2. What You’ll Learn Today
The 5-step analysis process that successful
companies use to squeeze every last dollar from
seasonal trends
How to proactively stay ahead of the seasonal
curve, while your competition is stuck in reactive
mode and missing opportunities
The rewards and payoffs from using these
strategies in your online marketing campaigns
4. July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May June
Fall
semester
Spring
semester
Summer
semester
5. 5 Retail Weeks of January*, each year:
*Cal 2015: Dec 31 to Feb 3
YEAR PREVIOUS YEAR
Calendar 2013 Base Year
Calendar 2014 -15.6%
Calendar 2015 -24.7%
Cost-Per Visit Performance Over Time
v s
6. Handle Peak Season Differently Than Off-Peak
If You Have Staff, Delegate.
Don’t Set It and Forget It
Plan Right, Manage Right,
and You’ll See Amazing Results.
7. We have the same time
and resource
constraints that you
do!
8. STEP #1: Set Goals
BUDGET?
PROFITS?
RETURN ON
INVESTMENT?
VOLUME?
EFFICIENCY?
CONVERSIONS?
CLICKS?
REVENUE GAINS?
LIFETIME VALUE?
COST PER ACQUISITION?
9. CONSUMER &
INDUSTRY
TRENDS
KEY DAYS
TOP PRODUCTS
TOP SEARCH
TERMS
INTERNAL
BENCHMARKS
Stay aware of industry updates.
From technological changes
(last year’s iPhone 6/6+
upgrade) to seasonal buying
trends in your niche, it’s
important to keep your fingers
on the pulse.
CONSUMER & INDUSTRY TRENDS
STEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
11. CONSUMER &
INDUSTRY
TRENDS
KEY DAYS
TOP PRODUCTS
TOP SEARCH
TERMS
INTERNAL
BENCHMARKS
Today Post Transition
Bing Ads Yahoo Gemini Search
30 to 60% decrease*
in Yahoo Bing Network
2,500% increase*
in Yahoo Gemini
*This is a current estimate based on internal Yahoo data, as well as the projected impact of moving all available search supply to Yahoo Gemini and current
marketplace trends. The percentage of traffic that may serve from Yahoo Gemini could vary for a number of reasons, including, for example, advertiser verticals
or individual advertiser campaigns.
STEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
13. KEY DAYS
TOP PRODUCTS
TOP SEARCH TERMS
INTERNAL
BENCHMARKS
CONSUMER &
INDUSTRY
TRENDS Outline your spend, revenue, and sales through
each day of 2014’s peak season. Update day of
week for 2015. Then use this trend sheet as a
guide to make sure you bid appropriately on days
that perform similarly.
KEY DAYS
STEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
14. KEY DAYS
STEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
Date Cost Transactions CPA Revenue Profit ROAS
Monday, November 12, 2012 2,742$ 133 20.62$ 18,953.71 16,211$ 691%
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 2,424$ 100 24.24$ 13,840.93 11,416$ 571%
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 2,479$ 114 21.75$ 16,801.92 14,323$ 678%
Thursday, November 15, 2012 2,421$ 129 18.77$ 19,025.74 16,604$ 786%
Friday, November 16, 2012 2,533$ 112 22.62$ 16,630.57 14,097$ 656%
Saturday, November 17, 2012 3,022$ 240 12.59$ 33,922.36 30,900$ 1123%
Sunday, November 18, 2012 3,123$ 211 14.80$ 28,812.78 25,690$ 923%
Monday, November 19, 2012 2,769$ 157 17.64$ 22,227.82 19,459$ 803%
Tuesday, November 20, 2012 2,697$ 136 19.83$ 19,157.98 16,461$ 710%
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 2,959$ 169 17.51$ 22,337.34 19,378$ 755%
Thursday, November 22, 2012 3,652$ 169 21.61$ 25,146.78 21,495$ 689% Thanksgiving
Friday, November 23, 2012 4,930$ 267 18.47$ 37,874.90 32,945$ 768% Black Friday
Saturday, November 24, 2012 4,774$ 290 16.46$ 37,999.26 33,225$ 796%
Sunday, November 25, 2012 5,422$ 312 17.38$ 43,098.08 37,676$ 795%
Monday, November 26, 2012 6,639$ 381 17.42$ 56,798.97 50,160$ 856% Cyber Monday
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 4,924$ 242 20.35$ 34,256.62 29,333$ 696%
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4,561$ 214 21.31$ 33,783.86 29,223$ 741%
Thursday, November 29, 2012 5,012$ 211 23.75$ 28,718.81 23,707$ 573%
