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Tips for Online Retailers: Preparing for the Holiday Season

The year has just started, but it is time to start planning and thinking about the holidays. And what better way to start planning than by looking back at what happened last year.

Oneupweb.com has an interesting study called Holiday Online Retail Buying Trends: A Study of the Consumer Behavior Online that looks at the traffic, conversion rates and sales during the 14-weeks holiday season. It provides an analysis on effective pay per click campaigns, and offers strategic bidding advice in preparation for the holidays.

The study offers a number of interesting insights on the holiday online selling trends and traffic, including the period where sales and conversion start rising as a signal of the start of the holiday season and online holiday shopping peaks. The study also finds that a pre-Thanksgiving dip in traffic and sales occurs as well as the impact of last-minute shoppers on the week before Christmas.

Their findings include:

1. Be ready by Halloween.
2. Back-to-school triggers testing.
3. Protect peak season opportunities, e.g., develop bid strategies with higher conversion rates in mind (to offset seasonally high keyword prices), and develop inventory strategies.
4. Prolong the season with e-cards.
5. Use milestones to predict peak volumes, e.g., multiply Halloween levels by four or double levels two weeks prior to Thanksgiving to estimate peak volumes .

Read the study Holiday Online Retail Buying Trends: A Study of the Consumer Behavior Online