Millions of shoppers will be scouring the web for gifts this holiday season—and that makes it a crucial time of year for e-retailers to stand out from the crowd and make sure they are easily found. Search marketing vendor NetElixir offers tips on how e-retailers can turbo-charge their keyword search advertising programs to help make sure their sales are as merry as the season.
First, NetElixir recommends, e-retailers should build an investment vs. objective scorecard. This will offer online merchants an overview of investments vs. returns in a single spot. For example, the objective for the holiday season would be to sell X number of products for a specific holiday search engine marketing investment.
Additionally, retailers should be aware that during the holiday season, average cost per keyword increases between 50% and 80% for categories like flowers, gifts, apparel and consumer electronics. To rein in costs and do the smartest bidding, merchants should:
- Make their bidding strategies product category-specific—and determine which categories are not worth a significant amount of money.
- Consider day-parting, or adjusting bids up or down on keywords according to the times of day they deem most or least advantageous.
- Do away with ultra-expensive vanity bidding, or aiming for the top ad listing spot no matter what the cost.
- Realize that conversions are often the result of several clicks coming from multiple keywords. It’s too simplistic, NetElixir says, to attribute a sale to the last keyword click.
- Sync their search campaigns with their holiday promotion calendar. For example, the first Monday after Thanksgiving last year accounted for 3.31% of total online holiday sales, and Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, accounted for 2.10%. Retailers may want to adjust their search budgets to spend more on such important sales days. NetElixir predicts this year’s heaviest online shopping day to be Dec. 8. Last year it was Dec. 10.
NetElixir also recommends that e-retailers look closely at their competitors. It suggests making a list of the top competition’s price, products, promotions, brand strength, estimated search engine marketing budget, number of keywords, average ad listing positions and the search tactics they use, such as day-parting. This way, NetElixir says, e-retailers can get a good idea of what they are up against.
Also, the vendor suggests retailers create a special targeted holiday keyword list. Retailers can come up with the list by seeing the phrases customers are using on social networks such as Twitter. That, NetElixir says, will likely be what they type into Google. E-retailers may want to try out keywords by allocating 3% to 5% of their search budget to testing the words for 60 to 90 days. After the test, they can examine each keyword’s performance, see how well it fits within an ad group, then classify each word or phrase as Star, Laggard and Question Mark.
Other tips include using more targeted ad copy over the holidays, such as holiday-themed ad copy, and to double check that all landing pages are relevant to the ad that the consumer clicked on.
NetElixir also suggests that retailers take a closer look at their branded keywords this holiday season. Google in May announced it would allow some marketers to use their competitors’ trademarked terms in ad copy. Retailers should expect this change to impact their campaigns this holiday season, NetElixir says. It also suggests evaluating the performance of branded terms vs. non-branded terms. It recommends e-retailers not allow affiliates to use their URLs in ad copy because this may result in the retailer’s ad not showing up under some keyword terms.
NetElixir says advertising on sponsored listings for trademarked terms adds to the performance of search campaigns—even if a retailer appears high in organic listing for branded terms. Retailers should bid accordingly, the firm says.
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