Posts filed under 'Strategies'

Black Friday Anything But Bleak

Online spending during the early part of the holiday shopping season is strongest ever

Brick-and-mortar stores weren’t the only recipients of consumer love, as the holiday season kicked off with Black Friday and Cyber Monday following Thanksgiving. Even before Cyber Monday (the biggest online shopping day of the year) actually began, shoppers were heading online to get great deals. According to the analytics firm comScore, U.S. online spending on the Black Friday weekend was the strongest it’s ever been, up 11% over the prior year, with $595 million spent online.

A jump that high is worth taking notice of, especially when you consider that the increase in brick-and-mortar sales from 2008 to 2009 was only 0.5%. Of course, brick-and-mortar spending greatly overshadowed online spending for Black Friday weekend, but the huge disparity between yearly increases for both areas of sales is interesting to note.

And that rise in sales carried over to Cyber Monday as well. According to comScore, Cyber Monday sales were up 5% from a year ago, reaching $887 million and matching the heaviest online spending day on record (December 9, 2008).

Gotta spend money to make money
What’s the cause for this sort of impressive increase in spending? First is the aggressive marketing that online advertisers have begun to master, which entices consumers to open their wallets. Offering the right incentives, such as low prices, free shipping, coupons, discounts and other promotions, can go a long way toward turning a shopper’s head. Smart shoppers know they can find great deals online, and smart advertisers know that the shoppers are looking for them.

Additionally, online shopping offers an enticement that traditional shopping is sorely lacking: comfort. Shopping from home is quicker, easier and requires less hassle, stress and even gas. The rise in Cyber Monday sales indicates that not only are consumers getting more mentally comfortable about buying online, but thanks to the ease involved, they’re getting more physically comfortable, as well.

What’s more, online shopping allows consumers to shop during times when stepping out to the store might be impossible. For example, comScore reports that this year, more than half of the dollars spent online at U.S. web sites originated from work computers (52.7%), representing a gain of 2.3% from last year. That number illustrates the fact that even when they’re stuck at the office, consumers can and will still shop.

The holiday shopping season has just begun, but as the numbers indicate, we’re off to a great start. And if we can keep this momentum as we head into December, the holidays in 2009 may really be something to celebrate.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Whoohoo120.

The 12 Weeks of Christmas: A Yahoo! Survey

When and what consumers will be buying this holiday season

It wouldn’t surprise anyone to know that the recession has changed the way consumers think about spending, but the question on your minds right now is likely, “How will it affect my holiday sales in 2009?”

To help answer that question, Yahoo! has worked with Decipher, Inc. to create the “12 Weeks of Christmas” Consumer Survey. The survey, conducted in October, polled 2587 online Americans. They told us when they’re planning to shop, what they plan to purchase across retail categories, where they plan to purchase, and what offers/promotions people are likely to take advantage of this holiday season. We’re broken it down a bit, to bring you the highlights:

Fears affect shopping
The majority of people polled (76%) said they were worried about the rising cost of basics such as gas, food and services. More than half (55%) said they felt the government isn’t doing enough to fix the economy and 52% of people polled said they that they were worried that the US won’t be able to get out of the recession. Almost half of people polled (48%) said they’re worried that something will happen to their income and they won’t be able to support their families.  So clearly the economy is weighs on consumers’ minds.

Read more on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

Behind “It’s You”

Video: Q& A with Yahoo! CMO Elisa Steele

Why “It’s You,” and not “It’s Us”? Yahoo! Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele talks about the hows and whys of our global marketing campaign in this interview—including the behind-the-scenes story of the kid with the ice cream cone.

This is the first in a series of videos, which we’re calling Yahoo! Yodelcasts. For more info, visit our corporate blog.

—The Team

Black Friday is the New Cyber Monday

Which post-Thanksgiving shopping day gives the biggest online bang?

While most people identify the day after Thanksgiving—or “Black Friday”—as the biggest shopping day of the year for in-store sales, some new Yahoo! research shows that the day of turkey leftovers may actually be turning into the new “Cyber Monday.”

The Yahoo! Network Insights team looked back at last year’s consumer patterns to help marketers improve their sales during this critical time of year. Online advertising effectiveness on Black Friday and Cyber Monday—the Monday after Thanksgiving, traditionally the biggest day for online sales—was analyzed and compared to data in the preceding four weeks of November.

For more details, please see the complete post on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

Social Chemistry

Marketing strategies from the Social Networking Conference

Good social media marketing always blurs the lines a bit between the personal and the professional. But the lines seemed extra blurry at the Social Networking Conference we attended in Los Angeles which, it turns out, is also the iDate 2009 Internet Dating Conference.

