The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

It is said that ‘the early bird gets the worm.’ When it comes to holiday shopping, this applies to shoppers and advertisers alike. But what makes this year more interesting is Google’s new position on using branded, trademarked terms in your ad copy. Google now allows advertisers to use trademarked terms they do not own in their ad copy, so you can expect much more competition from online retailers buying product-specific, and brand-related terms in Google AdWords.



If you are a retailer who plans to increase online advertising efforts for the holiday, you’ll want to get ahead of the competition on AdWords. To do so, you must establish good history with your Google campaigns and obtain a high click-through rate and Quality Score. Regardless of whether you are offering sales and promotions right now, it’s a good idea to upload your catalogs into AdWords early, to begin optimizing your click-through rates and Quality Scores while the bidding is less competitive.



If you don’t yet have the budget for a full-blown acquisition campaign, you can still upload your ads and run them with a light daily budget to control spend. This will help establish a strong AdWords history, especially if you achieve a high click-through rate in tandem with properly categorized campaigns and ad groups.

Another critical component to improving your click-through rate is deploying effective negative keywords and testing your ad copy (with multiple variations of ad copy within each ad group). Over time, begin pausing or deleting underperforming ad copy so that you can optimize your position and click-through rates.  



If you need assistance with creating optimized campaigns before the holiday season kicks off, consider a service such as Clickable Assist. Clickable Assist combines the expertise of our search-engine-marketing specialists with Clickable’s state-of-the-art tools. This way, when holiday shoppers hit the web, you will be in a great position to open up the budgets, tweak your best ad copy and rank ahead of you competition with lower acquisition costs.  



Andrew Bernero, 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.