Search Tips for That Time of Year, Again

Search marketing isn’t over-supplied with traditions; it’s hard to get hung up on the past in a field that essentially didn’t exist four years ago, and where this month’s best practices can be next month’s blacklist bait. But it does have a few time-honored practices. One of the most venerable is: If it’s Labor Day, it’s time to get your search campaigns ready for the holiday shopping season.

And if you’ll check the calendar, Labor Day is two weeks dead and gone. So if you haven’t winterized your search marketing efforts yet, it’s time to buckle down and get serious about holiday selling online.

According to Diane Rinaldo, senior director of the retail category at Yahoo! Search Marketing, speedy SEM holidays strategies are particularly of the essence if your company plans to sell apparel, computer, consumer electronics or books this coming holiday. All those categories saw strong revenue growth in last year’s holiday season—electronics and computers by more than 100% over 2004 holiday levels, according to stats collected by comScore Media Metrics. Gift cards saw a healthy boost, too, with sales up 19% year over year in November-December 2005

The online retailers that Rinaldo encounters in her job are mostly “a pretty sophisticated bunch,” she says. “Every year they get smarter about keeping their messaging fresh and making sure their promotions are extended into search [marketing] and using search to reach across all of their products and categories.”

But each holiday shopping season seems to produce some new metrics and tactics that retailers may benefit from examining. This year, following on a trend to look more closely at the buying cycle and the “assists” that may go into a purchase decision online, Rinaldo points to findings from the Yahoo! Buzz Index about how searches users did last year related to actual shopping trends.

Yahoo!’s Buzz Index takes a look at search traffic on specific keywords and categories at Yahoo.com. The figures factor in the total number of visits during whatever period is examined, to reduce the effect of, say, comparing searches on a Sunday with those on a Monday; this can give analysts a better, more reliable picture of the spikes and valleys in user interest in a topic, category or keyword—producing patterns they can use in their marketing campaigns.

For retailers in the apparel category, for example, Yahoo! Buzz found that consumer interest started rising appreciably before Thanksgiving 2005 and remained fairly high through Dec. 19, when it dropped back to pre-holiday levels. But it began to climb again right after Christmas Day.

On the other hand, the computer hardware and consumer electronics categories hit their peaks on the weekend after Thanksgiving, dropped back on Cyber Monday to almost normal levels and then spiked again right after Christmas—in part, it’s assumed, due to shoppers looking for gizmos they didn’t get as gifts.

Or they may be looking to take advantage of gift cards, a large part of the “gifting” search category tracked by Rinaldo’s team through Yahoo! Buzz. The trend here is a steady upward climb all through the holiday season with a definite peak on Dec. 24, followed by a steep drop-off in searches. Online retailers who are offering gift cards should be sure to keep them in their search marketing promotions throughout the holidays and should probably make them a bigger feature of messages as the season progresses.

Searches in the jewelry and watches category showed a large increase between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday last year, and then slipped a bit before peaking twice more, on Dec. 12 and Dec. 20, before declining for good right after Christmas Day.

Users started searching in the toy category much earlier than for the other product groups last year, Rinaldo says. The Yahoo! Buzz Index shows that 2005 searches on toy names and toy related keywords began gathering steam on Nov. 5, almost three weeks before Thanksgiving. Those toy searches reached their highest point between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, then showed a trend of multiple peaks through Dec. 18—perhaps as users go online to find out who’s got this year’s hot toy at what price or, later in the season, which retailers still have it in stock. As with the jewelry/ watches category, there was virtually no bounceback in search activity in the toys category after Christmas Day.

These trends may not be news to online marketers, Rinaldo says, but many of those she speaks to find it “reassuring” to see measurable confirmation of shopping and product research patterns that they’ve suspected. “We see a tremendous appetite among our retail clients for these trends,” she says.

It’s important to remember that the Yahoo! Buzz trends track searches in a category, not buying. Rinaldo points out that online merchants can benefit by comparing the peaks in their sales last year with the peaks in user research in their category and determining what benefits they can reap by showing their pay-per-click search ads during that early research phase, when consumers might still be considering multiple brands of a product or multiple sellers for that brand.

Whether or not to advertise in search during that early-consideration phase is a strategy that will depend in part on each retailer’s budget. “It can be expensive to advertise early in the season, when the conversions may not be as high,” Rinaldo says. “But you’re certainly there with the opportunity to influence the ultimate purchase.”