Never mind the discomfort of submitting an expense report receipt that says “Internet Dating” on it. When my wife found out the iDate conference was there, she said, very drily, “Oh? And were you planning on stopping by to pick up some tips?”

No, not dating tips. But the Social Networking Conference part of the event had some pretty useful marketing tips  for businesses trying to augment their traditional advertising techniques through video, forums, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Intel social media strategist Michael Brito, a former Yahoo, said that for any company to successfully build a social network, they have to be believable and trustworthy. That means being transparent in your communications, admitting mistakes when you make them, and listening to and acting upon customer feedback. And you have to give communities some time to grow. “Don’t make monetization your only priority,” he said. “It’ll happen naturally if done right.”

Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, talked about using Facebook and Twitter in business. Clara had, until recently, worked for salesforce.com, the customer relationship-management (CRM) company. In her mind, “Facebook is CRM for individuals. It gives us one place to manage our relationships with all of our contacts.”  Social networking should make marketers look more closely  at a customer’s lifetime value, she said—while a customer may not have that much individual spending power, he may have an extensive network whose buying decisions he can influence.

Social media is about storytelling, said Angela LoSasso, U.S. social media and social networking manager at Hewlett-Packard, and “storytelling is an integral part of your daily life.” So she tries to get customers and employees telling stories about her company’s products. HP tries to make its 300,000 employees brand ambassadors by presences on blogs, Twitter, or forums. “Friends” in social networks are important, she said, because they are people we trust to help us make decisions. If someone is excited about your product, they’re going to tell their friends about it. You just have to make it easy for them to do so.

The social networking and Internet dating events did occasionally cross over. We ate lunch with the president of ScientificMatch.com, which matches people based on DNA tests. Our unique odors are hard-coded to our DNA, he said, and we tend to be attracted by smell to those who offer more genetic variety and immunity to disease, increasing the health of our children. “Stop using deodorant,” he said, “you’re ruining the chemistry!” And we wondered briefly if we had attended the wrong half of the conference.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

“Ho-Ho-Ho” or “Ho-Hum”?

Getting the best from a tough retail season

Anyone who’s read a paper or turned on the news is aware of America’s current financial crisis. Amidst the sluggish economy, mortgage crunch and a volatile stock market, Americans have clearly tightened their budgets. How this crisis will affect the 2008 holiday shopping season has yet to be determined, but most experts agree that the shopping season in 2008 is not likely to deliver the spending gains retailers enjoyed in previous years.

According to the National Retail Federation’s annual holiday forecast, sales for the 2008 holiday season are expected to rise 2.2%, to $470.4 billion. And while it’s an impressive number, this gain would fall well below the ten-year average of 4.4% in annual holiday sales growth. In fact, 2008’s projected holiday sales growth would represent the slowest growth since 2002, when holiday sales rose just 1.3%.

With consumers acting more Scrooge-like with their holiday spending, retailers must work to make their sales and promotions as competitive as possible, because everything will take a backseat to price this holiday season. But retailers can face the holidays with a realistic, yet resilient approach: Bad economy or no bad economy, the holidays are coming. The road may be a little rockier than usual, but as the National Retail Federation study indicates, consumers will still be spending.

The best thing that our Sponsored Search advertisers can do is to make their ads as appealing as possible: Make sure that shoppers know about holiday specials, sales, free shipping offers and anything else that will attract interest starting this week. Your customers are out there, but you’ll need to work harder to grab them.

A bright spot in this gloomy news is that the economic slowdown may end up stimulating online sales, if cash-strapped consumers turn to the Internet to find great deals not available at brick-and-mortar stores. Lower prices — minus the hassle of driving, plus the ease of things like comparison shopping, user reviews and free delivery — could make the idea of online shopping even more appealing this season to those who would normally head for the malls.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

The Monday You’ll Actually Enjoy

4 ways to make the most of web retail’s busiest day of the year

“Cyber Monday” may sound like the title of a Tom Clancy thriller, but in reality it’s the online counterpart to “Black Friday,” the biggest shopping day of the year. While Black Friday takes place the Friday after Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday occurs the following Monday, and is considered to be the ceremonial kickoff of the online holiday shopping season.

Consumers may pound the pavement for great deals from brick-and-mortar stores on Friday and the rest of the weekend, but when they’re back to work (and their computers) on Monday, that’s when the online shopping blitz goes into high gear. This being the case, retail advertisers should spend some time getting their Sponsored Search campaigns ready for Cyber Monday. Shoppers may be full of turkey and stuffing, but they’ll be ready the next day to start gobbling up the deals.

What motivates holiday shoppers?
According to the National Retail Federation’s 2008 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch, 40% of shoppers say that sales or promotions are the most important factors when determining where to shop for holiday gifts. As the average consumer plans to spend $832.36 this holiday season and 44.2% of those consumers plan to buy items online, it’s more important than ever for advertisers to make their holiday ads as appealing and well-crafted as possible.

