New Holiday Data Reveals Insights About Handling Seasonal Volatility - Q1 2020 Virtual BotifyConnect
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When we originally embarked on our 2019 holiday research project, we expected to uncover insights about how publisher and e-commerce SEOs should be prepared for peak shopping seasons like Black Friday. While we did uncover some helpful holiday insights, we also uncovered insights that could apply to other times of seasonality and volatility as well. Botify’s Director of Content Kameron Jenkins presented the findings from our research, then Martin MacDonald, Founder of MOGmedia Inc., shared his experience handling seasonality at brands like Expedia, Orbitz, and Omnicom.
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New Holiday Data Reveals Insights About Handling Seasonal Volatility - Q1 2020 Virtual BotifyConnect
- 1. New Holiday Data Reveals Insights About Handling Seasonal Volatility 1
- 4. 4 Participate in the polls.
- 6. { "@context":http://schema.org "@type":"Person", "Name": "Kameron Jenkins", "City": "LA", "worksFor": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Botify", "url": "https://www.botify.com", "jobTitle": "Director of Content"}, "Twitter": "@Kammie_Jenkins", "Blog": "https://www.botify.com/blog/", "Skillset": [ "80% Content SEO, 20% Tech SEO", “Proud dog mom to Bagel the lab", "Amateur sourdough baker" ] } Hey, I’m Kameron! 6 @Botify
- 7. 7 Thank you for being here.
- 8. 8 Poll: Where’s everyone working from right now? A) Working from home B) Still in the office for now C) Other (coworking space, coffee shop etc.)
- 9. What we’ll cover: 1. Holiday research in March? 9 @Botify
- 10. What we’ll cover: 1. Holiday research in March? 2. A timeline of holiday shopping 3. Most popular holiday queries 4. Mobile vs. desktop 5. Holiday crawl activity 6. Holiday SEO checklist 10 @Botify
- 11. “How does consumer behavior change around peak shopping seasons like Black Friday, and how should brands respond? 11 @Botify
- 12. We analyzed a massive dataset across verticals Websites that fall in one of the following industries: Pages analyzed. Data from Botify Analytics and from log files for these websites. Unique non-brand queries that generated traffic for the 200 websites in November/December. 200 361M 45.7M Retail Publisher 12 @Botify
- 13. And we looked at websites of varying sizes eCommerce WebsitesPublishing Websites 13 @Botify
- 14. 1A Timeline of Holiday Shopping 14
- 15. 15 Poll: When do you start your website prep for the holidays? A) Pre-October B) October C) November D) December
- 16. A Timeline of Holiday Shopping 16 @Botify
- 17. Black Friday still dominates Cyber Monday Source: Google Trends 17 @Botify
- 18. Click to edit title | Click to edit subtitle But this can vary by country A few South American countries search for “Cyber Monday” much more than “Black Friday” 18 @Botify
- 19. But when did people start searching for Black Friday? 19 @Botify
- 20. When did people start searching for Black Friday? 20 @Botify
- 21. When did people start searching for Black Friday? 21 @Botify
- 22. A Late Thanksgiving Created A Larger Window of Opportunity The year prior, impressions for Black Friday-related queries spiked predominantly in the five-day window between the 19th and Black Friday (November 23rd). 22 2018 28 2019 22@Botify
- 23. Prepare for a similar window in 2020 Thanksgiving is on November 26 in 2020 meaning that a similar window of opportunity should exist for marketers to capture Black Friday user demand this year. Make sure you take advantage! 23 @Botify
- 24. When did people start searching for Cyber Monday? 24 @Botify
- 25. When did people start searching for Cyber Monday? 25 @Botify
- 26. Media Websites Won Cyber Monday ● Media websites started racking up impressions and clicks for Cyber Monday-related terms about a week before retail websites did. ● Media websites also saw roughly 3x the number of impressions for Cyber Monday related keywords. ● This represents a big opportunity for retailers in 2020 to either produce more Cyber Monday content or partner with publishers for visibility there. 26@Botify
- 27. What happened on Thanksgiving? 27 @Botify
- 28. What happened on Thanksgiving? 28 @Botify
- 29. What happened on Black Friday? 29 @Botify
