Mothers Day and other seasonal events - do affiliates make the most of them?
OK we all promote stuff like mad at Christmas and to a lesser degree, Valentines day. But what about Mothers Day? Mothers Day is on a par, if not busier for online florists at this time of year. So where are the affiliates?
I did a search yesterday on Google for “Mothers Day Flowers”….
So where are all the affiliates? As you can see from my skillful Photoshop edit the only affiliate there is me. BTW the positions for that particular key phrase jump around like crazy. Keeping my bid price the same I appeared anywhere from number 2 to number 9 throughout the day. My theory is that new online florists come and then quickly go as they don’t run fully optimised ppc campaigns. Instead they just bid on the term “flowers” as broad match and pay an *awful* lot of money a click and burn out their budget in a couple of hours.
Anyway…where are all the affiliates? Surely we didn’t miss one of the busiest times of the year for flowers? There was a thread on the A4U Forum the other day when a lot of forum members just didn’t think it was feasible to run a PPC campaign for such a saturated market as flowers. Well it is. The key is too use “long tail” keywords. Now I really hate that term as its actually a new buzzword for something that most ppc affiliates have been doing for years, and thats using key phrases instead of single keywords. So the keyword “flowers” is up to £2 a click but the key phrase “mothers day flowers” is around 40p. The keyphrase “order mothers day flowers online” is even cheaper. And so on and so on.
Obviously there isn’t as much volume for “mothers day flowers” as just for “flowers” but the key differences are that (a) the phrase is much cheaper and (b) the user is looking for something really specific, so if your site caters to that specific niche then chances are your conversion rates will increase. Case in point, using “mothers day flowers” phrases I have been generating around 800 sales a day this week and last.
Now obviously after today I will put this site to bed until next year, as it is Mothers Day this Sunday. But my point is are we missing some seasonal and topical opportunities? For example, its St. Patricks day tomorrow but a quick search of Google only shows a couple of sponsored ads, and none for affiliates. Maybe we could advertise merchants who sell St. Paddy’s day memorabilia, or party costumes etc. Or even a link to Tesco (who are currently paying £10 per new grocery delivery customer) for people to buy their Guinness online. Just an idea 
What I’m listening to right now: Musiq Soulchild - “Luvanmusiq“
Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
March 16th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Good post Kieron, that was useful and thought provoking. I am just getting going in AM, so examples and lateral thinking are just the sort of thing I need to help pick the right kind of companies to promote. Its all to easy to try the obvious and high paying verticals and get trampled by the big boys and spenders.
March 16th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Interesting Kieron!
I came to it somewhat late but I’ve had a bit of bash at mothers day flowers for the first time this year.
Same as you targetting “long tail” keywords with a max cpc in adwords of 40p. Although achieving good CTR% (and a mix of great/ok quality scores) what I found was that my ad didn’t get to first page for the more competitive “long tails” so I didn’t get the volume of ad impressions and therefore clicks. I did some PPC in Yahoo too. No brand bidding undertaken - you? Probably only made a few quid in total myself.
How much of a positive impact does your flowers site domain name have do you reckon? Is it a new site or one that you’ve used in previous years and that has some adwords history? Not easy to build up a CTR% history for specific phrases when people only look for mothers day flowers in March.
I spotted that you rank highly in the organic search results in msn for “mothers day flowers” - that bring in any traffic?
Haven’t done my stats yet but it looks like Bunches was the best performing retailer for me. What about you?
John
March 16th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Thanks for your comments John. With regard to your point about not getting on the front page of the Google results and therefore not attaining large volumes and therefore improved CTR. What I always try to do is start my PPC bids off high, which in turn gets me in the top 3 listings. Then after around 24 hours I see CTR go up and prices come down. If you have good key phrases and a good site, this tactic always works well.
Brand name bidding? No, didn’t do any of that.
I’ve always stated that for PPC on Google, the domain name is very important. My experience tells me that having your key phrase in your domain helps your quality score.
I know the site you mean in MSN and thats not mine
To be honest my site was only launched just under 2 weeks ago so I’m nowhere in organic.
And yes Bunches rocks!
March 16th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Cheers Kieron
re: MSN site - ah yes, an extra hyphen that I didn’t notice.
Useful tip on bidding high in the first 24 hours or so to get a decent CTR%.
Regards
John
March 19th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Where are the other affiliates?
Well to be fair mate, I too had a mothersday dedicated website, not too disimilar to yours. However Google turned mine down as it didn’t offer the usual ‘Content/user Experience’ crap.
However, when compared to your website, it offered 10 times as much related content. As usual with Google, there is no consistancy with the rules and for some reason, it seems like a person attack on the FrostMiester
March 19th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
I too noticed this ommission with St Patricks Day ads - only two for goodness sake!
And I noticed it because Google UK was showing a St Patrick’s Day logo version, which when clicked went straight to a search of Google for St. Patrick’s Day.
