‘Tis the season to optimize search bidding

If you manage paid search marketing and your business is retail, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas probably don’t give you much time for sober reflection. Retail is intensely seasonal, and that is as true online as it is in stores. Search engine marketers generally understand the pattern, but they vary widely in how they choose to respond to it. One response is simply to ride the season out — to assume that competition among retailers will intensify during the holidays, driving everyone’s paid search bids higher, but that otherwise competitive patterns won’t deviate much from non-holiday conditions. This approach assumes that during the holidays, and other key buying seasons, the crucial difference is one of volume. Defending an established search market share will get more expensive, but other changes in the market dynamic will even out over the course of the year.