The holidays are upon us…. it doesn’t seem quite possible, but it’s true. In less than a month, Americans will start spending an estimated $465 billion on holiday gifts for their family and friends.1   With an anticipated growth of 2.8% over last year’s holiday spending, it’s looking favorable that e-commerce spending will surpass the $32 billion 2 it brought in last year drawing more than 67% of consumers online to make a holiday purchase.3 This means huge potential for you online retailers! To take full advantage of this opportunity and maximize your sales, it’s critical that you optimize your search marketing campaigns and do so early.

A study done by the National Retail Federation after last year’s holiday season found that 40% of consumers started their holiday shopping before Halloween.2  That means almost half of the market has already started researching and shopping! I’m hoping by now you should have at least started to think about what adjustments you plan to make to your search marketing campaigns for this holiday season. Optimizing your account early benefits you tremendously – you’ll gain key learnings you wouldn’t otherwise get and set yourself up for success during the peak of the season. You will also have the opportunity to grab a portion of the big gains we see in retail conversions starting in October as Americans prepare for the holidays (shown below).4

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When it comes to optimizing for the holidays, the first thing you’ll want to do is make sure you have the basics right, or the “foundation” as I like to called it. Check out my Spring Cleaning blog to find out more about the foundational basics of an adCenter account. Once you have that in place, look at the other tactics commonly used during the holiday season. The Vertical Specialist team here at Microsoft Advertising recommends the timely approach outlined below to optimizing in the months leading up to December:

Optimization Timeline

As you see October is the month for analysis. So this month take time to look over your keyword set to identify what keywords are performing well and how you can expand upon them. Where possible expand your well performing keywords by adding the misspelled version of them to your campaign or adding on modifiers to the term like “best” or “unique”. Think about all the different ways someone may search for the product your offering and add those as keywords. You can check out our holiday keyword list* too to see what seasonal terms may be relevant to your business.

Another way to expand your keyword set and drive additional traffic to your site is through a multi-screen approach. If you have a mobile compatible website consider adding a mobile search campaign to your adCenter account can help you capture the 28 million unique mobile searchers on Bing & Yahoo! each month. Mobile search campaigns are easy to create and generally have lower CPCs so it’s a great opportunity to reach a qualified audience in a low cost way!

Once November rolls around you’ll move to the Compete stage where you should focus on ensuring your ad is in a solid position to receive the volume of traffic you’re looking for. In December switch to refining your ad copy to ensure you’re converting the traffic your ad is getting with compelling ad copy. The majority of consumers are trying to spend the same or less than they did last year, so they will be highly motivated by discounts, flash sales, free shipping offers and guaranteed arrival by Christmas as you get further into December.5

Over the next two months we’ll be posting additional blogs about holiday optimization and the different stages so check back often. In the meantime you can find more general holiday optimization strategies in this 2-slide PowerPoint file, or you can attend our webinar on holiday optimization on November 2nd.

Happy Optimizing!

Erin

* NOTE: Keyword lists are simply suggestions and are not intended to be uploaded to your campaign "as is".  Please review all keyword suggestions for applicability to your own keywords, ads and landing pages prior to uploading.  Failure to do so could result in editorial disapprovals, a poor advertiser/user experience or both.

 

 

[1] NRF Holiday Forecast, Press Release, 10/6/2011

[2] ComScore, Press Release 1/5/2011

[3] BIGresearch/Shop.org Post-Holiday Consumer Study, 12/27/2010 to 1/24/2011

[4] adCenter internal data, selected retail clients, Sept. – Dec. 2010

[5] BIGinsight Analysis of Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, Sept. 2011 & 2010