- 30. What happened on Black Friday? 30 @Botify
- 31. Know Your Peak Traffic Days ● Making Thanksgiving the highest-traffic day for media websites and Black Friday the highest-traffic day for retail websites. ● The day after Christmas, a big shopping day, didn’t translate to a spike in clicks to retail websites, indicating this could largely be an offline activity still. 31@Botify
- 32. When did people start preparing for Christmas? 32 @Botify
- 33. When did people start preparing for Christmas? 33 @Botify
- 34. Important Dates If You Publish Recipe Content ● Start publishing Christmas meal-related content in mid-November and ideally no later than a week into December in order to capture maximum traffic. ● Expect seasonal traffic for these terms to die off around two days before Christmas. 34@Botify
- 36. What were the most popular queries for retailers? In 2019, the top query in terms of total impressions was personalized gifts with 1,039,806 impressions. That query was also popular the year prior, although slightly less so, with 715,422 impressions. personalised gifts 1,039,806 christmas cards 625,523 black friday deals 564,351 christmas decorations 183,183 christmas jumpers 169,081 secret santa gifts 117,703 christmas party dress 106,213 black friday 2019 78,851 gifts for her 57,739 christmas ornaments 22,640 ugly christmas sweater 2019 17,272 amsterdam christmas market 12,466 modern christmas decor 8,178 36 @Botify
- 37. What were the most popular queries for media websites? In 2019, the top query in terms of total impressions was *john lewis christmas advert with 1,949,730. That term was also popular the year prior, but less so, with 711,282 impressions. john lewis christmas advert 1 949 730 history of thanksgiving 1 275 264 apple black friday 2019 706 918 black friday deals 2019 191 826 black friday sales australia 133 830 a christmas story 125 398 sephora black friday 2019 95 789 wedding gift ideas 78 266 black friday sales 74 365 the knight before christmas 54 509 friends thanksgiving episodes 47 536 black friday tv deals 39 022 37 @Botify
- 43. Prioritize Your Mobile Experience ● Retailers: People may still make their purchases on desktop, but they clearly research on mobile. Make sure you provide fast mobile pages that are easy to navigate and contain detailed product descriptions. ● Media: Mobile wins by a longshot, so make sure your AMP is working properly! 43 @Botify
- 44. 44 Poll: When do you stop your prep / aim to finish changes by? A) Sometime in October B) Sometime in November C) Sometime in December D) We make changes throughout the holidays
- 50. Finish Your Prep Before December ● Because crawl activity reaches its peak the first week of December for retail sites, make sure your holiday prep is done before that. ● Watch your logs closely in November/December and be prepared to act fast if you seeing Googlebot hit errors. 50 @Botify
- 51. 5Your Holiday SEO Checklist 51
- 52. 5Your Holiday SEO Checklist 52
- 54. Strategic Checklist 1. Use evergreen content to compensate for seasonal volatility. 54@Botify
- 55. Strategic Checklist 1. Use evergreen content to compensate for seasonal volatility. 2. Make sure you have the ability to monitor your log files during the holiday season. 55@Botify
- 56. Strategic Checklist 1. Use evergreen content to compensate for seasonal volatility. 2. Make sure you have the ability to monitor your log files during the holiday season. 3. Plan on finishing your holiday prep before December, if possible. 56@Botify
- 57. Strategic Checklist 1. Use evergreen content to compensate for seasonal volatility. 2. Make sure you have the ability to monitor your log files during the holiday season. 3. Plan on finishing your holiday prep before December, if possible. 4. Retailers can consider publishing their own content to target consumers during their product research phase or, alternatively, working with publishers to do this. 57@Botify
- 58. Technical Checklist 1. Check nofollow tags 58@Botify
- 59. Technical Checklist 1. Check nofollow tags 2. Monitor your high-value pages for errors 59@Botify
- 60. Technical Checklist 1. Check nofollow tags 2. Monitor your high-value pages for errors 3. Check your analytics and tracking codes 60@Botify
