However, once upon a time, early in my search marketing career, that the thought of the holiday season filled me with dread. Midnight copy changes, last minute inventory issues, missed opportunities and those holiday-focused keywords that never quite perform. As an SEM, holiday can be as nerve-shredding as it can be jolly.

So what can we as retail search marketers do to ensure a pain-free, highly profitable holiday?

Luckily for you we’ve been making a list — one that you should definitely check twice. Do that, and you’ll be in a great place to capitalize on this bountiful time of year for retail, while avoiding some of the torment that has ruined the holiday celebrations for many retail search marketers.

Without further ado, here’s what should be top of your wish list this year:

1.  Budget Plan

Holiday, for most retailers, is the highest demand period of the year. It’s when sales (and searches) are at their peak. To take advantage of that, we need to ensure we have enough budget set aside to meet that demand.

Running out of budget, or having to limit traffic on high performing keywords during peak periods, is a fast track onto your company’s naughty list.

Properly set expectations with key stakeholders early, and make those budget requests well ahead of time. That way, you will set yourself up to fully capitalize on all the great traffic out there during the final quarter of the year.

As well as considering your overall budget, it’s important you look at your campaign flighting schedule.

Demand is far from even during the holiday period, so look at last year’s peak demand weeks/days and figure out how you’ll invest your funds, and adjust budget caps, bids and targets accordingly.

2.  Mobile Strategy

Mobile commerce hit record numbers last year, recording an annual growth of 143% and annual sales of $3.4 billion*.  Holiday was the undisputed star of the show, with a staggering 550%  increase in sales over the previous year**.

But what about mobile search? Well, the good news for us is that mobile search is also growing – and fast. Holiday 2010 recorded a 300% increase in shopping related searches on mobile devices year-over-year.

What do all these impressive stats mean? Simply put, people are using their phones to do more  searches, and are then making more purchases. If you don’t have a presence in the mobile search space, you will miss out on sales.

Ideally, you’ll be sending all this great traffic to a mobile optimized site (if you don’t have one, you’re kind of falling behind). The good news is, even if you don’t have a mobile-optimized site, lower CPC and competition levels mean you can probably still play profitably in that space.

At a minimum, you should look to have robust coverage on your brand terms, key category terms and top products to ensure you’re taking advantage of mobile demand during holiday.

Also, don’t forget to take advantage of mobile sitelinks. They provide an additional opportunity to promote your holiday offers, seasonal ranges and increase conversion rates by driving users to deeper level pages.

Tablets of course are a different proposition. The user experience on a tablet is far more akin to desktop than it is to a smartphone.  Conversion rates are, in our experience, at least equal to desktop and often higher; plus, tablets typically have higher AOVs.

We recommend funding separate tablet campaigns within your search accounts, and setting aside budget to ensure you can take advantage of this high performing device.

3.  A Promotion A Day

OK. So you don’t literally need a promotion a day. This isn’t an advent calendar. What I’m talking about here is having a promotion running for at least all the key shopping days during holiday – Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday and Free Shipping Day.

People expect offers on these days, and retailers that don’t serve offers up will lose sales to those that do. That’s a fact. Even if you’re not a promotional retailer – this is the one time you need to break that rule. You won’t tarnish your premium image by featuring promos on these dates, but you will thrill your customers.

If you are adverse to outright promotions– free shipping is still one of the most incentivizing offers around, particularly in the paid search space.

4.  Holistic Approach

Savvy retailers know shoppers often go online to research and price compare, with the intention of making their purchase offline. Therefore, work with all teams to drive shoppers online presence with the purpose of driving brick and mortar sales. If you fail to make the online-to-offline connection with your users, they will go and shop with a brand that does.

Desktop and mobile search are increasingly being used with local intent. We’ve talked about the growth of mCommerce sales online, but it’s important to  recognize (and have key stakeholders in your company recognize) that there’s significant offline value to being found in mobile search.

In addition to considering both the online and offline benefits of paid search, brands need to think holistically about the online consumer journey during holiday, and the need to be visible across multiple channels.

a)  Social

Increasingly, consumers are heading to social sites like Facebook and Twitter to look for deals (both online and offline) from their favorite retailers. A recent eMarketer survey found that more than half the visitors to brand pages/news feeds go there to keep up-to-date on sales and promotions.

So when you are having those Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers, be sure to message them in your social media profiles, too. Consider paid mediums like Facebook Marketplace Ads or Twitter Sponsored Tweets to further spread the word.

b)  Consumer Shopping Engines

With the recent economic woes, consumers are more cost conscious when going through the purchase process. During December 2010, the commerce site with the greatest YoY growth in visitors was Yahoo Shopping (beating out Amazon and a host of other major retailers). Take advantage of this trend and make sure your brand has a presence on major CSEs like Yahoo Shopping, Google Product Search and Nextag.

c)  Local Listings

Local search is another channel that retailers with a brick and mortar presence need to pay close attention to. If a user can’t find your physical store location, or the details around that location are wrong (address, phone number, etc), the odds they’ll go elsewhere are pretty high. Especially during holiday, when shopping time is of the essence and competition for consumer dollars is at its peak.

5.  Early Start…Late Finish

Consumers are increasingly falling into two distinct camps when it comes to the timing of holiday shopping – those who do it early, and those who wait until the very (very) last minute.

Those in the latter camp are increasing significantly YoY. In fact, by far the biggest growth in sales YoY last holiday was observed on December 17 – Free Shipping Day (+61% over 2009).

Consumers have come to expect stronger promotions late in the season, and even later “final shipping” dates from their favorite retailers. Both these features encourage this strong finish to the season. Retailers who don’t offer these things will undoubtedly lose these late season sales to competitors who do.

