The Twelve Days of e-Christmas: Day 6 Promote Your Video

Day six of the “Twelve Days of e-Christmas” focuses on Promoted Videos. This YouTube ad format is a highly cost effective way of engaging with your customers and surfacing your content at the top of the UKs second largest search engine.



Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team

The Twelve Days of e-Christmas: Day 5 YouTube Homepage

Day five of the “Twelve Days of e-Christmas” looks at the YouTube homepage. Use YouTube homepage advertising to create powerful brand awareness or as part of your remarketing strategy this Christmas.



Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK retail Team

The Twelve Days of e-Christmas: Day 4 Contextual Targeting by Keyword

The fourth part of our “Twelve Days of e-Christmas” series looks at the benefits of Contextual Targeting on the Google Display Network. With 140% more reach than retargeting or audience campaigns, contextual targeting should be an essential part of any marketer’s strategy when looking to fully realise the potential of Christmas this year.



Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team

The Twelve Days of e-Christmas: Day 3 Target by Category on the GDN

Day three of the “Twelve Days of e-Christmas” covers the benefits of category targeting on the Google Display Network. Marketers can realise their direct response and branding goals this Christmas by serving ads to customers as they browse the web, based on our categorisation of thousands of sites.



Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team

The Twelve Days of e-Christmas: Day 2 Remarketing

The second instalment of our “Twelve Days of e-Christmas” is out now. This time we’re focusing on Remarketing and how you can capitalise on its benefits as part of your seasonal marketing strategy.



Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team

The Twelve Days of e-Christmas: Day 1 Brand Bidding

With Christmas just around the corner, the Google UK Retail Team has started its “Twelve Days of e-Christmas” activity. These daily industry insights and best practice suggestions are designed to help marketers get the most out of their advertising campaigns as we head into the holiday season.

Day 1 covers brand bidding and how to best ensure that you are found at the right moment with the right message when customers are searching online.

Each daily update will be posted here so remember to check in regularly for new installments. Please email us or leave a comment if you have any questions.



Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team

Tracking Christmas Traffic

After you spend the time building Christmas specific campaigns, you want to know about the trends and spikes in Christmas traffic. If you are using Google Analytics, you can set up Intelligence Alerts to closely monitor important holiday shopping events. On November 27th, the Westend of London is being transformed into a traffic free zone for all of the Christmas shoppers to concentrate on shopping! This is a huge opportunity for potential customers to Research online purchase offline. Or they might see something in a store but it’s not available on that day so they return home to buy online.

It is really important to track these interesting traffic trends. Once you’ve set your code and tracking goals, you can set up proactive alerts to monitor spikes in traffic. With Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts you can not only track important shopping holiday events but Christmas specific keywords as well as an increase from new visitors or from a certain source.

If you receive an alert regarding a spike in Christmas keyword traffic, for example, you can really analyse this data even further to identify traffic trends.

Top Tips:

1. Make sure you are running ads for high traffic Christmas keyword terms.
2. Run an advanced segment report to obtain insight about the visitors. You can see if they are new or returning visitors.
3. If you have a number of new visitors it would be interesting to run a special promotion for new site visitors. 10% off your first purchase, for example. Always remember to use any special promotions in the ad text for a unique selling point.
4. To get your AdWords Campaigns ready for Christmas please visit our ‘Jingle All The Way’ Christmas site

Posted by Trish McGinty, Dublin Retail Team