The holiday season means high transaction rates for online retailers.  Adjust your bid strategy to hit high transaction dates and to stay ahead of your competition. 

Create a Bid Schedule

The holiday season is big for online retailers.  Because of the upswing in transactions, it’s important for ecommerce websites to create a bid schedule that matches estimated ROI for the season.

On high transactional days like those around the Thanksgiving holiday, plan to increase your bids to maintain competitive visibility.  Your competition will be increasing bids to capture valuable holiday traffic, and you must do the same on shoppers won’t see your ads and the height of the holiday buying spree.

Google Analytics put out a helpful report on the spikes and dips of shopping around the holiday season.  It’s interesting to note that the days with the most traffic volume are not the days with the most transactions.  This may indicate days where shoppers are doing more comparison and browsing than actual buying.  You’ll want to watch your remarketing lists on these dates, then see if you get more sales through remarketing based on that traffic closer to Christmas.  You can also use known shopping trends and your ecommerce marketing data to create a bid schedule for your ads.

Do some ROI projections and then work with your SEM manager to adjust your bids to be the most competitive possible during the holidays.  Watch your account closely and make sure you’re getting strong traffic with the buying spikes hit.

When the dips hit in January, look over your data and see where spikes, dips, and remarketing sales happened.  Smart retailers will take this data and start to outline a holiday sales and bid schedule for the 2015 holiday season.