Latitude’s 12 Digital Tips to Christmas Retail Success

November 3, 2010
by Retail Champions

Halloween is now over for another year and Latitude has put away their pumpkins and fancy dress costumes in preparation for the ‘silly’ season. From here on in its all about Christmas! Mince pies, mulled wine and Christmas carols are filling the office and to help you prepare for this festive season, we have put together an indispensible checklist for any retail campaign…

1. Key Search Dates

NOW: people research what they will purchase as gifts weeks before Christmas. Many also buy for themselves before buying for others so retailers with their full product offerings on show right now will have the best chance of ensuring customers see them in all their glory and potentially come back in the next 3 weeks to make a purchase.

The ’10′ days of Christmas: these are the 10 days preceding Mega Monday. Last year this peak in traffic commenced on Monday 7^th December.
Mega Monday/Cyber Monday: This is quite literally the biggest day of the year for online sales. It’s traditionally the 2nd Monday in December and for at least 3 years in a row it has been the biggest online shopping day of the year.

Boxing day: for the last 2 years, this has been the busiest day in online traffic for online retailers. Make sure that you’re hosting is up to scratch as people will be visiting your website to review your exchange policy, grab some bargains and spend their Christmas cash.

2. Coverage

Ensuring that you are reaching your audience at the right time is important – but equally important is ensuring that you have got a good level of coverage across the right channels.

With Google having over 90% share of the UK search market it is vital to any search campaign, however Yahoo & Bing are not to be ignored and should be included to ensure well rounded coverage.

When managing PPC campaigns for our clients at Latitude, we ensure the top performing campaigns are cloned on these two search engines. Additional revenue and lower cost conversions can be gained, especially at this busy time of year simply from having coverage on the ‘other’ search engines, and not just on the big ‘G’.

3. Mobile

The year of mobile search is upon on us! Savvy retailers (and their agencies) will also need to consider mobile search when planning the coverage of their campaigns this Christmas.

Mobile search is an important aspect of any search campaign as more and more users are opting to carry out preliminary searches about products & services on-the-go using their Internet enabled mobile phones. Mobile search on Google has surged past Bing for PPC and is growing at an average of 76% per quarter. This presents a great opportunity and mobile targeted campaigns are a must this season!

Here at Latitude we have created a ‘best practice guide’ for getting the most out of mobile search… from splitting out mobile and desktop traffic into their own individual campaigns to optimising ad copy to specific handsets… and we are seeing some really great results.

4. Budget

During the Christmas period in PPC we often see a surge in searches followed by increased CPCs. If you plan ahead and optimise now you can benefit from the lower CPCs. So review previous Christmas PPC trends e.g. your ad spend, traffic and conversion rates in order to make forecasts. Monitor your PPC budgets to make sure your ads do not stop appearing due to budget caps.

While most retailers see an increase in sales and online traffic during this time of year, advertising spend normally increases around the Christmas period. As a result you should increase your daily budget allocations to ensure proper exposure and don’t lose out to the competition.
Additionally it may be worth leaving the holiday budget open during the last few weeks of the year so you don’t miss out on those shopping after Christmas looking for the gifts that they were hoping to receive at Christmas.

5. Ad Copy

We are safe in the assumption that customers are price sensitive and that they value quality and efficient service, so you should put emphasis on this within the Ad copy. Equally an effective way to increase sales or traffic to your landing page is to create a sense of urgency to encourage buyers to act now rather than shopping around for too long.

Examples:

“Sale ends 15th Dec ”

“Today Only”

“Limited Supply”

“Sale ends Midnight”

The Ad copy should be made relevant to Christmas so use ad text to promote special Christmas offers (or discount codes), as well as gift idea messages. Users looking for Christmas gifts will consider your adverts more relevant because of the use of festive keywords and this will also discourage irrelevant traffic.

