Presentation from the September 18th webinar, "Optimizing Your Path to Seasonal SEM Success." Josh Dreller and Emily Helander of Kenshoo share the 6 most important steps for retailers looking to maximize paid search marketing during the peak shopping season.

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Optimizing Your Path to Seasonal
SEM Success
September 18, 2013

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Webinar Instructions
• Audio instructions – Listen via computer speakers or use phone numbers
listed in email from gotowebinar@citrixonline.com
• Still can‟t hear the webinar? Tell us please!
• Ask questions using the Questions box

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Today‟s Speakers
Emily Helander
Product Marketing Manager
Josh Dreller
Director, Marketing Research

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2013 is the Shortest Shopping Season on Record
• President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in
1863, to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of every November
• President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of
November, hoping to raise revenue by adding a week to the holiday
shopping season.
• Congress has since reverted Thanksgiving to its original date.
The 2013 holiday shopping season is set to be the shortest on record. With just
26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, six fewer than last year‟s 32.

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Retail Paid Search Metrics Up Year-Over-Year

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US Retail Ecommerce Holiday Sales Will Reach
$61.8 Billion in 2013

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Key Dates Will Affect Your Paid Search Strategy

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How Do You Maximize Your Opportunity?

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Like a String of Tree Lights…

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Optimizing Your
Path to Seasonal
SEM Success
Keywords
Ads
Bid Management
Website
Follow-up
Optimization

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Cast a wide net with the
right keywords

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How Does the Holiday Shopping Season Affect
Your Keyword Strategy?
• Q4 sees the highest volume of searches on retail terms
• More emphasis on research and browsing terms as consumers look for deals
• Holiday terms such as Christmas, Gifts, etc.
• New products become hot overnight (there will be new keywords to add
throughout the season)
• Competitors gearing up may catch you off guard for keywords you thought
had little to no competition during the year

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Tips for Success
Mine keywords from last year‟s holiday shopping season, not just from
recent months
Use the SKUs and product terms from your entire catalog to cash in on long
tail searches
Combine your keywords with holiday shopping terms such as
Christmas, Holiday, Gift, etc.
Link your keyword lists to your product feeds to automatically pause
keywords on out of stock items
Use Product Listing Ads as well as keywords for triggering ads
Use negatives to not be triggered for the wrong types of searches

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Deck Your Campaigns With Seasonal Keywords
• Uncover new terms from SEO
 SEO/SEM Report

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Deck Your Campaigns With Seasonal Keywords
• Uncover new terms from SEO
• Expand coverage with Keyword Suggest Reports
 Keyword Suggest Report
 Keyword suggestions – channel opportunities

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Deck Your Campaigns With Seasonal Keywords
• Uncover new terms from SEO
• Expand coverage with Keyword Suggest Reports
• Concatenate holiday keywords with the Keyword Tool
 Keyword Tool

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Deck Your Campaigns With Seasonal Keywords
• Uncover new terms from SEO
• Expand coverage with Keyword Suggest Reports
• Concatenate holiday keywords with the Keyword Tool
• Increase coverage on long tail
 PLAs

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Add Some Keywords To Your Naughty List
• Refine traffic and increase quality score with easy implementation
 Keyword Suggestions Report
 PLA Negatives Report

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Catch the eyes of shoppers with
ads that compel them to click

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How Does the Holiday Shopping Season Affect
Your Ad Strategy?
• Tons of clutter – not just online but offline too
• Competitors are constantly changing/testing creative
• Key dates such as Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.

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Tips for Success
Focus on getting consumers to click – with so much clutter there‟s not the
luxury of trying to use ads to help sell or brand as well
Keep checking the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to see what
creative angles your competitors are taking
 Zig when they zag
 You might be inspired to try something similar

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Tips for Success
Use the tried and true “Free Shipping” message if you can
Have different strategies for different key dates
Use constant testing throughout the season
Make sure your PLA ads have high impact visuals to entice consumers to click

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Write Your Copy and Test it Twice
What message works best for the holidays?
• Automate scientific ad copy analysis with AB Testing Report
 Take action in Kenshoo Editor
• Understand which promotion line works best for your PLAs

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Scheduled Action Elves Automate Your Changes
Automation lets you enjoy the holidays
• Flight promotional ads
• Pause seasonal campaigns
• Reactivate your standard copy

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Be diligent and extra smart with your
bid management strategy

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How Does the Holiday Shopping Season Affect
Your Bid Management Strategy?
• You don‟t have the luxury of long test and analysis periods
• Very volatile spikes during key dates
• Competitors might get a little wacky and bid way more than they should just
to get visitors to their site
• Multiple devices in a 3 Screen World can complicate the issue

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Tips for Success
Setup your testing schedule before the season starts
 Keep it tight
 Stay on schedule
Be prepared for key dates. You may even need to change bids several times
throughout those days
Don‟t let your budgets cap for your highest margin items
Use automated bid policies wherever possible

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Bidding in an Algorithmic Wonderland
• Kenshoo Portfolio OptimizerTM
 Intelligent bid automation
 Builds hundreds of thousands of
statistical models
 Considers marginal ROI for a portfolio
 Supports mobile bid adjustments
• Budget Center powered by Halogen
 Advanced forecasting
 Informed planning
 Automated execution with KPO
 Active Monitoring

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All I want for Christmas is ActiveClusters
• Kenshoo ActiveClusterTM technology predicts keyword-level or product-
target level performance to achieve goals
• Seasonal campaigns may not qualify for KPO or require a portfolio approach
 Keyword model and PLA policies offer a sophisticated solution
• Support mobile bid adjustment recommendations

