-choccies…
Whatever the industry or business type – with increased demand, aggressive competition, changes to the ways businesses operate, or a shift in human psychology – it’s the responsibility of PPC managers out there to be agile and reactionary to cope with any change in the market.
If you’re a retailer and would like to get in contact about how we improve your Google Ads efforts, then we’re your future partner.
Learn advanced tips that PPC professionals use to dramatically increase their Google Ads performance!