Examples:

“Gifts for her under £30”

“Christmas Gifts”

“Gifts for Him/Her”

“Great Stocking Fillers”

Delivery becomes increasingly important to shoppers as we get nearer to Christmas and this should be highlighted in the ad text (as well as easy to find delivery information concerning the Christmas period on the website).

Examples – “Ships today”

“Order today for Christmas Delivery”

“Next Day Delivery Guaranteed”

Create different Ad copy for the different types of shoppers:

Prepared shoppers – ‘Full Stock for Christmas’,
Semi-prepared Shoppers – ‘Items Available, Fast Delivery’
Last minute Shoppers – ‘Fast Delivery’, ‘Next Day Delivery’

It’s not enough to just give the ad copy a Christmas theme – ensure that landing pages are also Christmassy in order to increase your overall quality score!

6. Creative

Inspiring Christmas store displays aim to get the customer wanting to buy into Christmas and ultimately the products they are pushing.

The same should be done online through inspiring creative which should entice the customer to click through on your advertisement and purchase.

Think along the lines of singing Santa’s, dancing elves and falling snowflakes but make sure that your message is clear and concise so you can cut through the rest of the noise online.

7. Seller Ratings

There are a number of considerations that are taken into account when purchasing a Christmas gift for your nearest and dearest which include price, delivery costs and user reviews.

If you prepare now for the UK launch of Google’s seller rating extension then by next Christmas you will be fully equipped and stand the best chance of being the retailer of choice.

8. Competition

ROI is now under pressure due to higher costs per click, more price sensitive buyers, lower product margins and increased competition. This battle becomes even fiercer around the festive period and therefore it is even more important to stay ahead of the game.

Throughout the Christmas period you should check your account, notice trends, pull off reports, stay alert and you can then hope to make a healthy return on PPC over the Christmas period.

Consider your specific offers and the ways you can use those to differentiate yourself from the competition. Ensure that your Ad copy differentiates itself from the rest of the ads.

9. Sitelinks

Using Sitelinks across your campaigns can really help you to stand out from the crowd this Christmas. Not only do they increase your ‘real estate’ on the results page and link straight through to specific pages on your site, they can be used tactically over the Christmas period to promote and highlight specific seasonal messages about your products and offers.

The stats speak for themselves – on average campaigns that have used one-line Sitelinks have seen an increase in CTR of more than 10 percent, and those with two-line Sitelinks continue to see uplifts of more than 30 percent.

Similar to our advice on ad copy, Sitelinks can be adapted to work alongside your Christmas marketing messages. You can also change the Sitelinks as often as you like to make your ad’s more timely as the big day approaches.

Sitelinks are versatile and can be used in a number of different ways. It is essential to trail site links across your campaigns to establish the best way forward for your brand.

10. Product Extensions

Product extensions are a great way to visually display your products in all their glory in the SERPS. Now available to all UK advertisers, product extensions allow you to use your existing merchant centre account to highlight products – displaying images, descriptions and the price of your products in a plusbox under your ad. It’s as simple as linking up your product feed in the Merchant Centre to your Adwords account to enable this functionality.

With competition fierce at this time of year, being able to visually display your most relevant products to the user will help to increase CTR and ultimately conversions, giving your search campaign the (visual) edge!

11. Broad Match Modifier

Make use of the Broad Match Modifier to keep search results more relevant to the shopper.

This can be achieved by putting a + sign before any word in a broad match keyword, forcing a near exact match on that word (except incorrectly spelt words and singular/plurals).

There is a pattern with brand/manufacturer focused key words served for non brand focused queries, for example cameras/digital cameras. Here the modifier can be used to restrict broad matches to the brand and manufacturer words within your key words string – for example Canon, Samsung, Kodak.

12. Sales

Finally, you should also remember that the Christmas period is closely followed by the January sales. The sales are starting earlier and earlier and in many cases they now start on Boxing Day. Think about what your competitors are doing, and consider ways that you can take advantage of this vitally important period.