How to Maintain Your AdWords Account Post Presidential Election 2016

As you undoubtedly know, Donald Trump is the country’s President-elect following a grueling 18-month campaign. The Internet is ablaze with social commentary regarding the election of our 45th President, and it’s unclear whether the political division in this country will easily mend, or if yesterday’s surprising outcome will drive everyone insane.

Perhaps those most concerned are the businessmen and women who have to carry on a tune of business as usual. However you feel about the election outcome, the impact on business can result in extreme behaviors. When people are more concerned with national security and social justice, they’re less focused on buying your products and services.

Should PPC marketers close up shop for a while? Wait for the dust to settle?

Nobody wants to think about unique value propositions or ad extensions right now, but you can’t just walk away from an AdWords campaign either. AdWords and social media marketing are testy; they can take a long time to warm up if left in the cold too long.

To combat the political fallout and national confusion, we’ve got some tips to help you manage your AdWords campaign post presidential election 2016.

Forget Conversions, Focus on the Top

Right now, a lot of people are taking a huge step back to reflect on what happened early Wednesday morning; making tough purchasing decisions might not be at the top of anyone’s list.

Hot leads and prospects might run a bit cool for a while, and instead of pushing those people to convert right now, focus on driving awareness and branding at the top of the funnel, so that when things calm down you’ve got a fresh crop of leads to pursue.

Use a special landing page and give new visitors an appealing offer. Gated content works well at collecting prospect information, which you can use later to follow up. This might be a good place to start a new drip marketing campaign, with PPC leads that come directly to this new landing page.

Ready the Display Advertising

The Display Network is a great brand-building channel with excellent targeting capabilities. Focus on building awareness, not CTA-specific search ads. Be sure that your branded search ads are linking traffic to a landing page that serves top of funnel information and offers. Hold off on the hard sale until you think your market is ready.

Display advertising in particular has several features that can hone a top of funnel audience:

• Try new keyword targeting
• Manage placements on specific websites your customers frequently traffic
• Place search ads by interest, topic, or affinity
• Use geo-targeting to focus on particular groups of people

National events like the election, natural disasters, and even acts of terrorism have an effect on how people interact with your search ads. Over time, these things have a way of balancing themselves out in a market, but it’s not a bad idea to meet these fluctuations head on with a proactive plan.

There’s no way to know what each ebb and flow will mean for PPC marketing, but with any luck, the tide will return to something we can comfortably call normal. For the time being, focus on brand awareness and display advertising, and drive new traffic to top of funnel content and information.

• Content Marketing
• Local Marketing
• Paid Search Management