This is our first post in the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series to help you get ready for the 2015 holiday shopping season—a critical time for online marketers and retailers. Last year, consumers spent $616.1 billion on retail purchases during November and December1. As you might know from Google’s 5 Holiday Shopping Trends to Watch in 2015, 40 percent of that spend was made online.

In fact, 2014 was the most-connected holiday shopping season we’ve ever seen. Shoppers spent an unprecedented amount of time researching and buying online:

  • 78% used the internet for holiday research vs. 29% relied on friends, relatives, or colleagues (down from 2013)2.
  • 40% of holiday shopping was online2.
  • 53% of those who shopped online used smartphones or tablets, up from 41% the previous year3.

For you, this represents a huge opportunity to reach shoppers, either while they're still researching or when they're actually ready to buy. To help you capture this opportunity, we’ve created the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays that walks through five key steps for holiday success. Today, we’ll address the first step: Preparation.

  • First, unify your data for insights and action. Effective tagging will help track your success during the holidays.
  • Your labels are important, too. Track your holiday promotions, and make them easy to identify in reports by assigning labels to your seasonal campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords.
  • Finally, don’t neglect offline data integration. Often, conversions start online and finish offline. Use the DoubleClick Search conversions API to report on and optimize conversions from external data, including call-tracking and in-store transactions.

In our next post, we’ll talk about automation. Learn more about all five steps in the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Register now for a webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Posted by Nick Macrae
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search
1 National Retail Federation, “Retail Holiday Sales Increase 4 Percent,” January 14, 2015.
2 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,500.
3 Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,167, January 2014, n = 1,077.