With the 2008 holiday shopping season behind us, it  is important to take a look at key revenue driver’s to focus on growth next year. CyberMonday, the first Monday following Black Friday, has become one of the most influential shopping days of the year for online week retailers. By looking back at how specific affiliates and publishers performed, retailers can better allocate funds to reach a wider range of consumers. by adding and modifying ad spend and commission rates, retailers can position themselves better on publishers websites and incrementally increase sales.

The following publishers are divided into two groups based on visitor site traffic from compete.com.

FatWallet, Mahalo, & RetailMeNot

FatWallet.com, Mahalo.com, & RetailMeNot.com make up the first group of publishers analyzed. These publishers on average had between 1 million visitors per month. FatWallet had the least number of visitors last year finishing with an average of 2.3 million visitors in November 2008 and year-over-year growth of 14.2%. Mahalo.com finish the year with an average 3.2 million visitors in November 2008 and year-over-year growth of 168%. The big surprise was RetailMeNot.com, which started the year with just over 1 million visitors and finished with over five million visitors per month.  RetailMeNot’s year-over-year growth was 302% in 2008.

CouponChief, CyberMonday, Dealio, DealTaker, & GottaDeal

Out of the last five sites analyzed, CouponChief.com, CyberMonday.com, Dealio.com, DealTaker.com, & GottaDeal.com, two of the sites, CyberMonday.com & GottaDeal.com, increased visitor traffic exponentially during the holiday season.  CyberMonday.com, Shop.org’s specialty shopping site, at 1.2 million visitors in November 2007 is only 750,000 visitors in November 2008 a decrease of 38%.  GottaDeal.com, which has less than half a million visitors most of the year, spiked in November 2007 to 1.5 million visitors and again in November 2008 to 1.8 million visitors, an increased of 18.4%.  CouponChief.com, Dealio.com, and DealTaker.com increased sales in November 2007 but growth remain linear.

CouponChief.com ended the year with approximately 270,000 visitors in November 2008 and a year-over-year decline of 33.6%. Dealio.com had half a million visitors in November 2008 a year-over-year  increase of about 20%. DealTaker.com finished November 2008 with over 1 million visitors and a year-over-year growth 17%.

Managing a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign for a brick-n-mortar store has its advantages and disadvantages. Internet marketing professionals are accustom to studying analytic data, crunching numbers, and optimizing campaigns on conclusive data. But for brick-n-mortar stores, internet marketers are forced to rely on the same subjective data used for TV, radio, and print marketing. A lot of marketing managers focus on impressions and a lot of mangers focus on clicks but most internet marketers know that either of these metrics are easily manipulated by bid, position, ad copy, keyword relevance, etc.

This Costco ad caught my attention recently:

Costco AdWord Ad

Initially, I thought the ad was odd because it was promoting Black Friday (Friday, November 28) and I was viewing the ad on Sunday, December 21. I let this obvious error go because I figured Costco was referring to “all” Fridays before Christmas as Black Friday.

Second, I tried to figure out what triggered the ad. My Gmail account is almost empty (keeping with good GTD principles) but there was a Kohl’s email (you get a Kohl’s email everyday). Either Costco was using a very broad term like “Christmas” or “Sale” or the competitor term “Kohls” but neither term seemed very targeted or relevant.  It would have been much wiser for focus on the keyword “Costco” or use keywords relevent to the products in the promotion.

The most asinine aspect of the campaign was the landing page:

Costco Landing Page

Not only was the Google AdWord ad copy out of date, the campaign expired six days ago on December, 15. Costco’s marketing manager or Costco’s SEM firm had forgotten to pull-down the campaign after it had expired and were now just wasting money.