Search Marketing Tips For A Successful Christmas

By: Cedric Chambaz - Marketing Manager Search & SMB, Microsoft Advertising

published 1295880293

With three busy trading weeks ahead, culminating in the busiest day of the year – Boxing Day – this is both exciting and nerve-wrecking time for online retailers. This is the time during which annual turnovers are made, or missed.

The good news is that consumers are increasingly turning to the web for stress-free and often last minute shopping. So now is the right time to make the final adjustments on your search marketing campaign and capitalise on additional opportunities to drive customers to your door this Christmas – despite of the ice and snow!


Opening the doors…

The Christmas holiday period drives unique search behaviours which require you to adapt your on-going search marketing campaign.  For example, searches for free delivery increase during that shopping season.  So, if you offer this service, make sure it is part of your keyword portfolio and your ad copy.  To make things easy, Microsoft Advertising has put together a collection free keyword suggestion lists for popular retail sectors during Christmas time, including electronics, home and garden and clothing and footwear amongst others.

The same site also provides a range of seasonal, retail-specific search insights and marketing tips to develop your campaign planning, fine-tune your keywords portfolio and optimise your bidding strategy.  For instance, toy retailers can find the list of must-have toys for this year, electronic retailers have insights of the latest launches impacting search behaviours and there is valuable data around click volumes and costs for all popular sectors this season.

Clothing retailers will be delighted about recent innovations in visual searching. Bing.com is promising to be a favourite destination for last-minute Christmas shopping and New Year’s Eve party planning, with five new visual search galleries made available for women’s dresses, women’s shoes, women’s handbags, ]women’s accessories, and women’s underwear.  Clothing online retailers can capitalise this traffic as well as take advantage of the clothing-specific search insights and resources available at the Christmas hub.


…and making the path wider

Finally, another quick-win to attract Christmas trade is to get registered on Ciao e-commerce solutions. Ciao is one of Europe’s leading shopping and price comparison portals and operates on a cost per click model.  The product range is wide from electronics to travel and a whopping 90% of its users are regular online shoppers.  It’s not too late to tap into this high-potential audience, and after completing the free sign up you could be up and running in 2 days.