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Steer Your Sleigh with Advanced Search
• Boost your bids on items on the day they go on sale
 Create custom rules-based bid policies for granular control
• Pause keywords when items go out of stock
 Search for keywords across your entire program
• Use Scheduled Actions to automate changes so you can enjoy your holiday

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Make sure your website is optimized
for a great shopping experience

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How Does the Holiday Shopping Season Affect
Your Website Strategy?
• Holiday shoppers know it‟s a buyers market and will click away if they don‟t
see deals
• So many other priorities during this time of year that it‟s hard to focus on the
website
• Visitors coming from so many different devices that you need phone and
tablet optimized experiences
 1 site for all will not maximize your success

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Tips for Success
More focused landing pages that let shoppers know these are “holiday
deals”, not just regular deals
Constantly test your pages for your most important products
Stay consumer centric; let holiday shopping visitors know that you understand
how much effort goes into this time of year

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Have Yourself a Merry Landing Page
• Perform multivariate landing page
testing with dimensions
 Create dimensions
 Create categories
 Assign creative for testing
 Test and track
 Optimize
• Use Advanced Search and
dimensions to monitor and optimize

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Make Sure Santa Comes to Every Town
• Advertise beyond the search engines
 Extend your local reach with CityGrid
• Drive traffic to physical locations
 Update Place pages with holiday
promotions
 Connect online and offline stages

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Track and follow-up with your
consumers after the initial visit

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How Does the Holiday Shopping Season Affect
Your Follow-Up Strategy?
• So much competition for deals, shoppers may not convert on their first visit
 You must have a follow-up strategy in place or miss out on low-hanging fruit
• Website visitors may even forget where they saw the best deal
• Don‟t think of follow-up as non-search related activity. These tactics will bring
tremendous value to your search program‟s ROI

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Tips for Success
Don‟t let a holiday visitor leave your site without enticing them to opt-in to
communication
 Holiday daily deals newsletter
 Price drops for key dates
 At the very least, connect with them via social network
Retargeting on Facebook Exchange
 Bid based on value of the search term
 Customize creative based on the search term

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„Tis the Season to Track Holistically
• Get a holistic view of your marketing activities – especially when there will be
more volume to learn from
• Gain valuable insights and optimize intelligently with cross-channel tracking,
reporting and attribution
 Over 100 completed third-party integrations

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Retarget to All, and to All a Good Return
• Re-engage customers that have visited your site through display ads and the
Facebook Exchange (FBX)
 Prompt conversions with shipping deadlines or promotional offers
 Leverage search keywords to create retargeting audiences
 Use top performing product targets from PLAs to create Facebook ads

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“You‟ll shoot your ROI up, kid”
• Better data + smarter bids = instant lift
• Market demand changes with holiday
 Activate more informed bidding at the time it matters most
• Reach your holiday goals
 Improve campaign performance
SMARTER BIDS SMARTER BIDS

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“You‟ll shoot your ROI up, kid”
• Better data + smarter bids = instant lift
• Market demand changes with holiday
 Activate more informed bidding at the time it matters most
• Reach your holiday goals
 Improve campaign performance
SMARTER BIDS SMARTER BIDS

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Take what you‟ve learned &
continually optimize

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Optimization is the Key
• Mantra = “Test. Optimize. Test. Optimize. REPEAT!”
• For the holidays, step it up.
 If you optimize monthly, try weekly
 If you optimize weekly, try daily
• Remember – your competitors are going to step it up to. If you don‟t have a
good plan, by the time you realize that you‟re losing, it will be too late.

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Tips for Optimization
Keywords – bring in the right customers, not just every customer
Ads – keep rotating and testing to find the best performing ads
Bid Management – you have to act quickly or lose out
Website – don‟t let all of the great work you‟ve put in with keywords, ads, and
bid management go to waste with a poor website experience
Follow-up – use everything you can to get those search visitors back to your
site

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Do You See What I See?
• Analyze and understand results before next optimization
 Comparison and trending widgets
 View pre and post data in the grid
 Analyze historical Quality Score

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“Buddy the Elf. What‟s your favorite device?”
• Understand device performance throughout the season
 Fusion: Keyword by Device Report
• Optimize to reach consumers on all devices
 All KPO and keyword model policies support ad group-level MBAs
 Advanced Search & Kenshoo Editor support MBAs and mobile preferred ads

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“Buddy the Elf. What‟s your favorite device?”
• Understand device performance throughout the season
 Fusion: Keyword by Device Report
• Optimize to reach consumers on all devices
 All KPO and keyword model policies support ad group-level MBAs
 Advanced Search & Kenshoo Editor support MBAs and mobile preferred ads

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Your Optimizations will go down in history!
• Quickly make cross-channel
changes with Kenshoo Editor
 Work off-line while on the plane
to grandma‟s
• Advanced Search
 Say goodbye to bulksheets
 Take action on subsets of data you
define easily and efficiently

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The 6 Steps to Season SEM Success
• Cast a wide net with the right keywords
• Catch the eyes of shoppers with ads that compel them to click
• Be diligent and extra smart with your bid management strategy
• Make sure your website is optimized for a great shopping experience
• Track and follow-up with your consumers after the initial visit
• Take what you‟ve learned & continually optimize

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Download your copy of The Kenshoo Guide for
more tips
Kenshoo.com/SeasonalSEM

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Questions & Answers

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Merry SEM Season to all!
Recording will be posted at: Kenshoo.com/Retail-SEM-Webinar