Desirea Calvillo
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Search @ Skai
Holiday Search Marketing Tips: See which Skai Search features can help you optimize your campaigns right now for maximum return at the end of the holiday season
Search marketers know that the Q4 holiday shopping season can be as wild as a ride on a rambunctious reindeer. At this time of year there are dramatic and frequent changes—both in search volume and efficiency—and search marketers will need to be nimble to both maintain returns and maximize sales. That’s where a powerful search marketing platform like Skai Search can offer the granular functionality that gives search marketers the automation tools necessary to control campaigns and provide peace of mind during this critical time.
Holiday Search Marketing Tips for Optimization
These quick and easy tips will help ensure you get the most out of Skai optimization this holiday season:
- Make sure budget caps for KPO and Budget Manager don’t block your growth. Allow KPO to manage your budget cap.
- A forecast is still just a forecast. Monitor your plans and adjust constraints during your biggest days of the year.
- Use ‘Boost Spend’ for days that you are willing to compromise on your efficiency constraint in order to spend more.
- Remember there will always be a fine balance between spend and efficiency.
- Start running shopping structure optimization at least 3 weeks before the holiday season to ensure you gain enough historical data.
- If you need to use manual bidding, pause KPO for the day.
- During the day, use “daily projection” in Budget Manager to see how we project the day will end.
Holiday Search Marketing Tips: Scenarios & Skai Solutions
Let’s look at three common scenarios you may face during the holiday season, along with our recommended solution.
Scenario 1: It’s Black Friday and you want to change your goals during the day as you’re seeing different performance to what you expected.
Skai Solution: You can edit the pacing and the boost during the day. The change will take effect within an hour.
Scenario 2: You have a strict budget plan for the holiday down to the week and sometimes even the day, and you just have to follow that plan.
Skai Solution:
- Add last year’s data to your forecast.
- Set your budget plan with spend as the top priority.
- Add a constraint on ROI/CPA only if it is critical. Set it to the lowest ROI/CPA possible so as not to limit your opportunity and spend.
- Edit pacing for special days.
- Boost spend on critical days – for these days, the algo will compromise on your ROI/CPA goals to meet your spend goals.
Scenario 3: You are running a promotion for two days and plan to spend three times more than you typically do on each of these days.
Skai Solution: Using new intraday bidding causes the default step size to be increased. Plan accordingly and add budgets gradually a few days before and after your special days.
Ready to apply these tips and more to your holiday search campaigns? Reach out to your Skai rep for help, or contact us for a demo of our search platform.
