For a year that started with fears of a 10% unemployment rate, things seemed to end on an up note.

The economy seemed to improve, digital marketing rebounded nicely after a few shaky years (roughly 15% growth according to comScore), and heck, Bing managed to not go bankrupt and even gained a point or two of marketshare – all-in-all, 2011 shaped up to be an alright for many retailers.

Unfortunately, the early projections for 2012 don’t look quite as rosy. Just this week, the National Retail Federation released its numbers projecting U.S. retail sales should rise 3.4 percent this year, down from an increase of 4.7 percent in 2011.

Given the terrible economy of the last few years, any growth is good growth, but slowing retail demand makes all of our jobs harder. But this is by no means a death sentence for 2012, and by focusing in three key areas – evaluation, improvement, and testing – we can not only survive, but grow our business in the coming year.

Take The Time To Really Evaluate 2011

This is probably the most boring, unsexy part of our jobs, but in order for 2012 to be better than 2011, we have to truly evaluate what worked and what didn’t work last year.

Look at your normal metrics like revenue and ROI, but take things a step further and look at secondary and tertiary metrics like new customer acquisition or the influence search had on email signups, or even the interaction of each of your marketing channels.

Only after you have truly evaluated what worked and what didn’t work in 2011 can you determine your approach for 2012.

Trash What Worked

Take your best, most effective channel from 2011 and trash it. I don’t mean that literally – if you just hit “delete” on your Adwords account, you jumped the gun just a bit – but theory goes something like this:  When things are broken, you have to rush to fix them just to get them up to the status quo.

But once things are in a good spot, people tend to be complacent and stop working to improve them (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it right?).

Unfortunately, complacency inevitably leads to things not working as well as they should, and the cycle repeats itself. So instead, take your best channel and challenge yourself to change it, think about it differently, revamp it, and improve it.

It is always easier to improve things when they are working and there is no stress than when things are broken and you are stressing just to get your head above water.

January Is More Important Than December

It is exponentially easier to affect your annual numbers in January than it is in December. This one seems like common sense but an incredible number of marketers hold back their budgets, testing ideas, etc. until it is late in the year and they realize they are short of their goals.

This leaves them with only a few weeks to try to find new tactics, test them, and implement them – and since you are so late in the year every test must work or you risk missing goal.

Instead, front-load your budgets a bit and test early in the year. This will do two things: 1) you will quickly learn the effect each tactic has on your business (meaning you will know which new tactics work and which don’t) and 2) you will be able to more accurately project results for the rest of the year. In the end, you are left with more accurate projections and a list of proven tactics you can implement whenever you need.

Ultimately, there is no silver bullet that will magically make 2012 better than 2011 and there are a ton of outside factors that will ultimately determine the economic climate for 2012 (on the downside, escalating tensions with Iran, but on the upside, what if Europe solved their debt crisis – wouldn’t that be nice?).

But if you prepare for 2012 to be a slower year and you take the proper steps to strengthen your campaigns, you should be able to do much more in 2012 despite less retail demand.

Our entire agency, all five of us, stopped working and had a glass of champagne together to celebrate. This was big money to us. But even bigger, it was a sign a client saw an opportunity to grow and trusted us to make that growth happen. Amazing no matter what way you look at it.

Ten years later, the budgets and the agency are a bit bigger, but I always get that same feeling when a client gives us incremental money and tells us to get aggressive.

Unfortunately, I have also been on the other side of things – looking back on the holiday season from mid-January realizing our holiday season could have been exponentially better had we been more aggressive and worked to get every last conversion possible.

It’s a terrible feeling and what’s worse is it takes nine months to go away. While avoiding that feeling isn’t 100 percent avoidable, there are clear steps you can take to make that feeling a rare occasion.

There is a long list of things you can do to make your holiday campaigns a success, but there are three key things you must do to not only make your campaigns successful, but make them the most successful possible: plan ahead, fail quickly, and be flexible.