Friday, November 30, 2012 7,438$ 238 31.25$ 31,917.01 24,479$ 429%
Saturday, December 01, 2012 9,647$ 439 21.97$ 60,717.83 51,071$ 629%
Sunday, December 02, 2012 9,018$ 363 24.84$ 51,517.65 42,500$ 571%
Monday, December 03, 2012 6,714$ 357 18.81$ 48,389.65 41,676$ 721%
Tuesday, December 04, 2012 6,431$ 315 20.42$ 41,226.98 34,796$ 641%
Wednesday, December 05, 2012 6,362$ 325 19.57$ 43,761.26 37,400$ 688%
Thursday, December 06, 2012 6,141$ 330 18.61$ 41,323.74 35,182$ 673%
Friday, December 07, 2012 6,688$ 316 21.17$ 40,412.85 33,724$ 604%
Saturday, December 08, 2012 8,995$ 577 15.59$ 71,480.04 62,485$ 795%
Sunday, December 09, 2012 8,606$ 492 17.49$ 62,816.85 54,211$ 730%
Monday, December 10, 2012 8,010$ 443 18.08$ 54,296.70 46,286$ 678%
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 6,352$ 337 18.85$ 48,536.72 42,185$ 764%
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 6,487$ 305 21.27$ 40,703.58 34,217$ 627%
Thursday, December 13, 2012 6,475$ 336 19.27$ 46,587.74 40,113$ 720%
Friday, December 14, 2012 5,691$ 278 20.47$ 38,310.09 32,619$ 673%
Saturday, December 15, 2012 7,601$ 405 18.77$ 54,430.90 46,830$ 716%
Shopping behavior changes dramatically
during between Thanksgiving weekend and
Christmas day.
Biggest day before November = Monday
Biggest shopping day Nov-Dec = Saturday
15. TOP PRODUCTS
TOP SEARCH
TERMS
INTERNAL
BENCHMARKS
CONSUMER &
INDUSTRY
TRENDS
KEY DAYS
Pull data on which products sold well during
prior peak seasons. Keep tabs on these
potential big-sellers, so you can capitalize on
them if they’re popular again.
TOP PRODUCTS
PPT
SMARTART
STEP #2: Data-Driven PlanningSTEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
16. TOP PRODUCTS
PPT
SMARTART
STEP #2: Data-Driven PlanningSTEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
These are the products you
want to focus on the most.
Highlight them
Cross sell or upsell them
Offer package deals with
them to maximize revenue
18. Capitalize on your top non-branded AdWords
search terms from your last peak season, sorted
by revenue and transactions. You want more
traffic going to your most profitable keywords.
TOP SEARCH TERMSTOP SEARCH
TERMS
INTERNAL
BENCHMARKS
CONSUMER &
INDUSTRY TRENDS
KEY DAYS
TOP PRODUCTS
STEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
19. INTERNAL
BENCHMARKS
INDUSTRY
TRENDS
KEY DAYS
TOP PRODUCTS
TOP SEARCH
TERMS Use data from last season as a performance
benchmark for this season. Update your
internal reporting daily and weekly to ensure
you’re on track to beat last year.
INTERNAL BENCHMARKS
STEP #2: Data-Driven Planning Trend Analysis
29. STEP #6: Rollback
RUN FILTERS (at least twice a week)
LOWER BUDGET (prevent expensive mistakes)
PAUSE CAMPAIGNS (some campaigns only perform seasonally)
BID DOWN (return to off-season bidding strategy)
30. STEP #1:
Reevaluate Goals
Determine your seasonal goals
and manage accordingly.
STEP#2:
Data-Driven Planning
Gather the right data in order to
best prepare your campaigns.
STEP #3:
Settings & Budget
Change paid search settings
and budget to accommodate
your seasons.
STEP #4:
Bid Adjustments
Form a strategy for
optimizing seasonal bids by
keyword, time, device, and
geography.
STEP #5:
Promotions
Take advantage of easy ad
extensions to promote your
sales to paid search traffic.
STEP #6:
Rollback
Don’t squander your profits
by forgetting to revert your
account back to off-season
operations.
31. Key Takeaways
Following this proactive process simplifies things
and is much easier (and profitable) than reacting
Like investing, it’s better to be first in and first out
first when opportunities rise and fall. Raise bids
before performance rises, decrease before it falls
Treat each week and day during your seasonal
peaks differently. They perform differently
SMILE!
Hello, my name is [Mark Curtis]. Welcome to another ROI Revolution web clinic.
Today’s web clinic will be focused on [AdWords Strategies for Peak Season].
