'Tis the season to increase bids?

[Tonearm]

Is it pretty standard practice to increase your AdWords bids around this time of year in the retail industry?

[King_Fisher]

Depends upon your niche. If your site has products or services that are applicable to the holidays season you will probably have to up your spend.

As other sites start to increase their budget you will have to increase yours
to keep from sliding down the listings...KF

[BDuns]

I know I'm gonna...mostly because I expect others to do the same.

...funny thing is, we're all probably doing it just because we all expect the other to do it.

[vincevincevince]

It's important to focus on a budget increase at this time of the year. Bid increases should be limited to just those required to exhaust your budget. Focus on hot gift-class items wherever possible and hook in buyers with your one or two market-leading prices only to recoup on cross-selling other items.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

There was an Inside AdWords blog post earlier this month on a similar subject, that may be of interest to you - written by Google’s Chief Economist.

If you're interested, just go to the blog and search for the subject line of 'Clicks Conversions and Christmas'

AWA

[Khensu]

Yes it is totally the season to increase your bids.

I think it starts around 11/15.

I'm a publisher ;)

[edited by: Khensu at 3:47 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2007]

[potentialgeek]

ASA can't link to the G blog, but I think I can!

You must see the spending+clicks chart:

[adwords.blogspot.com...]

This should answer your question.

p/g

[PPC_Chris]

If you have found that your pages convert better during this season, then yes.

[mike_ppc]

Nice article. A more recent one would be even better!

[fordo23]

I’d like to comment you don’t necessarily need to increase your bid but your budget -maybe. Another potential strategy is to outlast the competitors in terms of budget. Use the impression share report to see if you’ve got enough in your pot. If you outlast your competitors, your CTR will stay up or even increase, hence your CPC will stay down overall. This strategy provides the opportunity to capitalise on greater profit if you keep your cpc costs lower on higher conversion rate.