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Merry Clickmass!

Take advantage of increased online activity this festive season with our handy tips.

By Graeme Lipschitz

As your retail store and offline media activities take on a festive look with your messaging, special offers and tinsel so too should your online marketing approach. With the numbers of online shoppers growing between 2-3% points year on year and consumers extending their shopping cycle – starting their shopping early and waiting to beyond the last minute – it is imperative that marketers look to take advantage of the flux in seasonal traffic. What follows are our top tips for increasing your sales this festive season:

Learn from free tools like Google’s Insights for Search: Insights for Search provides great insight into user behaviour as peaks and troughs in search query volume are displayed for you. In the example below we can see that there is a clear spike in ‘gift’ queries over the November-December period from 2004 to 2009 – this is an ideal spike in search query volume for retailers whose main product ranges consist of typical Christmas gifts. Predicting spikes in query volumes also allows the marketer to prepare a season-specific campaign which we will discuss in more detail throughout this article.

Reflect the season in your Adcopy: Creating seasonal ads to rotate through regular campaigns lets users know that you are doing something special for the festive season and could increases your chances of them buying your product, however we believe you should still keep your ‘everyday’ ads rotating alongside your seasonal ads. We also feel that guaranteed shipping offers; special return policies; Holiday coupons; Price points (“Gifts Under $100”); Gift cards; Last minute shopping promotions; Free in store pick-up; Free gift with purchase and any other season-specific specials you are doing should be displayed loud and clear in your adcopy.

 

With consumers setting budgets, bargain-hunting and seeking out value, seasonal-specific USP’s like last minute promotions and price cuts encourage greater levels of conversion during the shopping frenzy before December 25^th and if you don’t mention it your client is not going to guess it.

 

Use season-specific Keywords: We recommend Testing out holiday keywords, but don't rely on them, we think that season-specific keywords are a very good addition to the core traffic terms retailers currently use. We recommend that these kinds of keywords are closely watched as the flux in search queries causes them to become expensive. With the global recession having reached it’s trough economists are predicting that the consumer will be more price savvy therefore adding price points to your keywords like “gifts under $20” could be a clever way to snag the price conscious consumer. Another way to snag the holiday shopper is to use holiday modifiers with regular keywords like “Christmas gifts”.

One aspect of search engine marketing that retailers don’t oversee is comparing sales inventory to keywords – it’s no use bidding on “computer screen” terms if the store room has run out of that stock.  The festive season is also an advantageous time to review your keyword sets and expand them with more long tail terms - serious shoppers know model names and numbers as they have been reviewing this items over the course of the year in the build up to the festive season sale. And lastly, in terms of keywords - create holiday-specific campaign negative lists, for example: carols, recipes, wrap, etc as most retail products are not associated with festive season cheer.

 

Change your campaign settings: Retailers make the mistake of closing their virtual shop doors due to running out of budget. Once budget has run out ads don’t run anymore and this effectively closes the door to your online store. We therefore, recommend that search budgets are raised in advance of the search query increase in October-November so that the 3am shopper gets the same amount of exposure to your business as the midday shopper.  In this regard we also recommend the close monitoring of your campaigns – too often the size of the increase in queries is underestimated leaving retailers red-faced when they miss out.

We recommend that retailers adjust budgets and keyword bids throughout the entire season as retail players fall in and out of the auction. Lastly, if the ship date is past and the season is slowing down, lower the budgets.

 

Review and Price Comparison sites show the way forward for the Content Network: We recommend the following types of sites to target in the festive season: gift idea sites - targeting gender, relationship & age range: gifts for her, him, gifts for mom, dad, girlfriend; gifts for teenagers, kids; and review and product comparison sites.

The post-recession shopper is on the lookout for differences in product selling points and price, therefore review and comparison sites should be great sources of qualified traffic.  In this regard we recommend that retailers build separate holiday content campaigns early so that they can gain history before holidays hit.

Graeme Lipschitz of Clicks2Customers, the Pay Per Click Experts has worked as an account strategist in the London and Johannesburg offices of clicks2Customers for 3 1/2 years. In that time he has worked on and grown large scale Travel, Finance and Retail accounts. He is now a New Business Development Manager for Clicks2Customers based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Happy Retailing!