Is your business ready for the 2005 search engine holiday season?

It's mid summer in the northern hemisphere. Sunshine aside, it is time to prepare your pay per click search engine strategy for the winter holiday season.

By Pandia Guest Writer Greg Ives

It is time to prepare for the holiday "CPC wave". Come fall, the cost per click for search engine text ads starts to rise.

It begins in late October/early November when rookie marketers remember how important holiday sales are and begin flooding the paid search engines with bids.

They have no strategy. They don't test their ads. They don't measure their results. These are clods throwing money at paid search and creating the CPC wave.

The paid inclusion search engines love them.

If you follow my Holiday Search Success Guideline the CPC price increase they create won't affect your ability to get real return on your ad spend.

Pay close attention to 2004's "CPC Wave" as it crested between Dec 2 and 12 (second week of December 2004)

As you will see prices start rising in September.
Based on historical trends provided by Neilson NetRatings and Fathom Online, watch the cost-per-click wave as it gains momentum into the holiday season.

Click here for a table showing the wave's price increases broken out by vertical (by business sector).

Smart Marketers Start in August

Every year advertisers wait too long to properly prepare for the holiday CPC wave and they end up spending too much money on traffic that doesn't convert.

Smart marketers begin preparing for the holiday season in August and have a well-tested, profit-generating campaign in place when it matters the most.

The Holiday Search Success Timeline

Follow my holiday search success timeline and you'll ensure that you have truly happy holidays this year.

Now, let's take a closer look at what we have to do.

August: Strategy Prep Work

In August it's time for you to define your goals, determine opportunity and set up proper tracking for your seasonality campaign.

August is the month when the most extreme holiday shoppers begin searching for the perfect gift and you can use data from these early shoppers to begin getting your holiday campaign in place.

GOALS: Define your goals and establish metrics for success. This is crucial for ANY search marketing campaign, and especially for this, your seasonal campaign.

OPPORTUNITY: Understand and take advantage of good ROI opportunity. What seasonal messages are the most compelling to shoppers? Which terms deliver shoppers who are ready to buy?

TRACK: Track your results down to keyword level. And if you don't have tracking in place, now is the time to do it.

September: Implement/Test/Implement

In September you should continue your SEM research, revisit your brand, group your keywords, develop a solid bid strategy, write ad creatives based on planned promotions and set-up keyword and ad tests.

RESEARCH: Use Quality and Quantity of Keywords to match your entire product collections/services.

Now's the time to put your entire catalog online - people are searching for everything in the holiday season.

BRAND: Develop and leverage your brand terms. Mix seasonal messaging with your brand to capitalize on how people search.

KEYWORDS: Group keywords thematically based on your seasonality goals. For example, keep your "stocking stuffer" keywords in one group: keep keywords together that convert in the same manner.

START BID STRATEGY: Develop bid strategies to align with goals. Determine your positioning goals, performance targets, dayparting needs, etc...

CREATIVES: Write multiple Ad creatives/messages for each landing page

TESTING: Test multiple Ad creatives/messages and landing pages (A/B split testing)

October: Expand

For October you should research utilizing alternate paid search channels, build-out your alternate channels, explore contextual targeting for expanded seasonality reach and continue to monitoring and testing your bid strategies.

CHANNELS: Continuously take advantage of alternative advertising channels such as shopping comparison engines, 2nd tier search engines, and contextual advertising.

BUILD-OUT: Build out your additional channel keywords, creatives, and messaging, just as you did in September for your primary channels.

CONTEXTUAL: Utilize content targeting to expand your reach outside of search.

CONTINUE BID STRATEGY: Tweak your bid strategies to align with your predefined goals.

November: Crunch Time

November is crunch time, and you'll begin to see all your work paying off as the search market floods and your competitors begin shoveling money into ill-planned campaigns.

Be sure to monitor your bid targets and strategies to ensure you are within your thresholds for CPA (cost per acquisition/action) and/or ROAS (the return or revenue on advertising spend).

MONITOR: Final check of all areas of your campaign to ensure that all systems are go, everything's active, tweaked, refined and turned on.

MEASURE: Review tracking and compare to your goals: is everything working?

REFINE: Watch, make changes and delete keywords and creatives as needed to ensure success. Set up categories of keywords based on those you're watching, those that need changes made, and, finally, those that you're going to delete.

December: Refine

December is the month that the CPC wave crests. It's also the month where your search marketing campaign's at full steam.

In December you're emphasizing free shipping or your time sensitive messages such as overnight delivery.

December too is for more refining and monitoring. Because you've done your homework you're on target and meeting all your ROAS goals.

Before you relax and open your presents be sure to spend some time putting together a bucket of your post-holiday keywords.

MEASURE: Continue to review your data and compare it to your goals.

REFINE: Watch, make changes and delete keywords and creatives as needed to ensure success.

PREPARE: Prepare your post-holiday keyword group. Include percentages off for the specific inventory you think you'll have to move.

ENJOY: Take a few days off and enjoy some time with your family. Be happy you followed my holiday search success timeline.

January: Post-holiday Sales

While many shoppers get their holiday shopping done early, just as many eagerly await the post-holiday sales.

With early preparation, you can quickly shift your advertising focus from pre-holiday promotions, to holiday ads, to post-holiday sales.

People are looking for deals and specials now. Change your ad message to include percentages off.

POST-HOLIDAY: Shift advertising focus to post-holiday sales.

CELEBRATE: HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Be prepared for the 2005 Holiday season by either following my "2005 Holiday Search Success Timeline" or hiring an SEM agency that's experienced in seasonal marketing to take care of all the crucial and complicated details for you. In fact, why don't you let me recommend one for you...

About the Author:
Greg Ives is the Paid Search Director for Websourced's KeywordRanking.

See also: Drive Holiday Sales With Search Engine Marketing

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