Anne Garcia - August 22, 2011
While it seems like summer is still in full swing and fall is still around the corner, the holiday season will be here sooner than you realize it. Before the fall weeks quickly fly by, it would be ideal to take time now to plan for the upcoming online holiday shopping season. Here are some recommendations on how to successfully plan your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.
- Check past campaign performance. Do some research and see what keywords, ads and landing pages lead to the most amount of conversions. Additionally, what could have performed better? Taking the time to analyze your 2010 holiday campaigns will help you pinpoint the parts of your campaigns that need to be optimized and what you can re-use for this holiday season.
- Budget your advertising spend. Does your product or service have a long purchase cycle? If so, you may want to maintain a steady budget throughout November and December. If not, you may want to ramp up your budget early-on, when customers begin their shopping expeditions.
- Plan your Promotions Now. Do you plan on offering varied discounts throughout the online shopping season or will your promotions stay the same from when the holiday shopping season kicks off on Black Friday?
- Target Different Devices. With the emergence of smartphones and tablets, more and more shoppers are using these new devices to shop and conduct price comparisons. Plus, these shoppers can be physically in front of a product and still do price comparison shopping. SEM campaigns now have the ability to target different devices. You can optimize your campaigns for desktop, mobile and even tablet devices.
- Create Landing Pages Now. After putting in all of the time and planning into your holiday SEM campaigns, you would not want all that effort to go to waste if your online visitors land on a less-than-optimal landing page. Design your landing pages with a holiday theme and make sure that your promotions are clearly spelled out.
