How are you alocating budget for holiday season PPC spending?

[skuba]

How are you doing to estimate cost of PPC for this holiday season, nov and dec?

multiplying by 4 the spend of october? What kind of increase in conversion rates you expecting?

Thanks

[SFReader]

That depends a lot on the nature of your product. My industry's business is way down during the holidays and I budget less.

[skuba]

Yes, my bad. I forgot to mention, these are for industies where there is holiday shopping, retail in my case. And more specifically apparel.

[toddb]

By 4 would be super! If we are lucky, we double Sept.

[skuba]

we are estimating that Nov will be 2x October, and Dec will be 3.5x November..

I am thinking it's too much, not realistic...

Anybody has historical data?

And I am talkign about sales coming from PPC programs

[toddb]

Yeah, you are way off. My number above is based on several years with adwords in retail. The good news is January is big too.

[NoLimits]

The good news is January is big too.

I attribute this solely to my birthday being in the month of January :p

[skuba]

toddb, are you in apparel? is your retail item a giftable item?

We have historical data for TOTAL SALES, but not for search PPC program..

for total sales, we did get in Nov 04 70% more sales than Octobet 04, and in December 04 250% more sales than Oct 04 (or 2 times Nov 04)

So I don't think we are that much off taking in consideration TOTAL SALES, but maybe for search PPC programs.

How much are you estimating conversion rate will increase...

Let's say your October revenue share was 30%, do you think it would go down to 15%?

[toddb]

More broad based then that. Our conversion is about the same. Just more cost and more sales. Sorry, I am amazed you get that huge of a swing. straight apperal must be brutal.

[skibum]

Usually hold CPCs flat, will let the budget go as high as it will go and sales increase along with the budget.

If anything, some tweaks in the creative are made and this can help to offset other advertisers raising their bid prices.

Last year January was phenomenal and, IMHO, can be an even better time to be aggressive when bidding since it seems many other advertisers are pulling back or have spent so much in December that they have to cut back in January.

[shorebreak]

So far I'm seeing October 15% bigger than Q3, and expect Nov & Dec to be 1.15X October. This is general ppc, not any one vertical.