Megan’s First PPC Peak Season at Ingenuity Digital

With Christmas and New Year out of the way, January presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on our performance across peak season including Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and Boxing Day. We took the time to sit down with Megan, who joined Ingenuity Digital in her first PPC role back in July 2019. Take a read to find out Megan’s thoughts on her first PPC peak season in agency life…

What is your role at Ingenuity Digital and how does this differ to previous roles you have worked in?

My role at Ingenuity Digital is a PPC Executive. Before starting here, I was a Digital Executive and always worked on the brand side of companies rather than on PPC. This involved visual merchandising of the website and social media management whereas this role focuses on optimising for Google and Bing.

What training opportunities have you had since starting here?

So many! I joined the company never having worked in PPC. The team has trained me from top to bottom on everything. I was even given the opportunity to visit the Microsoft office in London to attend a Bing Bootcamp covering the platform and its new features.

We also complete all the necessary exams it takes to be accredited. This includes the Google Analytics certificate, Google Search and different variations to ensure we’re consistently at the forefront of training and updates.

What has been your favourite campaign to work on since joining?

I really enjoyed working on a Black Friday campaign for a British accessories brand. There were so many factors that needed altering across the event, it was great to be consistently implementing these changes like ad copy, images and banners.

How would you describe your first peak season at the agency?

As you’d probably guess – manic! It’s a very busy period for the industry and our team but everyone is really supportive, and I really enjoy the pace. We started planning for peak season at the end of summer. There’s 2-3 months’ of planning for essentially three days and a week at Christmas!

Our planning spans across clients and internal teams. We need to know what sale is happening for which client and if it varies over the events so a plan can be created to implement changes such as creatives and ad copy. We also plan with clients on how they want their budget to be split. Are we starting the month with lower budget so we can put more across the sale? Have they considered how they want it to be phased? And finally, understanding what their revenue targets are. It’s all well and good putting a certain amount of budget to certain days but if they have a specific target for a specific day, we have to take this into account as well.

What advice would you give to a client regarding the peak season?

Plan your promotions well in advance. With search engines such as Google and Bing, it’s a lot quicker and easier to implement changes and create campaigns. But with paid social, if you don’t have a promotional planner of what you want to go live when, it can be too late by the time you let your agency know. When advertising on social, we have to create audiences to target which is more time consuming. If we’re aware of the promotions you plan to run throughout the year, we can help you plan, prepare and optimise for them.

Also, just stay in touch with your agency or whoever is running your campaigns. Make sure you’re contactable in case anything changes, or we see a trend that we can leverage so we’re able to act fast and optimise campaigns.

What’s the earliest Black Friday campaign you implemented for a client?

A fashion and jewellery client of ours started their Black Friday campaigns a week before the actual event and then ran their offers for two weeks. Peak is a much longer event than it used to be with offers often occurring all the way up to the New Year! We don’t expect to see this trend changing anytime soon.

What paid search trend do you think will dominate in 2020?

I think Smart Bidding will become even bigger! AI and automation are growing in the industry. These advancements are beneficial to our team as it’s essentially a better use of our time. Using Smart Bidding, we can focus on adding more expertise and strategy to campaigns along with some hands-on management too.

Interested to find out more about working at Ingenuity Digital? This only scratches the surface! Reach out to us to find out what opportunities may be available for you.