Plan Ahead

It sounds like such a trite piece of advice to give. I mean who doesn’t plan ahead for holiday season? While I agree most folks plan ahead for holiday, I would also say most folks under-plan.

For example, many people take an approach something along the lines of looking at what their overall sales goal is for this year, compare it to what they did last year, and increase their budget this year enough to hit their goal.

If you need to grow by 20% this year, you see you spent $100 last year, so your budget this year is $120.  A little oversimplified, but you get the point.

However, the crucial piece most people leave out is they don’t take into account what they could have spent last year. So while you spent $100, was the actual market demand $110? If so, then not only did you leave money on the table last year, but you likely will this year as well.

To help prevent this from happening, there are some very tactical pieces you can implement (note: these will vary based on your individual business, but they are a great place to start):

• Give your branded terms on exact match an unlimited budget. This way, if market demand grows because you were featured on the Today Show or Toys ‘R Us says you are the toy of the season, you are already prepared for the influx of traffic. Plus, the impression and click data you get will give you a way to track market demand and brand growth.
• Use a combination of additional match types and the Search Query Report (SQR) to funnel qualified traffic to your exact match campaign. In other words, run broader match types, then sort through your SQR. Anytime you see a word converting insert it into your exact match campaign – which should give you the same word at a cheaper CPC, allow you to write more specific creative, raise your Quality Score, and thus improve your bottom line.
• Be able to answer the question: if I had 20% more budget to spend, where would I spend it? This sounds a bit idealistic, but when you force yourself to over-allocate budget, you also force yourself to look for new opportunities (whether they are new keywords or even new channels altogether) and tend to be more open to them. If you pre-investigate your options, it will allow you to be much quicker on the draw should you run into a situation where you actually have the need to implement them.

Fail Quickly

While this has a tendency to be overused and at times sits on the verge of becoming buzz-speak more than sound advice, but when you are trying to maximize your opportunity, it must be your mantra.

No matter how good you are at planning, no matter how many quant resources you used, and no matter how many fancy degrees you have on your wall, no one is able to exactly predict what will happen (if you could, you would be a zillionaire investor, not a search marketer).

So be prepared to fail. Be prepared to have your estimates be off from what really happens. Be prepared to try some things and not have them work out. And more than anything, be accepting of your failure. The quicker you fail and the quicker you accept your failure and move on, the more quickly you will be back on track.

Far too often, folks see something happen they didn’t expect, spend a week waiting to see if it happens again, then spend two weeks analyzing to see why it happened.

In that four week time frame, you could miss Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday and whatever other special day they invent this year. Don’t get me wrong, do your due diligence to figure out what happened, but also know failure happens – and failure is a good thing as long as you quickly react and truly evolve.

Be Flexible

All that said, it is ok to fail only if you have the flexibility to adapt.

It always used to amaze me when we would go to clients and say we wanted to shift money from one channel to another, or from one week to another, and the client would respond with something along the lines of “You can’t do that – you have to spend it in week A on channel Z.”

While there should be some limitations to moving money around from week to week or from channel to channel, if you don’t build a marketing infrastructure that is flexible enough to quickly adapt to market demand, you will always end up chasing the market.

One way to avoid this is to try leaving a small portion of your budget unallocated – say 10% of your spend. Then, whenever you see a channel, keyword set, etc. that is growing faster than predicted, or a new opportunity pop up, push the extra budget in that direction.

In the end, the holiday season gives us all an opportunity for great growth and great success. If we make the most of this opportunity and allow our businesses to grow at the greatest rate possible, we should all be able to sit back in January and enjoy a celebratory glass of champagne.

But if we miss the mark and leave dollars on the table because we weren’t prepared, we might be stuck sharing a bottle of Boone’s Farm until the following October rolls around.

Photo from 4 Simple Tips to Maximize Your Champagne Experience at Wine Enthusiast. Used with permission.

While I have yet to find a solution for the surprises your boss likes to throw at you at 5 p.m. on a Friday, there is a way to eliminate some of the stress that comes with holiday search campaigns.