Mind you, it’s been a busy week for topical searches, what with Mothers Day, St Paddys Day and Red Nose Day!
March 20th, 2007 at 1:33 am
“Brand name bidding? No, didn’t do any of that.”
Are you sure? Ever?
Steve
March 20th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Yes Steve I’m absolutely sure. Of the handful of flower merchants I promoted on my mothers day site none of them even allowed it.
March 20th, 2007 at 1:35 am
Don’t take it personally Frostie, as you say Google make no sense with their policies and double standards are erm…standard.
March 20th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Kieron
Great post and has got me thinking. Do you tend to use one pager landing pages or do you sometimes link direct to the merchant.
Which works best?
March 20th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Hi Purple, linking to merchants is best in some instances but in this case I wanted to give users a choice of flower merchants so I used a landing page.
March 21st, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Interesting. I have been thinking about this kind of strategy for a while. Your conversion rate would have to be fiarly high for this to pay off. Like over 3%. But then with something this targeted, your conversion should be higher than average.
March 22nd, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Hi Kieron,
Good post mate and a great blog. I agree with what you are saying - we tend to pass Mothers Day by as an affiliate community. At Prezzybox we notice very little sales uplift (possibly because we don’t sell flowers and chocolate which are your staple Mothers Day gifts).
Likewise - although we produce a lot of Mothers Day creative for Affiliates very few of them use it.
I really do think this is a trick we are missing. I’ve recently been speaking to contacts in the same sector in the US/Canada. They have a big sales push from October for Halloween/Thanks Giving right the way through to Valentines Day. Now - if we could achieve a similar sustained sales increase for as long a period of time - including Mothers Day, Fathers Day and Easter then it would be happy days for all concerned.
So, I think it’s up to us the Web Marketers to “up the ante” and further commercialise these public holidays much in the same way that Valentines Day is now a major sales opportunity.
Over and out!
Zak.
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Hi Kieron,
A smashing blog post. Very insightful and thought provoking.
I am fairly new to PPC but find it fascinating, and as your post shows, there are many opportunities out there for those with the skills and creativity to find them.
I’m also an avid reader of your blog and check for new posts obsessively on a daily basis!
I was really taken aback by the difference in PPC costs for “flowers” versus “mothers day flowers” In fact, I thought it might have been the other way around, on the assumption that the quality of traffic would be higher for “mothers day flowers”. Even so, it was the difference in price that surprised me. Just to clarify, this difference in price means that a whole bunch of competing advertisers were bidding solely on the exact match [flowers] (or simply bidding lower on the phrase “mothers day flowers”, which would seem very illogical) ?
As your post mentioned, I can only suppose that there were a number of inexperienced advertisers new to PPC who were failing to run fully optimized campaigns.
Perhaps you could comment if this price differential between one word, and long tail keywords can be generalized to other markets (‘insurance’, versus ‘renault car insurance’ for example) Or, on the other hand, would such a difference in price as seen here, be the ‘exception rather than the rule’?
A great looking landing page too, did you design that in front page?
Cheers,
Sam
March 24th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Hi Sam, its not illogical at all that people new to ppc would broad match on the most popular term, ie. flowers. I see this happen on all the time across all sectors.
Long tail keywords are generally much cheaper, yes. Although you do need to have a lot of them in your campaign to make up the volume, sometimes hundreds of thousands.
The page was designed by my design team, in Dreamweaver.
Cheers!
March 28th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Hi Kieron,
Interesting post, I had a look at some of the merchants payments regarding flowers and at 8%-17% each your average basket price must have been really high to make a profit at 40p a click and your site must have converted really really well?
April 9th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Great post and useful information as always Keiron. Just a couple of points need clearing up:
1) How many impressions did you get to achieve those 800 sales per day?
2) Do you see adwords ctr going up during kids school holidays and bank holidays, etc?
Cheers.
April 27th, 2007 at 8:05 am
With regards to the previous question, would you be able to share how you were able to get so many sales per day? At a 40p average per click, you must have either got a really high conversion rate, or your costs went down considerably during the life of your campaign. So, a few questions for you:
1) What did you set your total overall budget at for this campaign?
2) Approximately how many keywords did you have in total?
3) How did you achieve so many impressions? Was it something in particular?
Thanks. Your posts are always very inspiring.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Alex, in answer to your questions:
1) I always set my daily budgets at $100,000. That doesn’t mean i spend that amount though, it just ensures my ads are always showing.
2) Around 10,000
3) Just by using really targetted keywords and terms at the right time. You would not believe how many people search for “mothers day flowers” in the run up to Mothers Day.
January 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Hi Kieron,
I know this is an older article however I am curious as to how a program like this would pay out?
i.e. keeping track of the click thru’s to their site and they pay you based on clicks you show?
I’m a newbie and trying to understand this form of affiliate marketing as I believe it could be a huge opportunity for me.
Thanks for such a great article.