Here, today in this web clinic, we are going to show you [the techniques and strategies that help successful retailers squeeze extra conversions out of their seasonal upswings while].
The guest speakers that will be guiding you through this process today will be…
Now, by the end of our time together today you will fully understand:
[Go through animations]
With that said, let’s get right into it…
Now, by the end of our time together today you will fully understand:
[Go through animations]
With that said, let’s get right into it…
Robert:
I assume that all listening today have at some seasonality in their business. A the very least, you deal with 4th quarter seasonality around the holidays. Many of you have other peak seasons as well.
In our business, we have 3 peak—Back to School in the fall, between semesters in the Dec/Jan period and in May when, for most students, the school year ends.
Each one of these periods is unique in terms of the product mix. For instance, for Back-to-School, we sell and rent far more books than we buyback. In Dec / Jan, we do both. End of the school year is buyback season. We’re restocking our shelves for Back to School.
On top of this, we have dynamic pricing year ‘round.
So, as you can imagine, high seasonality, shifting product mixes and dynamic pricing ALL TOGETHER have the potential to wreak havoc on a keywords program.
NEXT…
The textbook business is wildly seasonal
With three peak seasons
Some months are up to 5x the transaction volume of other months.
Robert: Let me share some numbers related to cost per visit—which is a strong measurement of the strategies that are being shared today.
You’re looking at a year over year comparison for a 5 week period from late December to early February.
2013 represents the base year, when ROI and TextbookRush were NOT partners—and these strategies were not in place.
One year later, you can see that we drove down our cost per visit by 15.6% using these strategies.
This past January, we drove down costs another 24.7%.
Over this 25 month period, this represents a reduction in cost per visit of 36.5%
I want to demonstrate to the audience early on that we know what we’re doing. Here are real numbers.
With new practices in place, here was our Cost-per-Visit performance over time
Over 25 months, that’s a 36.5% cost reduction, savings which were of course reinvested.
Mark:
I’d like to contrast here, at a high level, what they might be doing now with what
1- Handle peak seasons differently than off-peak
2- Don’t set it and forget it
Many of you will set a monthly budget
Some of you will set a weekly budget
But with some planning and a set of parameters, you and your SEM agency can very simply run the playbook
3- If you have a staff, this is “stuff” that you can delegate
(wait for Robert to chime in) I want to just mention here that once we set this up these strategies, it became VERY easy to maintain—at least on the client side of the house. I can’t couch for ROI on that. 4- Plan it and manage it right. You’ll see amazing results.
Robert: Even though we’re discussing strategies and tactics here today, I want to point out that I have the same time and resource constraints that you do.
I have many competing priorities to handle, so I can’t invest immense amounts of time towards managing this
Your efforts must be rewarded. In my mind, there is nothing worse than working hard for zero results. And for us, this is absolutely not the case here.
In the end, it’s up to you to decide what works for you. Today, we demonstrate how we do it.
Trina:
Reevaluate goals (If you’re highly seasonal, you know it can be feast or famine, so in times of feast, take advantage!)
Overall profit dollar. Weigh volume gain against stricter goals – which gives you more profit.
Demand is high, impressions are up and conversion rates are elevated. Why miss out on this opportunity?
One day in peak season can be a weeks worth of profit in the off season.
ROBERT
Peak seasons generate different metrics than non-peak seasons. Make sure you understand the differences and how they affect your planning
There are lots of ways to measure your program. I recommend that you boil it down to 2 or 3 key metrics that you can review quickly and easily—and every day during peak seasons. For us, we’ve boiled it down to one—Keyword cost as a % of Order $Dollars.
If you have a high loyalty product or service, you might focus on something else like “Customer Acquisition Cost”.
Can we spell out Cost per Acquisition. There may be some very “new” people in the audience.
ROI:
Looking for two things:
Overall consumer behavior changes, like mobile
Smaller trends in your niche
Don’t assume this year will be the same as last year!
TIP: Look at Google.com/trends to analyze changes in search behavior
Mark:
There are many data sets to look at when figuring out seasonal trends.
You can look at your own historical data if you have it
Or industry-wide consumer shopping behavior if you’re new to the game and trying to predict without a few years worth of experience
Trina:
Another example that’s affecting all retailers is Yahoo Gemini
Brief explanation of Bing/Yahoo split
You’ll miss the traffic if you’re not paying attention what’s going on around you
ROBERT
In our category, there is a significant consumer shift towards textbook rentals. First, the business economics of a rental are completely different from a sale. Also, Avg. Order size is different, and conversion rates are different. And rental behavior is significantly different between peak and non-peak periods. Understand these shifts and managing for peak periods is way easier.