Google research tells us 71 percent of consumers start holiday researching/shopping on or before October 5^th, with 49 percent having already made a purchase by that date***.

For retailers, that means you need to start that holiday ramp-up early – as early as today. Don’t wait until the start of November, or you’ll already have missed the boat. And trust me, you don’t need that extra stress this time of year.

* ABI Research ** Foresee Results *** Google/OTX  Holiday shopping survey, comScore July 2011, State of economy

It’s true that Google doesn’t strike gold every time it releases something new into the wild (Google Radio Ads, anyone?) but when it comes to tools for optimizing your AdWords campaigns, they normally get things pretty dead-on.

Here are three of my favorite AdWords tools for retailers, along with some hints and tips on how to leverage them for your campaigns.

Conversion Optimizer

Paid search bid tools have been the topic of hot debate over the years. When they first started coming out, they were hailed as the savior of search marketers everywhere, promising to save hours of campaign management time and increase efficiencies many times over.

Later, when Google introduced “Quality Score” into its paid search algorithm – and bidding was no longer just a simple case of getting $0.01 above the next guy – people declared bid tools were dead.  This new “opaque” landscape was too complex for the tools…there were too many variables.

Well, this has proven not to be the case. Paid bid tools like Marin, Kenshoo and DoubleClick are being used to great effect by search marketers around the globe. However, there’s a free bid tool out there that’s also very powerful, and is contained right within the AdWords interface – Conversion Optimizer.

Conversion Optimizer is very easy to use. You simply go into your campaign settings, select edit bidding option, select the radio button next to “Focus on Conversions”, then whether you’d like to use a max CPA or an average CPA (think keyword vs. portfolio bidding here).

Within the UI, you will then notice your bid amount is now at ad group level, not keyword, and it’s your CPA you’re inputting, not your CPC. Once this is done, the system will then start auto-optimizing all ad groups within that campaign to hit that goal.

One thing to keep in mind here is that you must have recorded 15 conversions in that campaign over the last 30 days to be eligible for Conversion Optimizer (that’s the minimum amount of data required to make bidding decisions in the system)

What makes Conversion Optimizer different from other bid tools? Aside from being free? Well, it’s the depth of data available.

In addition to historic CPC, position, cost, orders, revenue and all that other good “surface” data, Conversion Optimizer has access to additional data points like user location, user search history, actual search query used (vs. just the triggering keyword), and whether the search is being done on Google.com or a partner site.

All this data helps the system make more educated decisions, and further reduce that cost per sale.

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE)

Continuous testing is one of the most important aspects of paid search management. Ad copy, landing pages, bids, budgets, ad positions, match types–you can test almost anything within your campaigns. However, the flipside to this great breadth of testing opportunity is that you can easily find yourself drowning in data and overloaded with variables.

So, with this in mind, how can you keep tests manageable, valid, and really measure the impact your changes are having on your results? The answer is AdWords Campaign Experiments, or “ACE”, as the kids are calling it.

This handy little tool can be used to split test ad copy, landing pages, identify the most profitable positions for keywords, and more.  It does this by splitting the number of impressions and clicks that go through a “Control” group, versus an “Experiment” group. No need for separate ad groups, moving keywords around, or any of the other nonsense.

Initiating an ACE test is actually quite simple. Start by clicking the Settings tab in the desired campaign, scroll down to Advanced settings and click the + Specify experiment settings button to name your experiment.

Then, select the desired traffic split between control and experiment, and set desired start and end dates or start manually.

To add keywords to the experiment, under the Keywords tab click Add Keywords enter keywords as you normally would, though check the Add as experiment only keywords box at the bottom of the page and save.

To adjust bids and compare results, simply click the Segment drop-down and then Experiment.

ACE testing gives marketers the ability to conduct highly valuable, statistically relevant A/B testing with accurate and easily accessible results. Like the Conversion Optimizer, ACE testing is also free and, if you’re lucky, your Google account team will aid you in identifying prime testing candidates.

Use ACE testing to identify the most profitable positions for KW’s, highest converting landing pages, optimal ad copy elements and more.

Google Insights For Search

For forecasting, trend analysis and competitive insights, Google Insights for Search is just a great tool. Its core function is comparing search volume patterns over time. You can compare up to five keywords at a time, and see how their search popularity has trended – all the way back to 2004.

Some key questions Google Insights can help with include:

• Is my offline or online display marketing effective? If searches for your brand terms rise while you’re investing, chances are that marketing campaign is the catalyst. If they don’t, perhaps you need to adjust your strategy.
• Am I making market share gains on my competitors, or am I falling behind? Search volumes are a great way to assess brand demand and popularity. Comparing your own brand search demand to your closest competitors will provide context to results, and alert you to trending competitors in your space.
• How much budget do I need to allocate to my non-brand campaigns during the next quarter? Knowing whether search demand goes up, down or stays consistent in the coming months can be a great budget and forecasting tool. The below graph shows that demand for laptops is highest during back to school and holiday, but that May/June are also key research periods.
• Why are clicks or conversions up/down within a certain category in my AdWords account? This could of course be down to a number of reasons, but if you haven’t changed your site or pricing, then a seasonal or market-wide drop in search demand could be to blame. Our laptops example below shows that search demand for laptop computers is down in 2011 vs. 2009 and 2010, which could explain a decline in recent performance on that group of terms.

Arming yourself with this knowledge will help you not only optimize your campaigns, forecast traffic, sales and spend volumes, but it’ll also be a huge help when you (or your boss!) are looking for answers when a certain category within your AdWords account is trending a certain direction.

If you haven’t tried the above tools, I’d recommend starting now. Once you do, you might just find they become a staple in your campaign management strategy.