Today we’re pleased to feature a Q&A with Harriet Trotter, PPC Manager at Boylesports. Boylesports is Ireland’s largest independent bookmakers and online betting company offering a state of the art online sports betting, poker and casino gaming experience. For Boylesports, large sporting events, such as the World Cup, represent key opportunities to promote its offering and capture new, engaged users.
How have you been preparing your paid search program for the World Cup?
The World Cup presents a great opportunity for us because of the large uplift in search interest around the event that we anticipate to see. As part of our World Cup strategy, we have been running a special offer leading up to the event; we started focusing on the World Cup quite a bit before the beginning of the tournament. By the time the event kicked off, we had already taken a significant step towards our acquisition targets.
We started expanding our keyword coverage well in advance of the event in order to take advantage of the additional interest in the weeks and months beforehand, as well as during the event itself. Our ads have also been promoting our special offer to give it as much exposure as possible. The key part of our approach has been to plan things out well in advance and to make sure we go into the event with a good idea of the levels of spend, traffic, and acquisitions we want to see.
What is your paid search strategy while the World Cup games are occurring?
Naturally, we expect to see higher search activity around the games themselves and are managing our budget allocation and bid management accordingly with the help of Skai’s platform. We also expect levels of interest to vary at the different stages of the event and depending on which teams are playing.
For our target customers, we expect England games to be particularly key and have taken this into account in our planning. A big factor we must consider is the times zones in which the games are taking place relative to where the majority of our customers are located. With many of the games occurring late in the evening in the UK, we need to ensure we keep budget available for the end of the day. Using Skai Scheduled Actions we can ensure we deploy ads and update assets as appropriate to coincide with the game schedules.
The key part of our approach has been to plan things out well in advance and to make sure we go into the event with a good idea of the levels of spend, traffic, and acquisitions we want to see.
Lastly, in terms of a device strategy, we will be focusing heavily on mobile, as we expect a large portion of traffic to come via these devices.
Are there any challenges around seasonality that you have faced in the past and how has that impacted your preparation for the World Cup?
As our World Cup promotion is focused heavily on the run-up to the event, the challenge is the balance of pre-event activity and coverage during the event. We want to make sure we are pushing our product when we have the best offer available, but also don’t want to run out of budget towards the end of the event. At the same time, it would be a shame to find that budget we have been saving for the final stages of the event in anticipation of a spike in search interest could have been spent more efficiently on our promotion at the beginning of the event. This is the balance we are striving to find.
As with any kind of seasonality, it is important to take it into account in your overall planning and ensure you are prepared to push spend at key times when it is likely to bring the greatest results, and pull back when a lull in activity can be expected. But flexibility is also important in case trends don’t turn out in exactly the way that was anticipated.
The World Cup is thankfully an event which we can confidently say will generate a huge amount of interest and holds great potential for us, but the fact that it only occurs every four years makes it harder to plan for than annual events, as the most recent data you have for comparison is four years old.
In the coming weeks, we’ll check back in with Harriet to see how Boylesports’ campaigns faired during the World Cup. For brands like Boylesports who experience these types of periods of seasonality, accurately forecasting and planning for the impact on campaigns can be a challenge. Skai Halogen enables you to gain unmatched insight and visibility into the future performance of digital marketing campaigns in order to meet your goals and objectives. To learn more about the predictive power of Skai Halogen, visit Skai.com/Halogen.