As a help in setting the timing of holiday SEM campaigns, Rinaldo says retailers need to make a basic decision early on about their seasonal objectives: Do they want to take market share from their competitors, or are they more interested in getting the best return possible on the search marketing investment? If the former, then marketers will want to make sure they budget for early-season search marketing and will need to design keyword lists that include more generic keywords intended to attract those early shoppers uncommitted to a brand or a seller.

On the budgeting topic, Rinaldo thinks search marketers have gotten past one holiday hurdle of the early days: reaching the end of their marketing funds before getting to the end of the season. Most marketers are now sophisticated enough to know the importance of allotting the funds they need to market effectively not only through the pre-Christmas shopping period but through any post-holiday rebound, she says.

“We saw less of that last year than in previous years,” she says. “If anything, we actually see budgets run out more in other quarters. But our clients have very aggressive [holiday] online sales goals, and in fact use the online channel to bump up sales when offline is not doing as well.” She points to a December 2005 BizRate and Shop.org “eHoliday Mood” study, in which 56% of merchants reported that increasing their search marketing budgets was the most common mid-season adjustment during the 2005 holiday shopping period.

Merchants who are concerned about lower conversion rates on generic keywords during the holidays may be able to benefit from creating a general gift guide page and using that as a landing page for those broad terms. Rinaldo says Yahoo! worked with one marketer last holiday to create such a landing page, offering visitors who clicked through on generic terms a range of gift options. The result was a doubling of conversions from ads on those generic terms.

Holiday gift guide pages might be indicated even when conversions aren’t a problem. That same BizRate/ Shop.org survey found that 76% of online merchants used a gift idea center or gift guide on their sites last year, and 60% reported that it was the most successful sales feature of their site. While such guides make good landing pages for general holiday keywords, even the landing pages for specific or branded terms should contain a link to any gift guide pages, Rinaldo recommends.

She offers other shopping-inducing tips for holiday search marketers:

* Review your keyword lists for relevant holiday additions, including revising “floral arrangements” to “Christmas floral arrangements”. Yahoo! and Google both offer lists of suggested keyword additions. (But marketers concerned with return on investment may find these holiday terms budget-killers; again, it’s important to decide if having your ad served on a general search is a good tactic for your business in your segment.)

* Keep adjusting your search marketing campaigns as the season progresses. You may want to shift your efforts to back surprise bestsellers among your product offering. And remember to turn off product-specific ads if that item goes out of stock for an extended period.

* In the matter of ad copy, get the search term into the title and high up in the description; eye-tracking research indicates search users’ attention goes to ad titles first, then to the use of their search term in the copy. Try to get any pricing info or promotions (such as the old reliable “free shipping”) into the ad creative, along with end dates for those offers, if any. Ad text should also include multichannel options such as in-store pickup. And don’t forget to include the last ship date for on-time holiday delivery as a call to action.

* For items you may be promoting in more than one category—for example, in both “gifts” and “home décor”—run ad copy tailored to each category, so viewers will find the relevance right away. And run specific creative specific keywords, and more general ads with generic keywords. “If your keyword is ‘women’s apparel’, don’t message only your line of suits in your ad,” Rinaldo says. “Conversely, if your key phrase is as specific as ‘holiday ornaments’, don’t mention every category of item on your site.”

* As a rule, landing pages should be immediately relevant to the search terms used. But if a specific product page doesn’t contain enough promotional language, marketers might do better to direct ad clickthroughs to a slightly higher page that carries a stronger sales message. In those instances, Rinaldo says, make sure visitors see a clear and obvious navigational path from the landing page to the product page related to the search term they used.

One factor slipping a little extra complexity into holiday marketers’ stockings this year is Yahoo!’s apparent intention to roll out the first phase of its revamped Panama sponsored listing platform in Q4 2006. The new platform will bring a kit bag of tools that marketers might find useful, such as enhanced geographic targeting, keyword “assist” tracking and keyword recommendations built by crawling a marketer’s actual Web pages. But it will also introduce a less transparent format for ad bidding that might make life less predictable for Yahoo! marketers—during the most important sales season of their year.

Asked about the possible impact of these large changes in Yahoo!’s ad management interface at the holidays, Rinaldo says, “We’ll work with advertisers to do it at a pace that is comfortable for each of them. We certainly will not force [the new interface] on any retailers that feel it’s not the appropriate time.”