By simply shifting your focus to be more analytics-heavy and adjusting the way you look at your data, you can lessen your stress, better predict trends and results, and make the entire holiday season more successful.

If the idea of carving a piece of time out of your already cramped schedule to focus on analyzing data seems like mission impossible, don’t worry, it is doable. The biggest key to finding time to analyze your data is to make sure you are analyzing the right data — meaning data that will actually move your business forward.

You can and should be looking at your basic metrics every day (e.g. CTR, bids, keywords, match types, etc.). But by looking at “incremental metrics” such as clickstream, cross-channel influence, time lag between first click and purchase, and branded impressions per day — metrics that often change during the holiday season — you can find pieces of data that might alter your marketing strategies.

For example, look at the amount of exact match impressions you get on your branded terms per day, then compare them to the exact match impressions from the previous year. Not only can this give you a good feel for the rate your brand is growing, but it will also help you better predict clicks, spend, conversion rate, revenue, etc., for the upcoming holiday season.

Once you start figuring out the data you should be analyzing, start analyzing it … as in now. It may sound trite (especially since by now you have read 50 articles talking about how the holiday season has already started), but the earlier you begin focusing on analytics, the easier it will be to make progress.

There are two reasons for this: volume and reaction time.

While October is the unofficial beginning of the holiday season, it is rarely a month that shows huge spikes in volume, so you aren’t yet dealing with the enormous influx of data that comes in the heart of the holiday season. This allows you to more easily determine what pieces of data you want to gather and install the systems you need to properly analyze it.

The second thing to remember is reaction time. The sooner you begin gathering data, the sooner you can begin using that data to influence your campaigns.

There is no worse feeling than to look back on your holiday season and know you left money on the table or spent money you shouldn’t have. By starting early, you will be able to have an immediate impact on your campaigns and drive incremental revenue.

The final thing to keep in mind when adding an analytical focus to your holiday campaigns is that you cannot allow perfection to be a barrier to progress. Far too often in search marketing — and in digital marketing for that matter — marketers get lost in the data; if any tiny little piece doesn’t line up exactly, they don’t trust the data.

You cannot do this during the holiday season or you will miss your opportunity. For example, I think the most common occurrence is something along these lines:

• A marketer discovers a common click path prior to conversion.
• They then dig in deeper and find the click path didn’t occur as commonly last Tuesday.
• The marketer then spends a week trying to figure out why it didn’t happen last Tuesday — completely forgetting the data is valid on the other six days of the week.

While that example seems a bit silly, examples like that happen all the time — and they cannot happen during holiday season or you will miss your opportunity. So while you should always strive to make sure the data is as perfect as possible, you also have to know when enough is enough.

For the marketers that are able to find the point where they trust the data and are agile enough to adjust for it, you will be able to add efficiency to your campaigns and even gain share against your competitors.

Thinking about Excel documents and analytics instead of Christmas lights and giant piles of holiday revenue may sound boring, but the marketers who can effectively build in an analytical mindset before we get too far into the holiday season will be more successful than their counterparts.

Then, they can go back to thinking about more important things — like how to finally get out of doing the pointless task the boss drops on your desk right before you leave for the day.

As a kid, it was just mean. How could mom tease us with the idea of Christmas when it was still so far away?

I am still convinced part of it was her version of payback for everything we put her through as kids (we later learned it was so she could start figuring out how big her “stash” needed to be – the secret pot of money she was hiding from my dad so she could buy us the presents we wanted).

Although my mom’s name and the words “online marketing” have never been mentioned in the same sentence, and while April might be a little early to start thinking holiday, there is a lot retailers can learn from my mom.

By properly planning for each month of the holiday season, you can make your marketing spend last longer and be more efficient than last year.

September Search Testing

 April is probably a little too early to start planning for holiday shopping season, but September is not. While most marketers begin their holiday campaigns in October, September often closer resembles a holiday month than October.

