Mother’s Day Insights for Digital Marketers

On Mother’s Day this year (May 8! Get on it!), we’ll celebrate more than 85 million moms in the U.S. If you’re a digital marketer, you’re already fine-tuning your plans to take advantage of this enormous market with its $21.2 billion in anticipated spending. Mother’s Day is the third-biggest retail holiday, commanding attention that’s fitting for its revered celebrant. We love our moms!

The research team at Bing Ads wanted to dig into some of the specifics about Mother’s Day searching and clicking. Three key things stand out in this research:

1. Mother’s Day shopping starts early – as long as a month early. This is in huge contrast to Valentine’s Day shopping, which is a last-minute lunge
2. Mother’s Day shoppers are brand-aware. They search for specific brand names
3. PPC advertisers aren’t even close to taking advantage of the best sitelink extensions to reach shoppers

Let’s break this down:

Mother’s Day Searches Starts Early

But clicks don’t happen until the last week or so before the big day.

Bing Research Mother’s Day Searches in April and May

• The Mother’s Day PPC smarty-pants will have ads ready to test (sharpen ad copy with emotion) by late March
• Fine-tune based on test results, take a close look at targeting (demographic, geography, time of day, device) and have your campaign running at full speed by mid-April
• Reserve some budget for that last week before the big day, when the clicks start rolling in. You don’t want to be MIA when the shoppers are finally ready to buy

If you’re not yet using shopping campaigns, consider ramping up for Mother’s Day. With flowers at the top of Mother’s Day searches, you can imagine how much more powerful adding a photo to your ad would be:

Bing Shopping Ads on a Bing SERP for Mother’s Day flowers

As many as two-thirds of Mother’s Day celebrants purchase flowers, spending an average of $74. More people purchase fresh flowers and plants for Mother’s Day than for any other holiday except Christmas/Hanukkah – totaling $2.3 billion spent in 2015. Do you really want your ad for Mother’s Day flowers to be text-only when those gorgeous shopping campaigns show up next to it?

Mother’s Day Shoppers Search for Brands

More than a quarter of the Mother’s Day searches on Bing Network are branded, and half of the top 10 searches are branded. Does this mean a mother is more likely to say, “I really want a Skeie’s bracelet” or does this mean her children are more likely to search by brand name to ensure they find a quality product? Search science can tell us a lot – but not this. Yet.

Bing Research Top 10 Mother’s Day Searches

Still, this is excellent info for PPC marketers and you should be taking advantage of it.

• Be sure to review the brand-term bidding video to see deeper research on the effectiveness of bidding on your own brand terms.
• If your product is not a recognizable brand, but competes with top brands, bid on their keywords so you show up in those searches. While you are not allowed to use branded terms in your ad copy, it is perfectly legal in most markets to bid on those keywords. Check out Bing’s editorial policies for more information.

Sitelink Extensions

We all know that sitelinks are ridiculously effective in getting clicks, but for some reason, advertisers haven’t found a way to fine-tune this product yet. Bing research shows that massive potential is being left on the table.

Bing Research Ad Copy Opportunities

It’s almost impossible to believe what this chart is telling us. But we can believe it! Here’s what it’s saying: For ads that use the word “online” in a sitelink extension, ad quality is the highest. And the number of advertisers using that word in their sitelink extension is super tiny. The research says that many searchers would click on that extension, but very few advertisers are using it. Opportunity! This holds true for every single one of the top ad quality sitelink extensions words, shown above.

Don’t walk – run! – to add sitelink extensions to your Mother’s Day PPC ads, and use some of these top terms. For your sitelink extensions to rate with high quality, they need to link to what you say they’ll link to. If you’re offering a 50% Mother’s Day discount in your sitelink copy, your landing page must deliver that.

Bonus Tip: Don’t forget step-moms, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, wives, friends, and daughters at Mother’s Day! Include these terms in your keywords, your ad copy, and descriptions to capture shoppers looking for gifts for these ladies on their list.

When Woodrow Wilson signed a bill recognizing Mother’s Day as a national holiday in 1914, he probably didn’t imagine it would become a search marketer’s biggest retail holiday of the season. But he certainly saw it as a day for flowers and gifts for dear Mum! Get more Mother’s Day research from the folks at Bing Ads here or post your questions and comments below.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Bing Ads. Used with permission.
All In-post Photos: Image by Bing Ads. Used with permission.