October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and everywhere businesses offline and online are displaying their pink ribbons of support. This and the fast-approaching ’09 holiday season got us thinking about ways in which advertisers and marketers are integrating their offline and online efforts when it comes to targeting the powerful working women demographic.

We know that women are spending more time online than ever doing a range of tasks including banking, shopping and social networking. We also know that women are responsible for the majority of household purchases which makes them an economic force to be reckoned with.

What we know less about is how a woman’s search behavior changes after she sees your ad, hears your radio or TV spot, or sees your advertorial. Does your ad prompt a subsequent search for your product or brand online? What keywords or phrases from your promotion or campaign might become search queries later? How does this further specific search action on the part of a potential customer contribute to a sale or conversion? Also, how can you be sure that when a user searches for you based on an offline ad that they will find you?

Integrate PPC to get more out of your campaigns.

Offline efforts have been shown to have enormous impact on a user’s search behavior. For instance, when Oprah mentions a product on her show, the company usually experiences a huge search traffic lift (apparently after a mention of the Kindle, Amazon had a 479% lift in traffic!). As marketing and advertising dollars get stretched further, tightly integrating online and offline campaigns are more important than ever.

By creating timely paid search (PPC) strategies to correspond with offline promotions or ad campaigns, you can maximize your exposure and potentially attract visitors to your site when they are specifically looking for your product or company based on an ad or offline promotion. Even better, if your newly-launched promotional landing pages haven’t yet achieved the kind of organic search engine rankings that put them at the top of the results, PPC ads will ensure that users searching on terms related to your promotion will see your ad and brand.

Best Practices: Offline Ads + PPC

So what are some best practices for integrating your PPC campaigns into your offline marketing efforts?

As a test case, let’s examine Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” campaign. Yoplait customers are asked to to save and send in their yogurt lids and the company will give a donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure®.

The following paid search ad appears when you search for “save lids” or “yoplait breast cancer” in Google:

Best Practices:

1. The “save lids” keyword term is based on the campaign promotion name so that searchers who have heard about Yoplait’s campaign can find them immediately. The “Yoplait breast cancer” term is not one that may be used in offline ad copy, but it’s specific to the brand and the cause and would likely be the way a searcher might look for Yoplait. Using creative ad copy as keywords won’t yield much results because people will tend to use more specific natural keywords when searching.
2. The ad copy specifically addresses the unique cause and goal of the campaign so that users who may have just heard the name “save lids” knows immediately what the offer/cause/action entails. Our recent white paper on Women & Online Advertising showed that women will respond online to a good cause. If your promotion isn’t cause-based remember that women go online often for discounts, coupons, and other money-saving options. Be sure your ad copy immediately conveys the “WIIFM” (What’s in it for me?) benefit of your promotion or ad.
3. The ad uses a unique landing page so that PPC visitors are tracked separately from other visitors to the site from offline efforts. Make sure your PPC traffic is tracked separately from your offline traffic. While it’s tricky to close the loop between which offline ads created online searches - keywords that are specific to the offline campaign can be a good indicator that an ad or promotion triggered the search.

This ad appears when a user searches “breast cancer awareness” in Google:

Best Practices:

1. The keyword term is based on topical, relevant, and timely events (National Breast Cancer Awareness Month) and ties in directly to Yoplait’s campaign. Create the perfect storm with your online/offline efforts. Bid on keywords that are nationally relevant based on season, major events, etc, and tie them into your specific campaign. For instance, you could bid on the keyword phrase “back to school” and run an ad about your huge back-to-school savings and discounts.
2. The ad copy uses the “save lids” copy in addition to stating the goal and the cause clearly. If your promotion has a name be sure that copy with a generic headline includes the name of your campaign to help the searcher connect the dots to your offline campaign.

Additionally, the Yoplait ads appear when a user searches for the term “dannon breast cancer awareness” in Google.

Best Practices:

1. This tactic ensures that searchers who may have heard about the Yoplait offer offline but confused the brands will be sure to find the correct campaign immediately. Note: Google does allow advertisers to bid on competitor keyword term but does not allow trademarked competitor names to appear in ad copy.

The overwhelming benefit of aligning your paid search campaign with an offline promotion is that PPC is quick to launch, flexible to change, and produces immediate results. The minute your campaign goes live your ads are being shown on major search engines. If your offline campaign is only for a month or even a few weeks, PPC can bring more visitors and searchers to your site for very little additional effort and cost. The flexibility of PPC also allows for the fine-tuning and tailoring of ad messaging that is crucial when targeting women online. Women seek relevancy when they encounter online advertising and they tend to click only when the message is highly targeted to their search.

Web Ad.vantage has executed successful paid search campaigns for a wide range of clients across many different industries. We provide Pay Per Click Management Services and PPC Consulting for local and national businesses. You may also be interested in downloading our white paper: Women & Online Advertising.