Ecommerce companies know this to be true, but it bears repeating: the holiday season will be on top of you before you know it, and it’s time to start getting your Q4 plan ready.
There are many reports and analysis you can pull and put together to develop our Q4 plan. Use the summer’s relative slowness to audit your accounts to see if there is anything to improve before the busy season comes. In this post, I’ll walk through five SEO reports that can help set a plan for Q4:
- YoY (Year-over-Year) Comparison
- Search Query Report
- Impression Share
- Top Products/Top Movers
- Optiscore
YoY comparison
For many ecommerce[1] companies, the holiday season brings higher volume and spend to your paid media[2] efforts. It’s important to allocate enough budget to keep up with demand on the high-volume days, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, etc. The first report I pull to start serious holiday prep is a YoY comparison by day for 2017 to 2018 to see what campaigns and dates were the most successful.
It’s never apples to apples, of course; last year, you might have tested a new campaign or strategy that wasn’t tested in 2017, allocated spend across a different number of channels, etc.
Questions that you want to consider with this pull are:
- What did performance look like on high-volume days?
- Could you have spent more to get more return?
- What was the makeup of search, display, and shopping campaigns?
- Should you use your marketing dollars differently this year?
- Did you have holiday-specific keywords, products, campaigns, etc., that need to be reactivated this year?