- 61. Technical Checklist 1. Check nofollow tags 2. Monitor your high-value pages for errors 3. Check your analytics and tracking codes 4. Consider creating and submitting a holiday- themed XML sitemap 61@Botify
- 62. Technical Checklist 1. Check nofollow tags 2. Monitor your high-value pages for errors 3. Check your analytics and tracking codes 4. Consider creating and submitting a holiday- themed XML sitemap 5. Review the prioritize your technical tickets 62@Botify
- 63. Technical Checklist 1. Check nofollow tags 2. Monitor your high-value pages for errors 3. Check your analytics and tracking codes 4. Consider creating and submitting a holiday- themed XML sitemap 5. Review the prioritize your technical tickets 6. Check that all the links on your promo/ holiday pages are working. 63@Botify
- 64. Technical Checklist 1. Check nofollow tags 2. Monitor your high-value pages for errors 3. Check your analytics and tracking codes 4. Consider creating and submitting a holiday- themed XML sitemap 5. Review the prioritize your technical tickets 6. Check that all the links on your promo/ holiday pages are working. 7. Monitor your query data to detect trends in questions your audience is asking. How can you help? 64@Botify
- 65. 65@Botify
- 66. Q&A 66 @Botify
- 67. 67 67 Fireside Chat Kelli Clark VP of Customer Success, North America Martin MacDonald Founder, MOGmedia @Botify
- 68. Thank you! 68
Notas do Editor
- Zach intro the topic (e.g. “Kam is going to walk us through the holiday research we just got done compiling” etc), thank everyone for being here.
- Zach “I’m going to run through a quick housekeeping items before we get started…”
- Zach says: This webinar is being recorded. You’ll get a copy sent to you after.
- Zach says: You’ll also have an opportunity to engage in some polls. Those will pop on the screen, giving you a chance to answer. We’ll all take a look at the results in real time.
- Zach says: We’ll have about 10 minutes for Q&A at the end of Kam’s presentation. Here’s how you’ll participate in the Q&A — you can ask questions as you have them, or during the Q&A time. They’ll all be addressed at the end. Any we can’t get to we’ll try to send to you later. Keep your GoToWebinar window open after the Q&A for the fireside chat, which will be starting right after. Hand off to Kam.
- (Turn camera on just for this slide) Hey, I’m Kameron! I’m the Director of Content at Botify and have been an SEO for about 8 years. I’m actually very used to this virtual thing because I live in the LA area but most of my team’s in New York, but I love visiting our offices as often as I can, so hopefully when we have our next in-person meetup I get a chance to connect with some of you there!
- First thing’s first. I want to sincerely thank you for joining us today. For those of you who originally registered with the goal of meeting up with us in person, we’re truly bummed we didn’t get to do that, but at the same time thankful for the technology that can still bring us together safely. We know it’s not the same — there’s really no substitute for engaging and connecting in person — but we hope that we can carry at least some of that into today’s virtual event. I also just want to acknowledge the reality that we’re in a pretty uncertain time right now, and that doesn’t just affect our health, it affects us economically. I’m sure the companies you work for are all being affected in some form, and that’s tough. We were debating whether “using seasonal trends to unlock hidden revenue” was even still an appropriate topic considering the circumstances, but we decided to stick with it. A big reason is that we’ve been seeing firsthand just how important it is to keep an eye on query data during times like this, because it provides such a critical window into what our audience needs, and as a result, we know better as brands how to serve them. So with that in mind, let’s dive in.
- Like Zach mentioned, we’re going to be doing a few polls throughout, so I thought we’d start with an easy one. Where’s everyone working from right now? I’m pretty sure most if not all of us will be working from home right now, but that might differ depending on what area you’re in. If you are working from home right now and it’s been tough to distance yourself from friends and coworkers, hang in there!
