Getting Ready for Father’s Day 2010

Photo courtesy of PhotoXpress.com

As Father's Day approaches on June 20th, you might have already thought about buying the card, purchasing the new golf clubs and maybe even some of his favourite chocolates. All for your special Dad. Your unique one-of-a-kind Dad. That’s right, just like your Dad is so unique, like all of the hundreds and thousands of fathers out there who people are trying to find special gifts for.

Looking back, consumers have historically spent around ₤63.67[1] on Father’s Day. Father’s day isn’t just for Dads however. Many gifts each year are given to husbands, sons and grandfathers on the day. For this reason it is important to segment and target each specific audience. Up to 20% of consumers are purchasing online for Father’s Day[1] so it is important to segment each category the consumer might be making their purchase for.

Try segmenting each category by ad group, ensuring the keywords and ad text are specific to Grandads, Dads, Sons and Husbands. Keep in mind gifts for the whole Father’s Day range from cards, music, chocolate and televisions to holidays.

According to an NRF report 2009 [1], Father’s day saw an increase in sales on greetings cards, clothing, book and cds, electronics, personal care, sporting goods and home improvement products. From looking at those search terms in Insights for Search, there have been rising searches over the last 30 days, in particular within electronics.

Other popular terms according to Insights for Search are "fathers day gifts", "fathers day cards", "fathers day presents" and "fathers day ideas".

Quick Tip: Graduations happen all year round from Universities all over the country. This time of year, many medical grads are graduating and what a perfect time for a special gift. So why not incorporate your display image ads with both ‘Dads & Grads’ referencing.

[1]Statistics and Figures from Emarketer

Posted by Trish McGinty, Dublin Retail Team

Feel the Love this Valentine's with Your PPC Campaigns

Valentine’s Day is a multi-billion pound holiday in the UK, and as it fast approaches this weekend there's still time to capitalise on the huge increase in traffic.

“Valentine’s Day” searches begin rising earlier each year, indicating that consumers are shopping earlier online for the occasion. However, shopping continues right up to the 14th with search interest peaking on the day itself.

Valentine's Day presents the annual peak for flowers, gifts and greetings cards with search popularity in these core categories growing year on year.



In February 2009 online interest was also some 30% higher than 2008 in the beers, wines and spirits category as people ordered wine and champagne for their Valentine.



The upward trend was also reflected in lingerie with a 10% rise during the month of February driven by Valentine's gift shopping.



Below are some top tips to check that your Valentine's campaigns deliver something special this February:

Ad Text

1) Make sure that you've target shoppers hoping to purchase gifts for their partners with keywords such as “women's Valentine’s Day gifts” and “gifts for him”.
2) Highlight special Valentine’s Day offers or sales.
3) Create Valentine’s Day specific ad texts.
4) Highlight the relevance of your site to each user.
5) Highlight fast delivery times in your ad text with terms such as: “Free Delivery”, “Next Day Delivery”, and “Delivered for Valentine’s Day” or “Guaranteed Delivery Time”.
6) Link to the correct landing page – in order to target seasonal spenders, consider linking to a page containing special Valentine’s discounts or offers mentioned in your ad texts.

Keywords

1) Use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches for higher CTR.
2) Use max CPC to yield high positions and traffic.


Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team

Measuring Up Your Keywords and Conversions

As legend has it over 2,200 years ago Archimedes was challenged by King Hiero II to discover whether his new crown had been made from pure gold or mixed with lesser metals. Figuring out how to measure the volume of the crown with its irregular shape presented Archimedes with a major task.

Today's PPC managers face a similar measurement challenge. Namely, how do you model exactly how much each keyword contributes to each of your conversions? And given that PPC drives nearly 1 in 5 visits to UK retail websites [1], such models are more and more likely to find their way onto CFO and CEO desks.

At one end of the spectrum is 'last click' attribution. Simple and straightforward, the only keywords that count are those that lead directly to a conversion.

Most people would concede however, that this method is not the ideal way to measure keyword conversions as it doesn’t consider how much of their previous search activity led to the final purchase. The 'consumer journey' has already been the subject of much discussion. But what then is the other end of the spectrum? How do you attribute important metrics like new customers and lifetime value to a keyword? A 90 or 180 day cookie, tracking everything and anything? The data could be overwhelming.

Research commissioned by Google indicates that as many as 40% of conversions occur after 4 weeks from when a shopper first performed a search related to the goods or services they purchased. Yet no one wakes up in the morning and says to themselves: “Today I will start my journey to buy a new coat, it will take 18 days for me to finally get there and buy it”. You make a start by seeing what products are available; take ideas from various sources and then when you think you have found the best item and deal, you make your purchase.

Is this because we all love browsing, or because it can be difficult sometimes to find exactly what you want? Like many things, it is probably a combination of the two. The Consumer Decision Journey recently published in the McKinsey Quarterly [2] discusses these moments of influence and how the 'purchase funnel' may be a different shape from what was once thought.

One thing that should gain the consensus of agreement though is that the consumer journey is path dependant. That is, each subsequent step is dependent on the experience from the previous point.

Accepting this, how much can each of these prior steps claim to have led to the final conversion? Not an easy answer given the total number of steps, the media involved and the time taken. Within the overall context of search however, comScore can shed some light on the path dependant nature of conversions within three major consumer categories [3]:

Metric	Clothing	Computers	Mobile Phones
No. of searches per conversion	5.7	5.0	4.7
No. of site visits per conversion	11.9	12.6	9.4

So how do individual Retailers start to better understand and act on the challenges posed by accurately measuring their own conversions?

