A look at current and expected trends in PPC amidst the global virus outbreak.
Nearly all businesses have been impacted in some way by the coronavirus and the PPC world is no exception. Unless your business is lucky enough to be selling hand sanitizer, face masks, toilet paper, or even vodka…the impact on your PPC account is likely not positive.
With that, let’s take a look at some trends we have already started to see in PPC and what we can expect to see over the next few weeks and months.
Virus Search Trends
While we’ve seen global epidemics in previous years, none have caught as much attention as Coronavirus has. Swine Flu and Zika Virus outbreaks caused ripples worldwide in 2009 and 2016, but caused little impact across the search world. Ebola, which had a 40% death rate, saw a sudden spike in interest in 2014. However, Coronavirus, which has a substantially lower death rate of 2%, has seen a shockingly rapid and large increase in search interest.
While we are arguably at the peak of interest in the virus, we are likely to continue to see high levels of interest over the coming weeks – rather than rapid decreases in interest as we saw with the other epidemics. These interest levels are likely to vary by location, depending on where the virus spreads next. Be on the lookout for tremors in performance, even after when it looks like the worst has passed.
News Effects on Performance
These tremors and even overall interest levels are largely impacted by the media, particularly in the travel industry. Below is a graph of day over day Google Search performance since the beginning of January for a client in the travel industry. Overlaid on the chart, are release dates of major news headlines on COVID-19. – Read more
