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Christmas searches start as early as October, as users start to research and plan their Christmas present wish list, and what to buy for their loved ones! Therefore it is important to ensure you have a presence on key terms now so consumers remember you later on in the process

Get full keyword coverage

Look at your website and ensure you have full coverage of your bestselling items and items that you really want to push. You should be expanding out your campaigns now, in order to ensure you are running in optimum position before you hit the Christmas peak in December. For example, you don’t want to suddenly start advertising aggressively on Ugg Boots in the first week of December. This is going to cost you a lot of money, as click volumes will be high and you may not convert at the same rate. Particularly if your offering is not competitive.

Look at last year's data

In order to know what to advertise on and what position strategy to take. If available you should be looking at last year’s data and analysing what happened, what positions worked for you, what were your key sale weeks, what % of impression share you missed out on, what extra click traffic you could have got if you had got 100% impression share etc. This should help you plan both your search strategy and budgets. For example, there is no point in splitting your budgets evenly across October, November and December if you saw 70% of your conversions come through in December. As clearly in this example you would need to invest more budget when consumers are looking to buy.

If you notice that key brands worked well last year, then it is worth looking at impression share, and working out the volume you missed out on – if you are missing out on a lot and had a good conversion rate, then increasing your budget for these key brands is a definite recommendation.

Identify traffic peaks

If you have never advertised during this period before, then you can do a couple of things to try and identify traffic peaks. One of these is looking in your Google Analytics account at last year’s data for other channels such as organic and see how traffic varied in the Christmas period. Another way is to use the Google Insights for search tool (http://www.google.com/insights/search/) and look at traffic volumes for different keywords. This will allow you to see how traffic volumes performed last Christmas. The example below shows that traffic started to increase from September for searches on “Christmas gifts”, this then peaked at the beginning of December.

Get clever with Remarketing

Whilst users are currently in the research stage, you should be adding them to your remarketing cookie pool. You can then remind them about the brand immediately through display remarketing adverts.

Target shoppers at pay day!

If you want to be clever, I would recommend catching the users into your cookie pool now and then retargeting them around the paydays leading up to Christmas. I suggest targeting them on October pay day reminding them about the brand, then reminding them again around November pay day with a clear call to action.

Promote your delivery options

I would then suggest a different approach in December, targeting users up until Christmas eve reminding them of your delivery USP’s such as click & collect, last delivery dates, next day delivery etc. I would suggest a more aggressive remarketing strategy if you offer a “click & collect” style service and it snows, as shoppers are going to be more concerned about getting their presents on time! Additionally if you have click and collect, it could be wise to increase your bidding in the week leading up to Christmas, again so that shoppers know they will get their last minute gifts in time!

Consider using the GDN

If you have particular areas of your website that perform well. I would recommend a display advertising campaign, with adverts that push these key products. If these are very specific then your targeting on the Google Display Network can match this, ensuring you appear on relevant content surrounding this subject area.

Alternatively if you have a specific audience or product type, you could also target them showing your best selling products. If you already have full coverage in your search campaign, this is a way of expanding your reach and potential sales. Using this alongside remarketing, will ensure that new visitors who come to the site are reminded of the brand and encourage to come back and convert.

Don't forget mobile users

You should also consider optimising your website to make it more mobile friendly. My colleague Vimal wrote a blog explaining the growth of mobile and how this cannot be ignored, and this is especially important at Christmas. The fact 77% of mobile users use their smart phones to find information about goods and services, with 70% of users using their smartphones whilst shopping in store. If you don’t have a presence on mobile devices, then chances are you are going to miss out. We recommend splitting out your search campaigns into mobile and computer/tablet campaigns. This means you can have differing bidding strategies, as you will need to be in top positions on smart phones in order to make advertising worthwhile. This will also allow you to easily monitor the volumes of traffic you are receiving on mobile devices, the spend and the conversion rates.

Multi Channel Funnels

A useful addition to Christmas advertisers this year is Multi Channel funnels in Google Analytics – this allows us to see the path to attribution and therefore if you do choose to up your marketing activity and invest in other advertising methods such as display and remarketing you will be able to see how often they contributed in the path to conversion.

(Find out more about Multi Channel Funnels: http://www.periscopix.co.uk/blog/google-analytics-multi-channel-funnels-go-live/)

Don't forget the sales!

Once Christmas is over, the shopping doesn’t stop – January sales start! Make sure that your strategy doesn’t end at Christmas, save budget for Christmas day, Boxing day and beyond when users are looking to spend their Christmas money on the latest deals.

Promote your sale through remarketing

Remarketing again can come into play here, we recommend that you target everyone who has purchase with you previously with a sale advert to let them know about your great deals. They have purchased from you before, so are more likely to purchase from you at a discounted price!

Mobile use on Christmas Day

Importantly you should factor a mobile strategy into this as last year Christmas day was the annual peak for Google searches on mobile phones! With traffic 3x as high on Christmas day as it was on Christmas eve. Therefore you want to make sure that your ads are in the top positions at this time, and that you have the budget to cope with demand

What if I'm not in retail?

Of course Christmas isn’t positive for everyone. For lead generation B2B campaigns and ecommerce sites that aren’t gift related, you can see a low. Therefore the task for these is to work out how to maximise the traffic that is available in order to improve conversion rate!

Some tips I would suggest are:
- Set your ad settings to deliver advanced rather than standard. This is going to ensure you appear for the most traffic possible.
- Consider offering promotions to encourage users who are searching to convert – for example free trials, free samples, free consultations etc. Everyone is incentivised by something for free.
- Consider raising positions, if you normally see low spend in December, then perhaps you can up your position strategy to increase your banner appearances.
 

To sum up, there are lots of opportunities for optimisation and expansion at Christmas....there are always more sales to gain! However, I cannot emphasise enough that to maximise opportunities you should launch before the peak in order to ensure you gain sales at the most efficient rate!

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• Advertising to Christmas shoppers

  08th December 2010