Where October tends to see a spike in interest from consumers (research and clicks tend to outpace purchases), September is filled with the tail end of Back to School, Fashion Week, roll-out of Fall lines, and the arrival of cooler temperatures – all of which lead to consumers actually spending money. This makes September the perfect month to test new holiday strategies.

Whether you are looking at basic tests like adding sitelinks or testing new areas of non-brand keywords, or you are looking at more complicated tests like the influence display has on your search programs, testing in September will give you a more apples-to-apples comparison to holiday consumer behaviors than testing in October.

September won’t be perfect for every test (e.g. running a free shipping test might yield different results in September than in December due to few competitors running comparable offers) but for many tests, September will give you results that allow you to properly forecast the impact new tactics will have during the traditional holiday season.

October Search Spend Budgeting

If September is focused on testing, October has to be focused on budgets. Far too often, online retailers plan their search spend based on calendar months rather than on consumer behavior.

Beginning in October, as we inch closer to the holiday season, consumers begin their Holiday research and slowly, day by day, the numbers grow. Retailers should plan their budgets the same way, slightly increasing their search spends daily.

For example, if your October budget is $31, simply spending $1 per day will lead to missed opportunity. Instead, use search data to determine the rate at which customer research is increasing and align your budgets accordingly.

A basic way to determine the growth rate is to take a term you have fully funded (meaning, you believe you are always in the top position or two and you are never offline – often your trademark term) and look at both impressions and clicks from last holiday season. If you chart both of these by day, you will begin to see the rate at which consumer demand is naturally growing for your business.

Supplement this data with data from Google Trends or Hitwise and adjust the numbers to reflect outside influences like economic conditions, growth of your overall brand, etc., and you will have a relatively clear illustration for the rate at which you should adjust your daily campaign budget.

November Campaign Launch

November is for implementing. At this point, you should know the tests you want to run and you should know the amount it is going to cost you, so getting everything live as early in the month as possible is your goal.

So many retailers focus so heavily on Black Friday and the subsequent days, they completely miss out on early November – a time when consumers are beginning to buy but competition for marketers is still relatively low. This gives the early implementers a leg up on the competition.

For example, if there is a subset of keywords that are too expensive for you to bid on during the holiday season, try bid-boosting early in the holiday season.

Hyper-competitive words are typically cheaper earlier in November than later in the month, by bidding more aggressively on these terms earlier in the month you can often build your Quality Score at a cheaper rate – which will give you an advantage over retailers trying to get in the market late in the month.

December Last Minute Suprises

Hopefully, by December your campaigns are firing on all cylinders. But December is also the month where having a stash like mom did will come in most handy. No matter how much you plan, forecast, predict, etc., there are always surprises.

By building flexibility into your campaigns and by having a “stash” to fund things that are overperforming, you can ensure you don’t leave money on the table. Without flexibility and a stash, sure you can have a great holiday season, but who would say “no” to having a holiday season that is 10% better?

True, my mom might not know what Quality Score is or might not know how margin varies by product, and true, there might have been just a little bit of teasing involved in her asking about Christmas in April, but I can say there wasn’t a single Christmas where my brother, sister and I woke up, ran downstairs to the tree and didn’t end up happier than we ever could have imagined.

Maybe if more retailers learned from my mom, when January rolls around and they look back on their campaign performance, they too will be happier than they ever could have imagined.

Image from Shutterstock, used under license.

Sadly, of late, more and more retail paid search ads seem to resemble NYC apartment ads than they do search ads – and it’s costing advertisers money, clicks, and customers.

Image courtesy of Naked Apartments

Running effective paid search accounts is no easy feat. You have keywords, bids, match types, tracking, and about 50 other things to worry about. Unfortunately, creative seems to be the piece that is most often, if not most obviously, neglected.

Full disclosure: I was a journalism major in college and while that doesn’t excuse my poor writing it does allow me to criticize the writing of others – particularly in search ads. But writing effective creative is an easy and free way to improve search campaign performance.

