Planning for the holiday season is always a tough proposition. Besides vacations and more gift shopping than any one person can handle, businesses everywhere also need to plan way in advance in order to optimize their ROI.
We believe this holiday season will go down as an ecommerce landmark where the better prepared retailers win and the rest walk away shaking their heads in frustration.
Yes, planning months in advance is the key to getting ahead of your competition. With that in mind, we created a calendar in August outlining the 2013 holiday season forecast day-by-day.
Now since the holiday season is almost over, we wanted to compare the actual results to what was forecasted earlier this year. What we found was very informative and even more useful.
It turns out:
- Cyber Monday week (12/2) was the strongest ecommerce week ever.
- The holiday weekends have been much stronger than in previous years.
- Interestingly, bidding strategies were not always in alignment with Ecommerce sales.
These trends presented opportunities that could have been tapped through real time tracking and swift execution. Smart management of your bids that follow the above trends can maximize your revenue and allow you to take advantage of the gaps jumped over by competitors.
Take Kansas City Steaks, a premium steaks and fine foods company since 1932. They wanted to directly take on Omaha Steaks and grab an even larger share of voice on SEM. We sat down and came up with an actionable plan almost 4 months in advance based upon:
- Around the clock monitoring and management of their bids and campaign
- Using our Proprietary Real Time Bid Optimization (RTBO) platform to identify revenue opportunities and execute strategic bid changes
- Having a marketing Plan B in place in case the Plan A didn’t work.
The end result…their year over year SEM Revenue grew by 89%.
As you can see, planning ahead, knowing when customers are shopping, and tailoring your campaigns and bids effectively can help you increase revenue significantly. This way, the busier the holiday season, the better!
