Driving Traffic to Events with Paid Search
The last weekend of October, the LIVESTRONG® Challenge was held in Austin, TX as the culmination of the 2008 events. This is a remarkable annual event “…uniting people to pick a fight with cancer” through participation in a 5K walk/run or a multi-distance bike ride. As an Apogee Search client, the Lance Armstrong Foundation has been leveraging paid search for this year’s series of LIVESTRONG Challenge events and has achieved successful results.
According to a Pew Internet study, “almost half (49%) of all Internet users now use search engines on a typical day.” This helps confirm that increasingly, people are using search engines as their first place of information. This makes search engine marketing a great avenue for increasing exposure for local events whether it be a fundraiser, conference, concert or anything else. The problem is that event promotions often don’t have months to build up SEO ranking. However, paid search can quickly begin capturing visitors to your site.
If you are considering running a paid search campaign as part of your event promotion, here are some tips to remember:
- Create an informative and engaging landing page. Be sure to answer the who, what, where, when, and why questions instantly when someone arrives on your site. And if there’s registration for your event, make it as easy as possible for people to complete the form.
- Emphasize verbs and dates in the ad copy. Use phrases to stress the immediate call to action, “Register to Vote Today”, or to invite searchers to participate in the cause, “Help Fight Cancer.” Include the dates of the event to create a sense of urgency.
- Speak to those who may realistically attend by geo-targeting your message. Use attendee data from previous years to make informed decisions on how broad to target. If attendees come almost exclusively from Austin, target the Austin metro only. For the LIVESTRONG Challenge, residents of Dallas or Houston may commute to participate, so target all of Texas to increase registrations in these areas. In both cases if you target the entire United States, you will probably exhaust your budget on people who may love your cause but aren’t going to fly across the country to participate.
- Don’t expand your keyword list too much. Since you are already geo-targeting your paid search campaign, there is no need to also create long-tailed keywords or you will end up with almost no traffic to your campaign. Bid on words that make sense for your event, and try bidding on some general keywords. For example, for a 10K, try the keywords run, walk, or 10k. Just make sure you are watching your budget.
- Decide how long to run your campaign for. Once again, data from previous years is extremely beneficial. Do the bulk of your attendees begin registering six months or one month in advance? Coordinate your paid search efforts to coincide with this pattern.
An event driven paid search campaign can be a great source for additional traffic and with these tips, can also be an efficient promotion method.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Another helpful tip is to put the city name in the ad copy if you’re using a broad Geo area. Some people will come to Austin from Houston for an event, but some might not. Being clear in the ad copy will save you money and save some people frustration.
That is, if you have a few spare characters
November 12th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Just a quick shoutout to the SEO peanut gallery:
In some cases, you may not have time to merge your events with SEO efforts, but we’d definitely encourage companies and organizations out there to try!
I bet you are promoting that event in other ways - use that same terminology on your event page on your site so that users who see the billboard but don’t quite remember the URL can find you. Also, bloggers are looking for topics to talk about (read: link to) so if you have a page dedicated to your event on your site, that gives bloggers an opportunity to inform their readership by linking to the event.
After the fact, you have some options, as well- you can redirect that page to a more general “Events” or “Calendar” page, or you could update the page to say that the event is past (perhaps upload some pictures from it!) or post links to find related events.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Great point, Alissa. The opposite suggestion may also be worth trying - if you’re targeting a specific city, include some broader geo keywords. For example, ‘texas marathon’ when you’re targeting Austin. Only be sure to emphasize where the event actually is.