With the next holiday season right around the corner, it is important for businesses to be prepared and enter the season with an online holiday media buying strategy; so when Santa comes down the chimney at the end of the holiday season he is carrying sacks of money instead of coal.

Every company is unique; and because of this, everyone’s media buying strategies are different. There is, however, some common steps that every media buy should possess to ensure success during the holiday stretch, whether your business is connecting people with applications or selling computers. The holiday season is the highest traffic time period on the net, which means it is important that you have a marketing strategy to best help promote your company or product. If you wait until Black Friday or Cyber Monday to start running your campaigns, you’re going to play catch up and have a tough time being competitive and maximizing your ROI. All this traffic in such a short period of time means there will be a lot of online inventory available. It is important to have a strategy in place so you are putting your product in front of the most valuable and qualified user instead of throwing your money away like leftovers after Thanksgiving.

Below is a graph indicating the increase in traffic during the major holidays. It proves that you need your strategy in place in order to get the best ROI on your media buys because the traffic comes fast and drops off even faster.

 Graph provided by http://www.google.com/trends

Goals
With any good strategy and a holiday media buying strategy in particular, goals must be in place. In order to create accurate goals for your campaign you must set some benchmarks. Do your research and ask yourself these questions: What worked last year? What didn’t? How much was spent? What channels were effective? Was it paid search? Display? An affiliate program? What were the rates? CPM, CPC or CPA? If you can answer these questions, it will not only help you optimize your campaigns with efficiency, it will also help you in determining the precise and most effective window of opportunity when starting and ending your campaigns. The goals you implement into your marketing strategy this year must be based on last year’s results. If you are a startup company and you are approaching your first holiday season, it is important to document and track everything you do this season so you will be firing on all cylinders next holiday season.

Test, Test, Test
Testing is a vital part for any media buy especially during the holiday season. Starting your tests early will give you and your team time to analyze the results and build historical data. It is important to choose which KPI’s (key performance indicators) are important to the particular buy. Once you have chosen which KPI’s to measure you will then need to determine what to test. There are many variations of tests you can run so that’s why it is important to test early.

Deploy and Observe Vigilantly
Deploy and monitor campaigns before the holiday season enters its peak period. This is essential for a variety of reasons, most notably because consumers are beginning to shop online earlier than ever before, according to Shop.org. Prior to the season, identify the newest and hottest trends (examine user browsing behavior, wish list activities, or whatever is important and pertains to your business or product). Observe your buy closely so you can be prepared for any shifts, and you can optimize at a moment’s notice. This is especially important when running display campaigns because they tend to take more time and effort when optimizing.

No Guarantees
There are no absolutes to creating the perfect holiday media buying strategy or any media buying strategies for that matter. These three tips are not the magic bullet and will not guarantee a successful holiday season on their own, but if you add them to your holiday media buying strategy you will definitely increase your chances for success.

Mitch Bain, Marketing Manager; W3i, LLC
Mitch has 4 years experience focusing on Display Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, and Mobile Marketing, in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.

Many of the online marketers I speak with have been using AdWords for years.  They love the ROI they see from the program but a common gripe has to do with the fact that many of them are having difficulty increasing reach and growing their customer acquisition efforts.

When I hear this my immediate question is always, “Are you advertising on the content network?”  The typical response is usually a variation of, “We’ve tried it in the past, but the quality of the traffic was always extremely poor.”

At W3i we’ve found Google’s Content Network, as well as similar offerings from other publishers, to be a great source of ad inventory to increase reach and grow user acquisitions for the W3i Download Network.  Whether it’s audio, video, games or utility software there are a plethora of relevant sites to advertise on in Google’s vast network.  After all, where do you think the users you’re bidding on in search end up when they don’t click a paid ad?  That’s right, probably a site that is displaying AdSense ad units.  Google’s robust algorithms do most of the heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on what you do best.  To help jumpstart your AdWords account using Google’s Content Network I’ve put together a list of tips to keep in mind.