- Yes, we’re talking about holiday trends in March! And we’re doing that for a few reasons. 1) this data is fresh. It’s from this past holiday season (November - December) so we wanted to give it to you as soon as we finalized it. 2) If you can believe it, it’s almost Q2, and as scary as it sounds, a lot of us will likely start holiday prep in Q3, so we thought it was important that you have this data to think on now. And 3) although this study looked at data from November and December, there are insights we can apply to other times of seasonal demand and volatility.
- You’re going to get a helpful, birds-eye-view timeline of dates to be aware of during the holiday season. A look at this season’s most popular queries — the non-branded terms that generated the most impressions. Mobile vs. desktop comparisons What Googlebot was doing in November and December, and how their crawling differed between retail and media websites. And finally, we’re going to wrap it up with a checklist — some ideas to help you make sure your site’s prepared for seasonality.
- This research all started out with a question: how does consumer behavior change around peak shopping seasons like black friday, and how should brands respond?
- So we looked at a pretty massive dataset to find the answers. 200 websites, a pretty even split between sites in the retail/e-commerce vertical and sites in the media/publisher vertical In total, that amounted to 361 million crawled URLs And 45 million non-branded queries that generated impressions in November and December
- We also looked at a good variety of website sizes, and you can see the breakdown here. In both verticals, sites ranged from less than 10,000 URLs to more than 10 million URLs. In both verticals, the most common site size was 100,000 to 1 million URLs.
- So first thing’s first. If you want to understand holiday shopping trends, a good first step is to get a bird’s eye view of the timeline — what are some of the biggest milestones?
- Time for our second poll. When do you start preparing your website (whether you’re on the content or technical side) for the holidays?
- So here, we’re calling out some of the major shifts in impressions and traffic and tying them to dates on a timeline. I won’t call out everything right now because we’re going to dive into each of these in the following slides, but one thing I did want to point out was the difference between black friday and cyber monday. Black Friday queries was really the first event we noticed, and that started on the 19th and lasted through the 29th (which was the day of Black Friday in 2019) In the middle of that, we started seeing interest in Cyber Monday. So interestingly, Black Friday interest started quite a few days before, but the sites that were getting most of those impressions were media sites. E-comm sites didn’t start getting Cyber Monday interest until December 2-3 (Cyber Monday and the day after). The day clicks to retail sites peaked was Black Friday, not Cyber Monday.
- Now this is from Google trends, not our own data, but we thought it was interesting to show that Black Friday is still so much more popular than Cyber Monday. Even with so many people shopping online, the queries that dominate still involve “black friday” However…
- This does seem to differ by country. This is also Google Trends data, and we can see here that in a few south american countries interest is actually higher for cyber monday.
- In 2019, impressions for Black Friday-related queries saw their biggest upward trend for both media and retail websites around the same time — the window between November 15th to the 29th (Black Friday).
- And here’s retail.
- Compared to 2018, that’s a bigger window!
- The year prior, impressions for Black Friday-related queries spiked predominantly in the five-day window between the 19th and Black Friday (November 23rd). It would seem that the late Thanksgiving created a larger window of opportunity.
- This is something to keep in mind this year as well since Thanksgiving is on the 26th.
- Cyber Monday was on December 2nd in 2019, and interestingly enough, media sites started racking up impressions for Cyber Monday-related terms as early as November 23rd.
- While retail websites really only saw a spike in impressions between November 30th and December 2nd, dropping off after that.
- Thanksgiving was on November 28th in 2019, which was the day that media websites received the most mobile and desktop clicks this holiday season. So here you can see desktop clicks.
- And here you can see mobile clicks, also peaking on Thanksgiving Day.
- The following day, on Black Friday, clicks to retail websites peaked on both mobile and desktop. So here’s desktop.
- And here’s mobile.
- This may not be true of every individual media and retail website out there, but across the board, we saw Thanksgiving being the highest-traffic day for publishers and Black Friday the highest traffic day for retail websites. Stay vigilant on these days in particular, watch your log files to see if you’re serving any errors, do load testing ahead of time to see if your site can handle the same or more amount of visits as you got the previous year on these dates, because there’s nothing worse than serving your visitors errors when they’re trying to buy something. One thing we were a little surprised about when it came to peak traffic days was that the day after Christmas didn’t really stand out. Anecdotally, that seems to be a fairly popular day for shopping, so the lack of interest online seems to indicate that this might still be a largely offline phenomenon.
