UK advertisers, get your marketing ready for the August bank holiday

17Jul10

Advertisers and travel marketers in Great Britain and Ireland, listen up: a bank holiday is approaching in these very competitive travel markets at the end of August!

A bank holiday, by the way, is a public holiday in both Ireland and the United Kingdom. It is observed by most financial institutions. Ergo, banks are closed. If you want to read more about the history of the British bank holidays, check out Wikipedia on the topic. Why should you prepare now? According to Google data mentioned in Jonathan Cranmers white paper on summer travel trends, most holiday-related searches for these dates happen shortly before the actual day in mid August.

The graph shows Google hotel and air queries in the UK and Ireland prior to the August bank holiday. The coloured circles mark the peaks of searches. They occur ten to 30 days prior to the holiday. Local travel search queries generally rise shortly before public holidays even though queries declined a bit in the past year due to the tense economic situation in Europe. Cranmer takes a look into the near future:

“We expect 2010 query seasonality to behave more like patterns seen in 2007 and 2008. Consumer confidence today is stronger than a year ago.”

He suggests to allocate sufficient budget to cater for the higher demand in this period of time and to monitor your bids if you are running search ads to not fall behind because of the possibly increased competition. Seasonal campaigns can help you capture generic traffic related to the bank holiday. Possible keywords could include “short breaks”, “weekend mini-breaks” or “bank holiday deals”.

As for the time after the bank holiday, there will be another high after the holiday and then again once schools holidays end. This spike will be reached within the first ten days of September. Have your budget, PPC ad copy and bids ready for this!

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