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Clark Barry is VP of Operations for TrafficLeader, a Eugene, OR-based provider of search marketing services and a subsidiary of Marchex, Inc. You can reach him at clark@trafficleader.com.

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‘Tis the Season for Search: How to Stay SEM-Focused and Successful During the Holidays

Written on
November 2nd 2006
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by Clark Barry  |
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During the frenetic weeks leading up to the end-of-year holiday shopping season, it is no secret that companies all over the land tend to ratchet up their marketing budgets, including funds allocated for search marketing.

And there’s good reason: JupiterResearch predicts in an October report that online holiday retail sales in 2006 will grow to $32 billion, with a projected 114 million users buying online during this holiday season. As the holidays approach, there are a number of important things to keep in mind to ensure that your organization is using its time and budgetary resources in the most efficient and results-focused ways possible.

Look Beyond the ‘Traditional:’
Search marketing during the holiday season has historically seen companies focus largely on bid management and pay-per-click advertising via major networks, such as Yahoo!, Google and MSN. While these networks are very effective, there are a number of other established avenues that can offer a highly targeted complement to working with the major networks. These include:

Shopping Search: Dozens of shopping search services are now in—place, focused squarely on matching online retailers and merchants with consumers who have an interest in buying their products or services. These include such entities as Yahoo! Shopping, MSN Shopping, Froogle, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, NexTag, and Shopzilla, among many others. As with traditional search engines and networks, each has its own set of specifications and requirements for merchants who want to be included in their respective search results. Because many of these entities are newer to the scene, you can often find targeted bid prices that might be surprisingly attractive.

Organic Search Results: While much attention has rightly been devoted to securing optimal placements via the paid sections of search results, it is also important to ensure that your site is optimized to appear in relevant organic search results, as well. Search engine optimization remains an exercise worth undertaking for most online merchants, as it will provide a way for you to assess if your site is as relevant to organic results as you think, along with suggested steps to improve on this front.

Meanwhile, paid inclusion provides a way for major online retailers with thousands of product pages to ensure that —all- of their product and service pages are included in the consideration sets of algorithmic search engines like Yahoo! As a relevance-based process, paid inclusion cannot guarantee placement, but it will ensure that your products are in the consideration set.



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