Kelly McGuigan
Director of Product Marketing, Skai
Event Planner. Skai Search’s new feature enables search marketers to label important date ranges—such as for big promotions or holidays—and then offers specialized analysis, alert, and automated action tools to make sure they are on top of their game during key marketing periods of the year.
At Skai, one of the most important ways that we support marketers with our technology is by helping them speed up their workflow and reduce errors so they have more time to work on the strategy of SEM.
After all, as stated in our latest white paper on paid search workflow efficiency: “A streamlined workflow is not a ‘nice to have.’ It’s a critical component to successful search advertising.”
Why? Because paid search is one of the most labor-intensive advertising channels in marketing and most search practitioners can easily spend most of their day in all of the tasks required of building, loading, and reporting on campaigns. These execution tasks don’t leave much time to do the important analysis and optimization work that truly drives great performance.
As labor-intensive as paid search can be, it gets exponentially more time-consuming during big promotional periods—such as the end-of-the-year shopping season or during big holidays such as Mother’s Day and Easter. As an event planner, most marketing tools don’t stack up. For many retailers, it’s a mad scramble just to stay on top of loading up deals and new products.
And there are so many holidays that marketers need to consider as well as seasonal sales. It’s in these intense times of the year that search marketers must be on top of their game. But, with the extra workload, it can be hard to find the time to analyze and optimize. The disturbing irony is that during promotions with increased conversion activity, it is actually the most crucial time to invest in performance optimization.
Skai Event Planner…saving time means making money
Event Planner is a new feature of Skai Search that offers a more automated approach to your holiday season planning, saves you time, and helps you to reach your goals.
At the heart of this tool is the ability for search marketers to define and label key date ranges for these promotional periods. For example, you can label the five days of the Cyber Five (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) or an upcoming “Clearance Sale”.
By defining these date ranges, Event Planner enables Skai clients to do all of the following in one centralized location:
View your year-over-year (YoY) performance metrics so you can make better decisions. For example, you could label last year’s “Christmas in July” and this year’s “Christmas in July” so you can instantly see how you are doing this year versus last without having to set up the custom date range every time. Once labeled in Event Planner, you can check back any time and get an instant analysis.
Audit your account to make sure everything is set up correctly. Set Skai Audit to check for specific things during the event and have them expire automatically once the event is over. Without Event Planner, you can setup Audits, but then you would have to go through and remember to turn them all off once the promotion is over.
Real-time alerts and automated actions
Configure real-time alerts so you’re always in the know about your activity . Skai Alerts notify clients when specific things occur in your campaigns. For example, you can get an alert if a campaign or ad group reaches its daily budget. During big promotions, it is important for search marketers to know when campaigns get paused due to spending caps so they can jump in and add incremental budget if needed.
Set up automated actions to make sure you don’t miss any opportunities. While alerts notify you if something happens, Automated Actions can make changes to your accounts if a certain activity is detected. In the case of a campaign running out of spend not only can get an alert, but you could also set the system to automatically increase the budget or bids by a certain amount when this happens.
“Event Planner is really great for search marketers that have to manage big promotions throughout the year,” says Bill Riddell, Client Success Manager at Skai. “It has a ton of great functionality and is a one-stop-shop to help speed up and prepare for periods of high activity.”
With the holiday season around the corner, Event Planner might just be the tool you need to make the most of your next promotion.
Does your search marketing platform have anything like Event Planner?
Probably not. To learn more about this feature and to see more of the innovative features available in Skai Search, please reach out to us today to schedule a quick and easy demo.
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