You don’t necessarily need another Archimedes, but certainly someone who will take responsibility for devising how you go about measuring your conversions. In this case, using data from your web analytics package to discover exactly how each keyword pays it way. There are numerous bid management programs on the market too that can make life easier; not to mention third party consultants who can help install and make sense of analytics. Today, retailers of any scale just have too many keywords to do this manually and hope to achieve their own “Eureka!” moment.

[1] Hitwise UK, Shopping and Classifieds category, August 2009
[2] http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/The_consumer_decision_journey_2373

[3] comScore custom analysis- UK Population, 15+ Home and Work, Q4-2007 activity

Posted by Jonathan Marsh, UK Retail Team

Top 10 Tips for getting accounts ready for Christmas

We all know it’s good practice to get one’s account in shape before the Christmas madness begins, but where do you start? Here are 10 practical steps you can take to ensure you make the most of the festive peak:

A practical guide for Retail Advertisers

1) Create a separate campaign for Christmas. Having a separate Christmas campaign allows you to control spend easily. Create Christmas themed keywords by combining popular products with Christmas modifiers. Eg a fashion retailer might run the keywords christmas socks, xmas socks, socks for christmas etc.

Test generic Christmas keywords eg christmas gifts, xmas presents etc but monitor performance carefully as these terms can be expensive. Run these keywords in a separate ad group so you can pause them easily if necessary.

2) Create Christmas ads to run in regular campaigns alongside existing ads. Eg a fashion retailer might add the following ad to their ‘Novelty Socks’ ad group:

Novelty Socks for Xmas
Browse our range of Novelty Socks.
Ideal gifts for stocking fillers!
fashionistaaz.co.uk/socks

3) Deep link to relevant landing pages. Try running Christmas-specific landing pages for your Christmas themed keywords. Highlight top gifts and products not previously offered and tie these in with seasonal ad text. Elsewhere, in your regular campaigns, make sure you're deep linking to product-specific landing pages. Avoid sending users to the homepage unless the traffic has come from a brand ad group.

Eg a sports retailer known as 'Sports Clobber' should direct users searching on terms such assports clobber, clobber sports etc to the homepage. However, users searching for a specific product (eg golf shoes) should be directed to a webpage featuring that product range. Users are far more likely to convert if they can find what they are looking for easily.

4) Include USPs in ad text. What makes your brand special? Use this opportunity to differentiate your offering from your competitors. Highlight any promotions which you have running eg free gift with purchase, free in store pick-up, last minute deals, special offers.

Price and delivery details work well but only feature them if you're offering competitive rates! Use calls-to-action eg 'Order online', 'Browse full range online' - commanding language makes for compelling ads. Promote final delivery deadlines. 'Order by **' tends to work better than 'Order now'.

5) Uncap budgets on popular categories. Try uncapping budgets on any well structured campaigns with a good ROI. As long as your campaign is well structured with targeted ad text, well themed ad groups, sensible keywords and a comprehensive list of well chosen negatives, your traffic will be relevant so uncapped budgets should result in higher overall ROI.

6) Increase bids (max CPCs) on existing keywords, especially on popular product ranges.Research has shown that the Christmas surge in traffic starts as early as September. Make sure you're ready for the onslaught. Raising bids on your well performing keywords will result in higher positions. Look at the quality score of your keywords – try raising the bids on any that have a high quality score and fall below positions 1-3.

7) Ensure keywords cover your entire product range. Consider expanding longtail terms. Serious shoppers know model names and numbers. You will benefit from having longtail keywords covered as more obscure keywords will have lower CPCs. If you're running highly targeted longtail keywords it's a good idea to set these to Broad match as users may type in a multitude of variations. Keywords comprising numbers/codes should be set to Phrase and/or Exact match.

Eg an electrical retailer (selling white goods) stocks a fridge known as 'snazzy tall fridge 123Z'. Users looking for this product could type in a variety of queries eg 'Z123 fridge snazzy', 'tall fridge 123Z' etc so it would be a good idea to have the keyword 'snazzy tall fridge 123Z' on Broad match. The advertiser should also add the code '123Z' as a keyword on Phrase and/or Exact match.

8) Check inventory to keywords. It sounds obvious but ensure your keywords match your current inventory. Pause/delete any keywords pertaining to products which are currently/permanently out of stock. Users quickly become frustrated if they are misled.

9) Expand negatives. Make sure your negative keywords are well built out on any campaigns running Phrase and/or Broad match keywords. If you have set up a separate Christmas campaign add in negatives re Christmas eg carols, recipes, decorations, wrapping paper etc.

10) Build out Content campaigns. Make sure your Content campaigns are well structured with tightly themed ad groups so that you can capitalise on AFC (Adsense for Content) during the festive season. Eg a lingerie retailer might want to appear on blogs discussing 'sexy festive gifts for your partner'.

Consider adding Christmas-specific ad groups. Eg a fashion retailer selling men's apparel might add an ad group based around 'Gifts for Him this Christmas'.

We hope you found these tips useful! Please email us if you have any feedback.

Posted by Zoe McFarlane, UK Retail Team