Advertising Against Everybody Else's Budget

What happens to prices

Advertising is an auction, and in the weeks before a major buying season more advertisers bid on the same inventory.

Costs rise accordingly, sometimes substantially, and a budget that produced steady enquiries in October produces noticeably fewer in late November.

Nothing has gone wrong with your account. The price of the same thing has changed.

Which means the question is not how to fix the campaign, but whether to compete in this market at all, and if so where.

You will not outbid them

Worth stating plainly so the strategy follows from it.

A national retailer's daily budget in December can exceed a small business's annual spend, and their tolerance for a high cost per sale is different because their basket and their repeat rate are different.

On broad, obvious, high-volume terms, they will pay more than you can and should.

So competing there is buying a small number of expensive clicks in the segment where you are least distinctive.

The available advantage is not budget. It is specificity, locality, and speed of decision, none of which a large advertiser handles well.

Where large advertisers are weak

• Local intent, where proximity matters more than price.
• Narrow specifics, too small for them to bother with.
• Service and advice, which they cannot offer.
• Collection and same-day, where a national network cannot compete.
• After their cutoff, when they stop being able to deliver.
• Unusual or awkward requirements that need a person.

The fifth is the most underused. When the national cutoffs pass, a local business that can still supply has a market almost to itself for several days.

Narrow rather than broad

The practical change, and it runs against the usual advice about broad targeting.

In an expensive month, broad terms are where the money is most fiercely contested and where your relevance advantage is smallest.

Specific terms are cheaper, convert better, and are frequently ignored by advertisers operating at scale because the volume is not worth their attention.

That means the specific product, the specific problem, the specific area, and the specific requirement, rather than the category.

Fewer clicks, a lower cost each, and a considerably higher proportion of people who wanted exactly what you have.

A worked example

A small retailer ran the same campaign in December as the rest of the year and watched cost per sale roughly double through the month.

The following year they restructured for the period.

They paused their broadest terms entirely for four weeks, moved the budget to specific product terms and a tight local radius, and added collection as a prominent option.

They also planned a short campaign for the three days after the national delivery cutoffs, advertising local collection and same-day availability.

Cost per sale stayed close to their normal level rather than doubling, on a similar budget.

The post-cutoff days were the most efficient of the whole quarter, and the owner's remark was that they had spent years competing during the week they should have been sitting out.

Consider sitting out the peak

A legitimate option that rarely gets considered.

If your cost per enquiry doubles in the busiest fortnight, the same money spent before or after buys considerably more.

Advertising earlier, into the research period, reaches people before the auction fills, and advertising afterwards reaches people in a quieter market.

For a business whose product is not strongly seasonal, spending the December budget in January is frequently the better trade.

That decision requires knowing what your cost per enquiry does through the period, which means measuring it rather than assuming, and it is the sort of thing worth checking this week.

Compete on the offer instead

Where a small business can genuinely win.

A large advertiser cannot easily offer collection today, a person on the phone, a modification, advice about what to choose, or an assurance from somebody who will still be answering in January.

Those are the things to put in the advert, because they are differences rather than claims, and they cannot be matched by a larger budget.

Price is the one dimension where you will lose, so competing on anything else is both cheaper and more defensible.

An advert saying in stock, collect today, from a named local business, does something no national campaign can.

Watch it more often, briefly

A practical note for the period.

Costs move faster than usual, so a weekly check is not enough in the peak fortnight.

Look every couple of days, briefly, at cost per enquiry rather than at clicks, and be willing to pause something that has become unaffordable rather than letting it run to the end of the month.

Set a ceiling in advance: a cost per enquiry above which you stop, decided calmly in November rather than while watching a budget disappear.

That ceiling is the discipline that prevents a bad fortnight becoming a bad quarter.

The counter-case

Higher costs are not automatically a reason to retreat.

Conversion rates also rise in a buying season, so a more expensive click can still produce a cheaper sale, which is why cost per enquiry rather than cost per click is the number to watch.

For strongly seasonal businesses, this is the month the year depends on, and paying more for customers is the cost of being in that market at all.

There is also a first-mover consideration: a customer acquired now may buy again all year, which changes what an expensive first sale is worth.

Work out what a customer is worth beyond the first order before deciding a December cost is too high, since that figure is what makes the decision rather than the headline price.

What to do

1. Check what your cost per enquiry does this month.
2. Pause the broadest terms for the peak.
3. Move budget to specific and local terms.
4. Advertise collection and same-day if you offer them.
5. Plan a campaign for after the national cutoffs.
6. Set a cost ceiling in advance.
7. Consider spending it in January instead.

Step five is the cheapest window in the quarter and almost nobody plans for it.

Timing a seasonal campaign is covered in seasonal campaigns planned in advance.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.