Why Optimize for the Holiday Season?
Consumers prefer the convenience of online shopping, and want to avoid the in-store hassle; they prefer to shop online and save on their gas mileage. 33% of consumers stated that rising gas prices are the reason why they are shopping more online (source: eMarketer August 1, 2007).
Plan a marketing strategy
For best results, map out a strategy for your sale at least one month in advance. Use the following list to start your planning:
- Build or expand keyword lists.
- Plan keyword strategy based relevance, cost history, volume, demographics, geography, and more.
- Forecast monthly and daily keyword impressions and future trends.
- Add the seasonal products or sale products to your keyword list.
- Develop copy for all the phases of your sale. For example, you could offer free shipping and then promote express shipping closer to peak shopping days. Integrate these offers into your ad copy.
- Determine how and when to apply age and gender targeting and incremental bidding to your campaign. You can determine what targeting to apply through:
- adCenter Add-in for Excel: add a full keyword list in excel and get demographics (by keyword) by pushing the Demographic button.
- adCenter demographic reports: run a demographic report in adCenter to see who are the audience for your keywords and set up incremental targeting based on that.
- Review how, when, and where to apply targeting by location and incremental bidding to your campaign to ensure they align with your holiday strategy.
- Prepare the Web site functionality to smooth the editorial review process:
- Test pages to make sure they load as expected
- Limit content on pages to a reasonable length.
- Each page should be accessible by at least one static text link.
- Text that is embedded in an image cannot be crawled by search engines. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is displayed in text that is separate from a graphic company logo on your page.
- If you have promotional ad copy make sure they link to the landing page with appropriate promotional offer.
- Consider the buying cycle. If you want to attract customers who are in the mid-to-late stage of the cycle and are ready to buy, use keywords that reflect this behavior. Consumers may use generic keywords during the research/consideration stage and brand terms / specific model parts when they are ready to buy
- E.g.: during the research phase the consumer may search for “SUV”, “Convertible”, “Sports Car”
- During the buying phase they may search for “Ford Explorer” “BMW 3.25” “Nissan dealer Newark, NJ”
Read more about the customer buying cycle in Charles Thrasher's post, Search and the Art of Fly Fishing: Optimizing for Your Customers’ Buying Cycle.
Holiday Account Preparation
Following are a few recommendations on strategies for implementing your sale promotion plans:
Strategy 1: Create duplicate campaigns
This is one of the most recommended best practices for development and implementation. This can be done by creating a new campaign, then “copy an existing adgroup” feature in the UI. This strategy has the following benefits:
- Provides the highest level of control over the run dates and budgets
- Offers complete visibility into your promotion's budget allocation and spend
- Automates your whole promotion strategy
- Allows for future start dates by activating the initial editorial review of the keywords and creative copy
- Maintains previous campaigns by saving historical performance data
- Ability to pause and re-use next year. Get more best practices refer to Tina Kelleher's blog "Tips on Preparing Your SEM Campaigns for the Online Holiday Shopping Season"
Strategy 2: Replace creative copy and keywords on existing campaigns
Replacing creative copy and keywords on existing campaigns may be cleaner and less time-intensive than creating duplicate campaigns. However, replacing creative copy and keywords does not allow for the controls and the visibility that are available in the duplicate campaigns strategy. Also once the holidays are over, undoing the changes could be quite cumbersome and hard to remember.
Strategy 3: Add creative copy and keywords on existing campaigns
Similar to adding new creative copy and keywords, adding creative copy and keyword to existing campaigns is cleaner and faster than the other strategies. However, this strategy lacks the benefits of creating duplicate campaigns.
To better the possibility of publishing your campaigns on time, activate the campaigns several days before the start date. This allows the editorial system to review the campaigns before they go live. Make sure the landing pages have relevant content for bidded keywords and are working.
If you have any questions or comments please visit the adCenter Forum.