Furthermore, as of mid-November, 72% of consumers have completed less than 10% of their shopping, while only 2.2% of shoppers are already finished. So there’s still plenty of time to get your campaigns in shape before Cyber Monday and keep them that way for the remainder of the holiday shopping season.

4 strategies for a green Christmas

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you prepare your campaigns for the post-Thanksgiving shopping blitz:

1. Call out any special holiday deals. Users always respond to things like discounts, coupons and sales, but the holidays and the current economic downturn make a good deal look even better.
2. Highlight lower-priced items when possible. If the price is right, things that may have once seemed like impulse purchases may now be irresistible to consumers looking to score a sweet last-minute deal online.
3. If you offer free shipping, be sure to include that in your ad copy. Free shipping is an extremely popular (if not the most popular) incentive for consumers, so if you offer it—even with restrictions—be sure to let your customers know.
4. Stress the ease and convenience that online shopping offers over the traditional mall shopping experience. Be very direct in stating how consumers can save time, money, fuel and hassle by buying online, rather than schlepping to pricey, crowded shopping destinations.

With a clear holiday plan that includes strongly crafted ads, Cyber Monday could lead to a lot of happy Tuesdays, and a pretty festive holiday season in general for your company.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Photo courtesy of Flickr user slightlywinded.

Have Some Email with Your Search

3 ways to use email and search together to reach your customers

You should know this from your own Web usage, but a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project says that the most popular Web activity for Americans is email, followed closely by searching. The two lessons you should take from these findings are:

1. It makes sense to do email marketing, and
2. It makes sense to do search marketing.

After all, both online channels are perfect ways to meet customers in their natural online habitats.

But there’s a way to make your search and your email work even better. How? Use them together. Here are three suggestions as to how to do it.

1. Use Search to Make Your Email Smarter
To get a strong response to your email blasts, you need to use just the right words and just the right message. This will make your customers want to read your email and respond to it. A good place to start looking for the right kind of language is in your Sponsored Search campaigns:

• Use your best-performing search keywords within your email subject line and body copy.
• Use your best-performing search creatives as the core of your email subject lines.
• Use your best-converting search landing pages as the model for your email body and your email landing pages.

Think about it: If certain words, messages and concepts drive searchers to convert via search, then those same words, messages and concepts should resonate with similarly minded shoppers within email. So it follows that if you want to learn how to sell to your email customers, you should ask your search customers.

2. Use Email to Make Your Search Work Better
People who have signed up to your email lists are, without a doubt, great examples of who your target customers are. After all, they’ve explicitly asked you to keep in touch with them. So if you understand your email subscribers’ online behaviors, you can read the mind of your target market.

Think about the types of wording, messages, email body and landing pages those target customers respond to best, and you can get clues as to what types of keywords, ad copy and landing pages will best capture the attention (and conversions) of people like them as they use search.

And, of course, look at the keywords, ad copy and landing pages that drove those email sign-ups to begin with: They’ve clearly worked!

3. Bringing it Together
For this last point, allow me to provide a simple example:

Consider a shopper who’s bought a specific brand of pants (let’s say, Acme Pants). She’s very happy with that brand, and the next time she wants to buy a new pair of pants, she searches for “Acme Pants,” clicks on a Sponsored Search ad, and buys the item.

That’s a Sponsored Search click that’s led to a sale—and so, arguably, that’s search spend well spent.

But here’s an even better scenario: The same shopper signs up to an Acme Pants email list. The next time she needs a pair of pants, she doesn’t search at all—and so she doesn’t create any search click costs for Acme. Instead, she arrives at the Acme Pants site via the Acme email, and buys a new pair of pants directly from the manufacturer.

The moral of this tale? Use Sponsored Search to acquire new customers. Then once you have those customers in your database, help them bypass the search engines by putting them on your email lists. Offer a clear “email signup” link throughout your site, and suggest that shoppers sign up to your email list as part of the checkout process.

You can invest the money you’ll save into getting even more customers via Sponsored Search.

Looking for more ideas on combining email with search? I’d suggest searching for them—and then emailing a friend about what you find.

— Abe Mezrich, Communications Manager, Didit

Turning Up (or Down) the Volume

How much traffic do you really want, and can your budget afford it?

Before iPods enabled teens to retreat into their music at any volume they like without disrupting the rest of the household, parents employed a three-word mantra that both parties quickly grew tired of: “Turn it down!” It’s a generational power struggle that probably echoed the world over.

As adults, our musical tastes may have changed, but at least we now get to decide just how high or low to set the volume—and not just for our favorite tunes. Within your Yahoo! Sponsored Search account, your account specifications can influence the volume of traffic you receive on your keywords.