1. Implement Conversion Tracking.
   Perhaps this goes without saying, but the one thing needed prior to diving into any network is a method for tracking return on investment (ROI) at a granular level.  Google’s Conversion Tracking option provides the simplest tool for measuring key performance indicators (KPI’s) on the Google network. Of course there are non-Google tracking options as well.  Establishing conversion tracking up front will provide the needed clarity for decision making down the road.  After all, you can’t grow what you can’t measure!
2. Segment your search campaigns from your content campaigns.
   Be sure to separate your search campaigns from content campaigns.  For those who are fairly new to Adwords you may think “no brainer”, however, there was a time that co-mingling search and content was thought to be the way to go.  We know better now.  Separating search from content allows ads to be written with the context of the user interaction in mind.  Another benefit of segmenting campaigns is the creation of keyword lists specific to content placements.  Best practices call for smaller groups of keywords (10-20 keywords) and the use of broad matching. The bottom line is users behave differently on search than they do on content, and segmenting the two allows for optimization by network.
3. Remember to set a campaign budget!
   The fastest way to get noticed by your management is to not set a campaign budget! We don’t suggest this. Google’s content network is huge and can burn through thousands of dollars in a matter of hours, so make sure you’re setting reasonable caps, especially as you dip your toes into the water.
4. Utilize Cost Per Click (CPC) bidding on the content network.
   CPC bidding greatly simplifies the online marketing process. Review search network campaigns to determine a starting range for content campaigns. Google typically recommends starting content bids at about half of the rate of your search bids.
5. Keeping the budget tip above in mind – BE AGGRESSIVE!
   If you don’t get aggressive, you will never get the opportunity to show Google’s algorithms how well your ads perform.  We typically start with bids well above our estimated allowable CPC knowing we will lower them to meet our ROI goal once we begin to see some performance data rolling in.
6. Focus on clicks initially.
   Use the AdWords auto ad-optimization feature to make sure you’re going to auction with your highest click-through rate (CTR) ads.  You can always test different ad copy once you’ve scaled your campaigns, but focus initially on getting high effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) ads into the network.  Regardless of the way you are paying Google (CPM or CPC), your bids are always translated into eCPM so they can be compared to other ads in the auction and Google can maximize its revenue.  For example, if you are bidding .25 CPC and Google estimates your CTR will be 1%, Google will go to auction with an eCPM bid of $2.50.
7. Try using Frequency Capping.
   Frequency Capping is a relatively new feature which was introduced as part of the Doubleclick acquisition.  It allows you to limit the maximum number of times during any given time period your ad can be shown to each user.  This is commonly used when buying banner ads on a CPM basis because of the following logic.  Typically, each consecutive ad impression a user sees (depending on the length of time in between) will yield a lower CTR than the prior.  The logic behind this is basically that if a user is interested in an advertisement he or she will engage it the first (or first few) time(s) he or she sees it.  Using this knowledge you can frequency cap your ads so that each impression has the highest chance of yielding a click, thereby aligning your interests with Google’s (Google only gets paid when there is a click).
8. Research!
   Research the sites that rank high organically on keywords in your search campaigns. There is a high probability these are the same types of sites that your ads will be shown on in the content network.  Pay careful attention to the context of this type of site, and use this information when choosing content keyword themes and writing ad copy.  You can also use this information to target sites that you know rank well organically for your top performing keywords.
9. Use the Placement Performance Report.
   Using the Placement Performance Report will allow you to see your historical performance on every site in the content network, including conversion rate.  From there you can take two actions: exclude low performing placements and target high performing placements in their own campaign.
10. Bid to performance.
    Using the ad scheduling feature to adjust your bids by hour and day of week will allow you to increase your bids during the times you convert the best and reduce bids (or pause bids) when you’re performing poorly.  You’ll be surprised how much your conversion rate varies by day of week and time of day.  Look at the data and see for yourself!

Maximizing our ad spend is a crucial element for the success of W3i.  If you are looking for more revenue, distribution, or engagement for your Windows applications, contact W3i.  W3i has spent nine years perfecting a Windows installation technology, Install IQ, which provides a lot of marketing opportunities for companies with consumer demand for their Windows applications.

Peter Novotny, Manager of Marketing, W3i, LLC
Peter Novotny uses his years of experience in Media Buying and Search Engine Marketing to lead the B2C user acquisition efforts for W3i’s web properties.