The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Click Here To Reserve Your Spot In Clickable's Nov. 4, 2010 Holiday Advertising Webcast

The holiday season is the most important time of year for online merchants. This recessionary year will be especially competitive as more merchants duke it out for every prospective shopper. 

With close to 46% of total sales being influenced by online media and marketing (Forrester Research, Mar 2010), having a smart online marketing strategy is critical. Search marketing continues as the most effective way to connect with customers, with over 57% of customers starting with a search engine to start looking for a product they desire (Power Reviews, 2010 Social Shopping Trends).

To help online merchants succeed, we’ve launched the Clickable Holiday eCommerce Advertising Solution. With experience helping thousands of businesses get found online through search marketing, our team has learned a lot about which strategies work and which ones don’t.  These insights form the core of Clickable’s Holiday eCommerce Advertising Solution:

1. Timing Is Everything: Identifying high traffic days and fine-tuning your bid and budget strategies is key. During the holidays, the cost per click for keywords experiences volatility. As a result, it is imperative to closely monitor and adjust your bids to ensure your ads are being displayed. If your ads are not being displayed, you’re not being found by shoppers. Online merchants also need to consider their shipping deadlines when bidding, and turn off ads after your last shipping date has passed. Leveraging this volatility to your advantage is one of the core attributes of Clickable’s Holiday Solution. 

2. Ad Network Diversification Pays: The difficulty of diversifying your advertising investment across all the major advertising networks prevents many merchants from doing so. However, diversification can have a huge upside given that opportunities on any single network can saturate, causing diminishing returns. Moreover, different advertising networks attract different audiences and offer unique targeting abilities. Unless you launch across all the major networks, you’ll never know what opportunities you may be missing. Fortunately, technology like Clickable now enables merchants to easily launch and manage their investments across all the major ad networks.

3. Test, Test and Test Again: Specify your unique value proposition -- what differentiates you from everyone else -- and test multiple messages and calls to action. Just like with a stock portfolio, you’ll want to put your money in the ads and campaigns that perform the best. The Clickable Holiday Solution includes technology and testing to ensure you maximize your investment.

4. Tap Into Your Long Tail: Strategies to cater to the long tail can pay rich dividends and improve the experience for shoppers. When it comes to online advertising, a great strategy is to analyze your own site history and identify keywords, messaging and offers that worked. A keyword search query report is a great place to start. Don’t forget that people search for SKUs and product-model numbers online.

5. Extend Your Strategy To Gift Cards: While the arrival of shipping deadlines may signal the end of physical purchases, online gift cards remain in full swing and often heat up. You should extend your holiday advertising investment to gift cards, and leverage them to capture frenzied demand among last-minute shoppers. Moreover, recipients of gift cards and cash will often go online to redeem them. Make sure you capture their demand. 

6. Tweak, Tweak and Tweak Again: Online advertising is a dynamic marketplace and, as underscored earlier, it is volatile. Therefore, you must continuously monitor how your ads perform and optimize continuously, based on sound data. That requires setting up core reports that can be automated, accessed easily and translated into actions.

These are among the core online advertising principles that drive success for our customers in online retailing. If you’d like help with your online advertising strategy this holiday season, our expert team is ready to help. To learn more, join us for Clickable's next Holiday Advertising Webcast on November 4, 2010 at 12:30pm EST. 

Click Here To Reserve Your Spot In Clickable's Nov. 4, 2010 Holiday Advertising Webcast

This post was written by Peter Chun, Vivek Narayanan and Max Kalehoff.

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