When done well, it increases traffic, increases quality score, lowers CPC, and ultimately increases revenues, subscriptions, or whatever your end goal might be. There are three keys to writing effective search creative:

Your Goal Is Not To Get Every Click, Only Profitable Ones

It is a bit of a simple goal, but so many retail marketers tend to miss it completely. Not unlike NYC apartment brokers and their misleading ads, so many folks are caught up in trying to get as many clicks as possible, that they forget to properly qualify the traffic.

While this may lead to a higher CTR, which might look great on a report you show your boss, the reality is you are wasting marketing dollars. And for those leveraging search traffic to help fuel retargeting display media campaigns, you have no effectively wasted marketing dollars in two channels (and if we really want to go down this path, you are also clouding your demographic and geographic data too since you are flooding it with users that aren’t truly a match for your business).

Good creative can do a lot of things, but perhaps the most valuable thing it can do is prequalify each and every click you get. By simply shifting your focus from getting every click to getting every profitable click, you will not only improve your overall marketing effectiveness, but you will ultimately help you more clearly outline who your core customer might be.

In apartment broker talk, you will get more people making $100,000 a year for the lovely 3-bedroom in the East Village than those straight out of NYU students who need 10 guarantors and can only afford a split loft in Bed Stuy.

Differentiation Helps In A Super Crowded Market

Do a search for “men’s running shoes.” What do you see? Anyone stick out to you? If your answer is no, I would assume most consumers would say the same thing.

Of the 11 ads, seven have creative touting free shipping (or free ship in one case), seven have five-star ratings, six have some sort of discount above 75 percent or a price lower than $50, and there are an obnoxious seven exclamation points used. Seven! I didn’t know running shoes had that much worth yelling about.

If I was truly shopping for athletic shoes, how would I choose which is best? I suppose I would just click on all of them until I found the right one, which is bad for advertisers and consumers.

Instead of assuming your free shipping/price/catchy URL is the best thing for your creative, before you write a single piece of creative, take a good look at your competition. What is everyone saying? Can you differentiate yourself somehow? Free shipping and free returns perhaps? What about an easy, quick shopping experience?

Take a good look at what other retailers are saying, then take a good look at your own business and figure out where the differences lie. Adjusting your creative to truly differentiate yourself should more than make up for any traffic you dropped whenever you did #1 on this list.

Focus On The Value You Actually Offer Or Offer Value

Yes, this is basic. Yes, we have all heard it a million times. Yes, this is boring. But most digital retail marketers still miss this key fact.  Rather than going in promising the world just to disappoint, talk about what you truly do offer that is different or better than what people expect.

If you don’t have any value to offer (you likely have some big problems), try creating value. For example, we once worked with an athletic shoes company that gave us some creative freedom.

In an effort to create value for the consumers we ran two tests. First, we bought terms surrounding the NYC Marathon, but instead of cramming a generic marketing message and numerous exclamation points into our creative, we wrote a simple message: Good luck in the marathon from your friends at [brand name here].

We actually tried to give value (luck) to our core customers, and they responded. Click through rate was through the roof and sales, which we weren’t expecting, were strong as well. We repeated the test at various points surrounding other events, weather happenings, etc. – each time finding strong results by differentiating our message and giving our customers value.

None of the above ideas are earth shattering, nor is creative something that can single handedly solve all your problems. However, when done correctly, it can help save you money and improve campaign performance.

And if all that fails for some reason, at the very least you will be able to sleep soundly at night knowing you are better than those lying, cheating brokers that prey on the young, innocent people that are just trying to make it in the big city.

Image Courtesy of Shutterstock.com

Yes, it’s late February. And yes, resolutions are supposed to be made in late December. But as anyone that works in retail knows, December is far too busy to give anyone time to think about resolutions and January isn’t much better.

But each year, sometime around the third week in January, something magical happens in retail: things slow down. We all get a chance to catch our breath, reflect on the successes of the holiday season, and figure out what fantastic things we are going to do in the coming year to impresses our bosses enough to give us a promotion.

To make this slightly easier, we compiled a quick list of five resolutions for 2011. Feel free to steal these and claim them for your own.

