January is a crucial month for advertisers who promote products or services related to a healthier lifestyle. The 2012 New Year’s Resolutions Survey, conducted by FC Organizational Products LLC, the official consumer products licensee of the FranklinCovey Co. brand, released the top New Year’s resolutions for 2012:
- Become more physically fit
- Improve one’s financial condition
- Improve health
- Weight loss
This year, resolutions related to overall health and fitness increased in priority over weight loss and other goals, signaling a possible shift from previous years.1
With three out of four top resolutions being health and fitness related, advertisers in the health vertical have a unique opportunity to start 2012 strongly by optimizing their adCenter accounts early.
comScore reported more than 583 million searches just for the term “weight loss” in January 2011 across all search engines. This was a 105% increase compared with the previous month.2
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This trend was certainly reflected in adCenter as well. A look at adCenter data from 2011 shows a small, but vital, window of opportunity. Though impression counts stayed consistently high throughout February and March, clicks peaked in January.
3 This makes sense, as people are more determined to achieve their goals when the new year starts, but the desire to take action fades over time.
However, the most important takeaway for advertisers is that costs-per-click (CPC) were the lowest in January.
Though there is no guarantee 2012 will be identical to the 2011 trends, we do expect there will once again be a very narrow time frame to run a successful campaign on products related to New Year’s resolutions.
In January of last year the majority of clicks for weight loss products happened in week one of the year, with clicks decreasing each passing week.
Timelines and Budget
- Be prepared to launch your campaigns by the end of December.
- Plan for growth and ensure your budget is sufficient for the first month of the year.
- Expect the highest demand in the very first week of the year.
Keywords
Create your keyword list in December. Review our list of suggested terms.
If you sell pharmaceutical products, upload your terms even earlier to clear any editorial obstacles that may occur.
Use all match types and avoid bidding on broad match only. We recommend using your highest bids on exact match. As you can see in the charts below, exact match type generated by far the most clicks and also the highest click-through-rate (CTR).4
Ad Copy
- Create ads that include references to a New Year’s resolution, for example “2012 Weight Loss Programs.”
- Use incentives, such as free shipping or discounts.
- Have a clear call to action, for example “Try it now for 30 days” or “Order online today.”
- Highlight the unique advantages of your product, for example “Average weight loss of 25 lbs in 6 months” or “Safely lose up to 5 lbs per week.”
Targeting
Small businesses can leverage incremental bidding to boost bids for specific age groups and gender.
59% of queries for the keyword weight loss are conducted by women, the age groups 35-49 and 50-64 combined for 63% of searches.5
And if your business has a physical location – such as fitness studios, vitamin shops – use radius targeting to focus in on searchers who are near your store address.
Other industries likely to benefit from New Year’s resolutions campaigns include:
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