The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

(Free Holiday Season 2008 Webcast! Click here to take advantage of a special Holiday Season Presentation hosted November 29, 2008, by Clickable and Search Engine Watch. It was led by SEW editor Kevin Newcomb and Clickable’s Senior Director Keith Hong.)

Holiday Season 2008 Search Marketing Checklist

For most retailers, Q4 (a.k.a, “The Holiday Season”) is far and away the most important and lucrative time of the year. Even this year, with a significant economic downturn underway, retailers should expect an uptick in sales in the final quarter of the year. This is especially true of online advertisers: with budgets tighter than they’ve been in years, more and more consumers are going to turn to the Internet for cost-saving deals. As Thanksgiving and the holiday rush approach, there are a few things that every online retailer should do to ensure that their campaigns are ready to take full advantage of this opportunity.

Let’s begin by clearly stating what your goal should be: aggressively (but efficiently) advertising your inventory, and differentiating your offerings to cost-conscious shoppers.

1) Differentiating Yourself with Cost-Saving Offers
The economic situation does present a unique opportunity to online retailers, but only if they give consumers what they’re looking for—savings. Consumers are still going to buy gifts for their families and friends, but, because of smaller budgets, they’re searching online for cost-saving deals. Therefore, presenting consumers with cost-saving offers and other value propositions is going to be critical in the 2008 Holiday Season.

If you have special deals to offer, now’s the time to offer them: anything from “Free Shipping,” to “20% Off” to “Buy One Get One Free.” It’s always important that your ad copy differentiate your offering in some way from the other ads on the page; this year, the differentiation needs to be in terms of cost. And, as always, the offers you make in your ads should be a very prominent part of your landing pages.

2) Tailoring Negative Keywords to Your Inventory
The majority of your Holiday Season SEM budget should be directed toward keywords that reflect your inventory. More generic keywords like “Christmas presents” and “gift ideas” may also convert, but they’re not going to be as efficient as keywords that directly reflect what you have to sell.

However, as important as it is to direct traffic to your site that relates to your keywords, it’s equally important to not direct traffic to your site that your inventory can’t support. Let’s assume that you sell fountain pens, and that they come in silver and gold. When a user clicks on an ad for “Silver Fountain Pens,” they want to buy silver fountain pens. If they land on your site and see that you’re out of stock on this item, they’re likely to form a negative impression of your business, rather than choose a different item. To avoid this pitfall, be sure to add negative keywords to exclude queries for items as they go out of stock. (You can always remove these negative keywords as you replenish your warehouse.)

3) Clearly Setting Revenue and Cost Goals
If the purpose of your search marketing effort is to drive sales on your Web site, you should have a very clear idea of your revenue and cost goals:

• Retailers with a single product  (or a small variety of products that sell for the same price) need to ensure that their Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA, is less than their marginal cost per item. For example, if you sell T-shirts for $10, and each one costs you $6 to produce and distribute, your CPA should be less than $4. (For those who prefer concrete formulas: [Marginal Revenue - Marginal Cost] * Percentage Profit Margin = CPA Goal.)
• Retailers with a basket of goods for sale will want to set an achievable “Return on Ad Spend,” or ROAS. If you want $3 of revenue for every advertising dollar that you spend, for example, your ROAS would be 3.

Clickable makes it very simple to set these values for your Google AdWords accounts. Just go to the Manage Account section, launch the “Goal Values Wizard,” and answer a short series of questions about your business. At the end of the questionnaire, you will be prompted to enter either an ROAS Goal or a CPA Goal, and our ActEngine will optimize to those values moving forward. This will assure that your search marketing campaigns will always be as efficient as possible.

4) Achieving Visibility with Precision
Now that you’ve set your CPA or ROAS goals, it’s time to achieve maximum visibility with maximum precision.

Because you will want to increase your daily budgets to assure maximum visibility, you need to make sure that you’re not wasting money on clicks that don’t convert. One of the best ways to do this is to implement Ad Scheduling, which will mean that your ads will only run at the times of day and days of the week where they’ve been proven to convert. (For tips on Ad Scheduling, see this post by our SEM Guru Tony Soric.)

Once you’ve implemented Ad Scheduling, it’s time to increase your daily budget. Your goal should be for your ads to appear with every impression of your keywords. This will allow you to take full advantage of each keyword’s conversion potential.

A concrete example will help clarify this tip. To return to the fountain pens we mentioned above: Google’s Traffic Estimator thinks that you’ll get anywhere from 84-106 clicks a day, at a total daily cost of about $120. Now, let’s say that the conversion rate for this keyword is 33%. (This isn’t reasonable, but it makes the math easier.) If you budget $120, you’ll get the full potential of that keyword. But, if you only budget $80, you may get the non-converting 66%, or some significant portion of it. You can’t assume that you’ll have the same conversion rate for only a portion of a keyword’s clicks; you need to aggressively bid for 100% visibility on your inventory keywords.

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru
 
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

It is said that ‘the early bird gets the worm.’ When it comes to holiday shopping, this applies