1.  Effectively Execute The Basics

The sad thing about this resolution is it seems to be on the list year after year, yet many retailers still miss the mark. From bad landing pages, to misused match types, to creative that includes misspellings, these are all easy fixes that when executed effectively reduce your marketing costs, improve performance and perhaps most importantly, make it easier for you to effectively test new features.

Yes the basics can be boring, (and it can also be a real shot to your pride when someone points out your keyword insert title is allowing your brand to be misspelled in your ads) but getting the fundamentals right must be step one.

2.  Integrate Search With Other Marketing Channels

As search has continued to mature over the past decade, we have slowly gone from being the annoying two year old kid that CMOs put at the little kids’ table to the somewhat attractive, budding high school quarterback that CMOs are now happy to show off as “the future superstar.” But if we aren’t careful, we could soon become the kid who had all the talent but just never quite put it all together.

Search does not happen in a vacuum and neither do any other marketing channels. Display is a great example of this. While the exact number varies from study to study, some studies show up to 30% of people search for the brand immediately after seeing a display ad.

The better each of us becomes at evaluating the impact other channels have on search and vice versa, the more valuable search becomes as a marketing channel and the better the chance we have of living up to our potential.

3.  Hold Search Engines Accountable

2010 brought about the joining of Bing and Yahoo, arguably one of the biggest changes in our industry in a long while. And with this change came great promise and potential (I believe a whole bunch of phrases along the lines of “Google killer” or the much more mundane “true Google challenger” were used more than once).

Yet for this merger to live up to its potential, and to keep Google from becoming complacent, we must continue to challenge the engines to improve. From the little things like Yahoo/Bing giving us a consistently working desktop tool, to challenging Google to stop simply telling us to “spend more on nonbrand” even if it isn’t a good idea for our businesses.

This may sound a little idealistic/optimistic, but ultimately it is up to each of us to hold the engines accountable to improve things so that each of our businesses can be more successful in the search marketplace.

4.  Embrace Mobile Search

The running joke around our office is that despite having the mobile industry swear this was going to be the year of mobile each of the past five years or so, 2011 really is the year for mobile, we promise.

Extending your search campaigns to mobile devices is not only one of the easier things to do, but it is also something that is driving more and more revenue for our clients. Due to little competition, CPCs are significantly lower than traditional search and consumers tend to spend more per purchase as well. In one case, we saw AOV (average order value)  increase by almost 50%,  to over $1,000 for one of our luxury clients.

While I am not sure I will ever spend $1,000 on a single purchase off my phone or PC for that matter, it is happening more and more often.  Mobile search is easier to do than you think it is. You can track it separately, you can target by device type and you don’t even have to have a mobile site in order to participate.

As if all that wasn’t enough, we haven’t even started to talk about the advantages of people searching on their mobile, then heading into the store to purchase. After years of hearing it, this truly will be the year of mobile.

5.  Don’t Let Perfect Be The Enemy of Good

While Voltaire coined that phrase, I think it is more applicable to search now than at any of time in search’s history (and yes I realize how ridiculous it is to apply a Voltaire quote to search marketing, but just go with it). As search has continued to mature, it has gained much more attention (both good and bad) and we have all become more sophisticated.

But with this attention and sophistication has also seemed to come an attitude of perfection as the only possible outcome for everything we do.  Each test must be meticulously planned then subsequently picked apart. Each idea dissected for weeks before any action can take place. Each variation in numbers analyzed, reanalyzed then analyzed some more.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we don’t hold ourselves to a high standard nor am I suggesting we don’t get the details right, but far too often we tend to try to perfect things so much, that we miss the bigger opportunity. So while all of us should be challenging ourselves and our teams to get all the details right, we should also balance that with the challenge of moving everything forward as well.

Yes, we are two months (fashionably) late to talk about New Year’s resolutions, but if we can execute in each of these areas, the next 10 or so months should make 2011 more successful, more productive and more fun than 2010…and every prior year too.