Are you ready and prepared for the holidays? Is your agency well aware of the key days for shopping and already preparing your season specific ads to boost your sales? Here are some tips to get ready and succeed this holiday season.

Key Online Shopping Days

Know the key dates for 2014 holiday shopping:

Image of holiday dates

Review Last Year’s Holiday Performance

You’ll want to start your plan by first reviewing 2013 performance and apply what you learned to your 2014 plan.

During your analysis you’ll want to review:

  • Day parting
  • Key Days Traffic and Spend
  • Ad Copy Test Review
  • Promotions
  • Ad Extension performance

What Promotions Are Running and When

After reviewing last year’s performance, there should be an idea of what worked well and what didn’t work. Collaborate with your agency to create a promotional calendar for the season and make sure you know what promotions are running, when they start and for how long they will run.

Read more in the full white paper: How to Keep Your Agency on Top of Holiday Ecommerce Planning

What’s Your Budget?

You may have a predetermined budget for the holiday season or you could use your findings from last year to help determine a budget for the upcoming year. Keep in mind that the holiday season is a marathon and not a sprint. Be sure to have extra funds set aside for days that are the most profitable and use day parting to pull back on the days and hour of the days that are less profitable to help balance the budget.

Put It On The Calendar

You’ve done your research, you know your key dates, you have your promo schedule, you’ve set and determined your budget, now – PUT IT IN WRITING! Or at least on your calendar, shared file or project management program. Using a filing sharing system like Google Docs and Outlook etc, that can help keep one place for everyone to review and set reminders for key days is important. Meet with your team and make sure everyone involved knows their part in the big show and when things are due.