Trina:
Understand your seasonality down to the day
This is where it becomes very important to be proactive in planning, rather than reactive --- By the time you react, you may have already missed out!
We proactively plan bid adjustments based on historical and predictive data. Don’t wait to see what happens, plan for it!
Utilize ad scheduling like a weekly calendar
Make sure you understand the pattern – Know the difference between if your seasonality starts a certain number of days from Christmas, or is it always the Monday after Thanksgiving?
ROBERT
I probably did you a disservice earlier by showing you a monthly chart earlier in the presentation.
I recommend that you break your business down by week.
Also, realize that while you’re spending more, hopefully, is your high volume weeks, you can learn a lot from what I call the foothill weeks—those weeks just before or very early in your season and those weeks coming out of the season. I reco that you break down those week in particular by day of week. And then even by hours. You might layer on geography. The trick here is to understand exactly your seasonality pattern and then take advantage of it.
Couple other advantages: Gets everyone on your team on the same page. Once the work is done, it is way easier to maintain it, update it.
Mark
Mark:
Could be predictive or historical
80-20 rule
TIP: Don’t know? Take a look at GA product performance reports…
Mark
Mark:
Be sure you’re watching impression share for top products.
If you’re well on target and low in impression share, you know you have room to grow
Trina:
Keep an eye on average position for profitable keywords!! Don’t lose out on traffic for top terms!
84% of available impressions go to top 3 positions.
Tip: Set up automated alerts to tell you when top keywords have slipped down past position 1.6 if that’s important to you.
Don‘t let the automated rule make the adjustment for you. You need to be aware, then apply rational thought to the decision.
Trina:
Your previous routine likely won’t work – Need to be checking daily!
Remember: Missing one day could cost you a week’s worth of revenue.
If you’re ahead of your goals, make adjustments now – don’t wait!
This also protects you against profit loss
Robert
It is our practice to do an early morning “snapshot” on our key metric—keyword cost as a % of transaction value. As we enter a peak season, we look at the metric every day. As we get into the heart of it (with spending and performance patterns established) we settle into a different pattern. Mon: Week prior. Wed am: Mon & Tues data. Fri: Mon-Thur data. As we move to the end of the peak, we look again daily to make sure we’re pulling back on spending appropriately. (Quickly, but not too quick.)
Trina:
Explain Accelerated vs Standard
In off season, this budget is working for you, and you’re showing for all available impressions.
Trina:
In PEAK season, you need to raise your budgets to make sure you’re not spending your whole budget by noon and missing out on peak hours
Don’t let something so simple keep you from having your best quarter ever!
Trina:
Go to the Dimensions tab and look at hour of day performance and see if your ads are shutting off. This can happen if you don’t raise your budget sufficiently… if this is happening, it’s an indicator that you will need to raise your budget and/or schedule your ads better to prevent this.
MARK – NEW SCREEN SHOT
TIP: Add a backup credit card
TIP: Call your credit card company and make sure they know you’ll see a sudden surge in spend
Trina
Step 4– Bid adjustments and how your approach might change in peak vs off season
Trina:
Things you thought wouldn’t work in off-season may work in peak season
Keywords:
Look for keywords you’ve paused that didn’t work during down season…with higher conversion rates, you can push spend into those concepts and snatch up additional volume.
Tip: Use labels so you know what you’re testing and so you can easily remember to pause them on the downside!
Display: Display can even work in season! Test test test!
Trina:
Hour of Day/DOW:
Buyer behavior changes during seasonal spikes. People shop during different hours: could be later at night, on their lunch break at work, etc.
Be sure to analyze this shift and adjust your hour/day of week modifiers accordingly to take advantage of high traffic times
Trina:
Device: Mobile is more important when people feel rushed to buy. Capitalize on this trend and open up mobile modifiers during seasonality. iPhone conversion rates are up as well due to larger screens!
Trina:
Geo: Re-analyze geographic performance and see if any patterns arise. If your seasonal patterns are based on weather, this will be even more important for you!
Mark:
(animation order: Sitelinks, Callout Extensions, Review Extensions)
Use sitelinks + other ad extensions
You don’t necessarily want to make dedicated sales ads, as those tend to equal higher conversion rates with lower sales (less impressions). Evaluate if this works for you.
Trina:
Run filters constantly (at least twice a week) to look for things that have stopped converting…
Be ready to roll back (bid down, pause campaigns, lowering your budget) as soon as things start tapering off, or you’ll blow all your profits.
Mark - Summary
Now, by the end of our time together today you will fully understand:
[Go through animations]
With that said, let’s get right into it…