But here, “cranking it up” is not always the best idea. High-volume keywords are often expensive, but low-volume “tail” keywords may not provide the results you seek. Most advertisers seem to prefer a mixture of the two. To take full advantage of their benefits, it’s important to know when and why to use both types.

Should You “Turn it up to 11″?
High-volume keywords have the advantage of being heavily searched on by users, and that can potentially drive a lot of traffic to your site. Of course, since they’re so popular, the competition for these keywords can be fierce, resulting in a very competitive marketplace and higher prices. If you’re not careful, a handful of clicks on a high-volume keyword can deplete your budget—without resulting in any actual orders from your site.

Low-volume keywords often can provide a lot more “bang for the buck.” They can not only stretch your budget, they potentially enable you to better represent the breadth of your product offerings. For example, if you sell appliances, a keyword like “appliances” may be highly sought after and fairly pricey. On the other hand, keywords based on the type of appliances you sell are likely to be less expensive and far more descriptive, which should get you more targeted traffic. Additionally, while a keyword like “appliances” may be so costly that it eats up a good portion of your budget, lower-volume, less-expensive keywords can drive more targeted traffic to your site at a lower cost.

Monitor Performance on Both Types
Of course this doesn’t mean that you should never include high-volume keywords in your account, but rather that you should keep a close eye on those keywords to make sure they’re working for you, rather than against you:

• Determine how much clicks are actually worth to you, by carefully gauging your ROI for those keywords.
• Monitor your bids for those keywords, so that they don’t eat through your budget too quickly.
• If you find that your high-volume keywords are costing too much or aren’t generating enough quality traffic for you, try lowering your bids.

Consider separating high- and low-volume keywords into their own (thematically relevant) ad groups. Since higher-volume keywords generally have a bigger impact on your ad quality, mixing them in with your lower-volume keywords may bring down the overall performance of the ad groups they share.

Additionally, with high-volume keywords in their own ad groups, it’s easier to create more targeted titles and descriptions that will be highly relevant to the keywords. Conversely, grouping lower-volume keywords in their own ad groups makes it easier to create “catch all” titles and descriptions that use keyword insertion and alt text to make each creative specific to the keyword. Finally, separating high- and low-volume keywords into their own specific, thematically relevant ad groups will make it easier to tell which ads and keywords are performing well, and which aren’t.

Remember, there’s no “wrong” type of keyword for any given account. Rather, it’s all about how you manage your account. Keep a close eye on your high- and low-volume keywords, make adjustments when necessary, and you should get the traffic you need and results you want. You have the freedom to adjust your keywords as you see fit, and this time around Mom and Dad have no say whatsoever.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Managing the Minimum

3 strategies to help you monitor and react to bid requirements

Remember how you used to daydream in school, only to snap out of it just as you heard the last bit of information that you knew was going to be on the test?

OK, maybe that was just us. But we’re guessing that, along those lines, over the last few months you may have missed a lot of the advice we’ve offered on managing your new minimum bids.

By now, you probably have keywords with minimum bids that can change from time to time—reserve prices that reflect both the value and quality of your keyword. If you weren’t paying attention before, you may find these three strategies helpful for managing your bids.

Know Your Keywords
Pay attention to which bids are changing, and then adjust as needed. For more details, you can read our original blog post, but here are a few basic principles you should follow:

• Learn which keywords work best for your business.
• Invest in the keywords that are working for you.
• Know what you can spend on your keywords.

Watch Your Quality
You may not have much control over the level of competition in your keyword’s marketplace, but you do have control over how relevant your ads and keywords are. Good ad quality can help lower your minimum bid, plus it can also help your ads reach higher ad positions without an increase in cost-per-click. And, of course, people are more likely to click on more relevant ads. Our March 17 post on ad quality and minimum bids touched on four concepts:

• Track your ad quality through the quality index and the Ad Performance Report.
• Write better ads to make your ads more relevant to potential customers.
• Test different versions of your ads using ad optimization, so that the best-performing ads are displayed more often.
• Group relevant keywords together to increase ad group quality scores.

Use the Tools
Without being too obvious, bids that can change are trickier to keep track of than ones that never change. So we’ve created a bunch of tools that can make it easier for you to know what’s going on with your account. In April we wrote about changes to the account interface, which fall into two main categories:

• How do I know when my minimum bids are changing? This information is plastered all over your account, from alerts on your dashboard to status columns on every keyword page.
• What should I do about my bids? We’ve added a number of ways to help you adjust your bids, including quick links from the status columns and bulk bidding tools that can set several bids at once.

We hope this helps you catch up. If only your ninth-grade Biology teacher had been as understanding.

— The Team

Photo courtesy ~romana~ on Flickr.

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