Year after year, the holiday season is the busiest time for online shoppers. Minor adjustments to your search advertising campaigns can help you connect with more customers during this valuable time.
Put these proven holiday best practices into action to help you maximize your adCenter marketing campaigns.
Shoppers are actively using Live Search to find and buy retail products both online and offline. By advertising with Microsoft adCenter, marketers can reach these highly active shoppers who account for:
- Over 17 million unique users per month1
- Over 56 million searches per month1
Live Search users converted the most buyers for online retailers.
- Live Search converted 3.1 percent of searchers to buyers, more than AOL at 1.8 percent, Yahoo! at 1.6 percent and Google at 1.3 percent.
- In August 2007, Live Search was the most efficient means of driving purchases and spending, with 8 percent share.
Referrals from MSN/Windows Live Search Successfully Converted the Most Buyers for Retailers
Conversion Rates from Search2
Holiday Spending Patterns
The holidays account for big percentages of annual sales in the retail industry. Be sure to plan for the holidays and budget spend accordingly.
Percent of Annual Sales During Holidays3
The following chart illustrates what consumers plan to purchase for Holiday 2007:
Key Dates
Throughout the holiday season, there are key dates for which online retailers should be prepared.
Most advertisers know about Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving). But did you know that there is more than one Cyber Monday? (A second commonly known Cyber Monday is the Monday two weeks before Christmas.)
Don’t forget to tailor ad copy around other key dates during the holiday season. The last day for free shipping is typically on or around December 14. The last day for two-day shipping is on December 20. And don’t forget the post-holiday time, after December 25, when shoppers return unwanted gifts, shop for sales and redeem gift cards.
Preparation Phase
- Align search efforts with other holiday media buys and online promotions.
- Set up your Holiday Account Structure: Depending on how you manage your account, one of the following strategies will be right for your campaigns.
- Add Holiday Ad Copy to existing Ads. This is the easiest to implement but doesn’t give you the flexibility to turn off after the holiday season.
- Duplicate existing campaigns or orders and add Holiday Ad Copy. This allows you to quickly and easily turn campaigns or orders on and during and after the holiday season.
- Make sure you’ve budgeted enough for each of the peak holiday shopping days.
- Utilize adCenter Keyword Research to identify the best keywords for your account.
- Microsoft adLab’s research tools (http://adlab.microsoft.com) help marketers successfully identify user intent and expand keyword sets.
- The search funnel shows previous or next search terms researched on Microsoft’s search properties. This tool will open up the universe of click path analyses to ensure that you aren't missing key search terms over this critical holiday season.
- The Commercial Intent tool allows you to pick the keywords that will have the highest likelihood to convert over the holidays.
- Be prepared: Ensure all ads and keywords have already been approved in adCenter.
- Focus ad copy on saving time and money, comparison shopping and avoiding shopping mall crowds.
- Make sure to increase bids during this period as competition increases drastically. Average CPC can jump 25 percent or more at this time.
- Plan for Cyber Mondays: With Day of Week (Monday) incremental targeting, you can effectively increase bids to reach these shoppers and take advantage of these track spikes.
- Monitor your budget closely as Costs Per Clicks tend to increase during this time.
- Focus ad copy on free shipping, two-day shipping, holiday promotions or last minute deals.
- Because holiday shoppers are still buying, online retailers can expect higher than normal track during the post-holiday season.
- Make sure that all pre-holiday ads are not running.
- Focus ad copy on clearance, liquidation, easy returns and post-holiday sales.
It’s easy to start your Live Search ad campaign—simply provide your contact details and pay a one-time, $5 fee to create your Microsoft adCenter account.
Sign up now to see what adCenter can do for you today.
