A Bar­be­cue Brit­ish Sum­mer — Per­haps Not!

I’ve been away for the last couple of weeks or so on a “Stayc­a­tion” and des­pite get­ting all excited about a “Bar­be­cue Sum­mer” as prom­ised by those bods at the Met Office before I went; the Brit­ish Sum­mer once again did not fail to dis­ap­point in its per­form­ance when it came to the weather.

So much for all this global warm­ing they keep banging on about!

Yes folks, Sum­mer is now over! So it’s back to to the grind­stone for the long haul up to Christ­mas, which incid­ent­ally is only 110 days away in case you’re counting!

Pre­pare Yourself

Christ­mas — 110 Days and Counting

Christ­mas for many online retail­ers is one of, if not the biggest; rev­enue gen­er­at­ing event of the year with the sales run-up start­ing in Novem­ber for many.

Last year in the UK £4.67 Bil­lion was spent online dur­ing Decem­ber with £102 Mil­lion of that being spent on Christ­mas Day itself. (Source: <a href=“javascript:openNewWindow(‘http://www.imrg.org/8025741F0065E9B8/(httpPages)/FAE5B4EDA9020E448025744F0038D60B?OpenDocument” ‚%20″)” target=“_blank”>IMRG Cap­gem­ini e-Retail Sales Index). Both val­ues are expec­ted to be sig­ni­fic­antly higher this year as more shop­pers, still bruised by the credit crunch, are expec­ted to turn to the web in their search to stretch out their Christ­mas budgets.

So if you’re an online retailer, are you pre­pared for the forth­com­ing money mak­ing months? If not, you should start to pre­pare now.

If you run a Google Adwords cam­paign to help pro­mote your e-commerce site:, here’s some top-tips from the team at the Google Retail Blog that will help you get ready for increased sales.

• Tar­get key age and gender demo­graph­ics with unique Christ­mas related ad texts, keywords & land­ing pages.
• Launch your cam­paigns early (per­haps late Octo­ber) to meet increased search traffic by mid-November and don’t for­get the last minute shop­pers, those who shop on Christ­mas Day and those look­ing for post-Christmas sale bargains.
• Add both branded & non-branded keywords.
• Use Google insights for search to invest­ig­ate your own product cat­egor­ies to see what search­ers are inter­ested in.
• Expand keyword lists using the Search-Based Keyword Tool.
• Use the Google Con­tent Net­work to reach your tar­get demo­graphic and com­ple­ment your search campaigns.
• Con­sider pla­cing your Con­tent ads on com­ple­ment­ary sites; remem­ber to tar­get gifts for women on men’s sites and vice versa.
• Use Dis­play Ad Builder to eas­ily cre­ate image ads.
• Set appro­pri­ate CPCs and com­pet­it­ive budgets to anti­cip­ate increased traffic

Good luck and happy Christmas!

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