COVID-19 Playbook

Finished with cleaning-up your desktop and rebooting your computer? As a paid (search) marketeer now is the perfect time to think over your paid (search) strategy and do an extensive health check on your paid (search) campaigns. Based on our experience with (international) clients, massive campaign setups and complex account structures, we know it’s definitely worth investing time in doing a proper health check and working towards a paid (search) power engine. This will make your campaigns, as soon as search behaviour becomes normal again. Here a practical checklist to start with:

Create audiences who show ‘different’ behaviour than usual and stamp them with Corona. Your visitors still have “buying intent”, but they lack trust or opportunity to convert at this time. You can follow up on this audience once the storm settles with good communication and where applicable deals. Make sure you set your cookie duration to the max as this situation will not pass anytime soon. In online advertising channels combine this audience with other intent audiences e.g. Corona visitors who have added a product to the cart but have not converted.

This is a hot debate, but not all algorithms are created equally and thus not all algorithms can “reset” themselves in a period of rapid trend changes. Let’s face it, we all trust the “Googles” of this world in one way or another for their advertising knowledge and implementation of their algorithms. However just like all us have not been through a situation similar to the COVID-19 global outbreak and are now learning how to adapt, the algorithms need to do the same. Based on our experience with rapid, large non-predictable changes in campaign KPI’s in the past, the algorithms base their optimisations on might cause algorithms to over optimise. For example, you might see a stable CPA (if that is your goal), however volume shrinking to a point where the campaign almost stops itself. If that is the case and you believe the volume might be there, we strongly recommend restarting the campaign and let it relearn based on the new reality.  The same applies to run-away CPA’s or reduced ROAS results. Don’t be afraid to let your campaign re-learn the rules of the game. Lastly, when the market begins to recover, depending on the speed of the recovery, keep an eye on the same behaviour.

The current situation clearly changed daily routines and consumer behaviour: people avoid crowded places and tend to purchase products online where they can. If and when your stores are still open, we do advise not to push traffic to the stores. When communicating about stores, inform potential customers about measures you are taking to help safeguard the health of your customers and your employees. Make sure to adjust your local ad, location extensions and store-locator accordingly. Especially the latter is important since people will be searching locally and visiting those pages. When possible, it is better even to emphasize on your online ordering possibilities and convenience in doing so. It might go without saying that with stores and local branches closing, online campaigns need to reflect those changes. When changing campaigns don’t forget to also check:

• Location extensions in Google/Bing Ads
• Local Facebook pages that might have been created decentralized
• Location ads in Google Maps and partners
• Opening hours in Google my Business
• Opening hours on Trip Advisor /Yelp/ Etc.

While these desperate times are impacting all budgets, an opportunity arises. The flip side is that for example, on Facebook, we see CPM’s plummeting up to -63% (source: Internal Dept campaigning data). Due to the increase in available inventory the reach-per-euro is quite high at the moment, making it an opportune time to send out a brand message. Staying top of mind, getting a supporting message out there or promoting a Corona indifferent product or service is quite possible.

The campaigns you have optimized based on time-window delivery or purchased for certain time slots might not be the most effective at the moment. There is a clear shift in both b2c as well as b2b behaviour. With more and more people working from home, office hours become stretched and more flexible (Dept internal campaign data). Even while working, people are more inclined to take care of “personal business” since they are at home. Adjusting campaigns and testing with reaching out during the day might be worth your while, especially around lunch breaks. Don’t forget that commuting to and from work becomes less prevalent as well and because of that less radio is consumed at those time slots and the early evening time slot is moved forward.

We are in the middle of crucial times for marketing managers and brand marketers. Product launches get postponed due to manufacturing issues, market moments like “Easter” become irrelevant and brand campaigns ask for adjusted media plans, refreshed tone of voice and responsive creatives. So it goes without saying that the current situation is clearly impacting your year-round marketing calendar and strategy. To adapt fast now is the time to rethink your marketing strategy with your marketing team. The first step to take? Jump on a video conference call with your team and agency and discuss what needs to be done. To become extremely agile and flexible in this uncertain time it’s smart to rebuild your campaign framework to a digital framework. Think of:

• Using a fully dynamic creative setup, so you can adjust brand images or product images according to stock- and product availability. And easily change the call to action, proposition statements and copy dynamically;
• Making use of programmatic media buying instead of TV, OOH or Radio. In this manner, you are completely flexible throughout the year and it’s possible to last-minute include / exclude publishers and adjust campaign settings like targeting and creatives according to your new strategy;
• Refresh your black- and whitelist of publishers, and create an experiment list of new publishers and partners to test and experiment with. Extra advantage, it’s probably against much better rates;
• Think of new market moments, which will definitely appear after this COVID-19 period.  Like consumer behaviour related to holiday allowance if the impact of the virus will hopefully decrease soon.

Every day new updates come in from either the government or news from which decisions are made within your company. Decisions to cancel events, decisions to change the setup of your marketing activities, decisions to add pages to your website etc. All the changes that are made, and large updates that impact your company should be annotated in your analytics tool to make sure that looking back into 2020, you still know what happened and what might have impacted your results. Make sure to have a consistent approach to using these annotations, so everybody in your company is able to see and understand them.

These times ask for new approaches. Normally you would probably compare your performance on a YoY or MoM basis, but right now it is important to keep a closer eye on your results. Whilst you should not base your decisions on daily results, it is wise to keep track of what is happening on a more frequent level than usual. You can keep a closer eye by:

• Doing WoW analysis and looking at the trends you see here

And keep this in mind:

• For fluctuating priced products and services connect margins to real-time bidding and real-time pricing to run campaigns and advertise on actual data.
• Seasonality might chance. Make sure you are comparing the right periods (perhaps WoW is better than YoY). Your data will be impacted for the coming 24 months at least by this paradigm shift in consumer behaviour.
• Make “COVID-19” annotations in Google Analytics for future analysis

Everybody is affected by this COVID-19 crisis and your customers have a lack of trust in the market at the moment. Don’t make it difficult to cancel a reservation/booking/order but build a relationship with your customers. Help them make the right decision and offer them flexibility. In return they will give you their loyalty and return to you when the market recovers. Ideally, you could offer an additional incentive for customers to reward their loyalty, ranging from cost-effective upgrades( e.g. a free late checkout for a hotel room, a free seat choice on a flight etc.) or paid upgrades with a discount proposition (e.g. 15% discount on product X when it becomes available again).