- There’s a lot that goes into Christmas preparations: buying a Christmas tree, ornaments, and decorations. Funny enough, most people this year seemed to agree on when those preparations should happen — December 1st. As you can see from the chart, retail websites saw the biggest surge of impressions for these types of items the day before Cyber Monday.
- But the preparations didn’t stop there. People also turned to Google to search for Christmas dinner ideas and recipes. On December 8th, the second Sunday of the month, media websites received the biggest surge in impressions for these types of queries, although interest seemed to start growing in mid-November. Interest in that topic dropped off almost completely after December 23rd, the same day interest died down in 2018.
- If you manage a site with lots of recipes, it’s a good idea to start publishing Christmas meal-related content in mid-November and ideally no later than a week into December in order to capture maximum traffic. Expect seasonal traffic for these terms to die off around two days before Christmas.
- We also wanted to know what topics were top-of-mind for consumers this holiday season, how that might have changed from the previous year, and how that interest differed between retail and publisher websites.
- In 2019, the top query in terms of total impressions was personalized gifts. That query was also popular the year prior, although slightly less so. Other top queries for retailers included christmas cards, secret santa gifts, and ugly christmas sweaters.
- In 2019, the top query in terms of total impressions was *john lewis christmas advert. *A note on this: Because we’re only looking at non-branded queries here, it’s important to note that it wasn’t John Lewis’ site that was racking up these impressions, but rather media websites covering their popular Christmas advertisement. Aside from that, some of the top queries for publisher websites included history of thanksgiving, a christmas story, friends thanksgiving episodes, and wedding gift ideas (which is interesting, given the fact that weddings peak in the Spring and Summer months and tend to be at their lowest in November/December).
- When it comes to holiday searches, do people search more often on desktop or mobile?
- Judging by the amount of impressions in November and December, mobile is the clear winner across all industries. For example, on Thanksgiving (when holiday interest peaked for media websites), there were 39 million mobile impressions...
- ...and just 3 million desktop impressions.
- On Black Friday, when interest peaked for retail websites, there were 7 million mobile impressions…
- ...and just 1 million desktop impressions.
- So for our third and final poll for this session, we want to know when you stop making changes — whether this is a formal code freeze or just a loose rule — when do you aim to have your holiday prep and changes made to your website?
- When was crawl volume highest this holiday season?
- Crawl volume was highest on publisher websites the week of Christmas.
- For retail sites, crawl volume was highest the week of Cyber Monday, the same week searches for Cyber Monday peaked. When it comes to Google’s crawl, we know demand is a factor, so it makes sense that crawl volume would spike during a time where demand is highest. An important takeaway here is that crawl activity reaches its peak the first week of December for e-commerce sites, so make sure your holiday prep is done before that.
- When was crawl volume lowest this holiday season? For publishers, crawl volume was lowest during the second week of November.
- For retail sites, crawl volume was lowest the week of Christmas. Interestingly, that’s the same week that it was highest for publishers.
- Media and retail websites should consider using evergreen content to compensate for seasonal volatility.
- Make sure you have the ability to monitor your log files during the holiday season. Even if you’re not making changes during your code freeze, it’s still a good idea to monitor and check if you’re serving errors to Googlebot.
- Because crawl activity reaches its peak the first week of December for retail sites, make sure your holiday prep is done before that.
- Retailers should consider publishing their own content to target consumers during their product research phase or, alternatively, working with publishers to do this. Publishers can also consider partnering with retailers proactively for this.
- Check to make sure you don’t have any nofollow tags on pages or categories you want searchers to be able to find.
- Monitor your high-value pages to make sure they’re not returning any 4xx or 5xx errors.
- Check to see that all your analytics and tracking codes are working properly.
- Consider creating and submitting a holiday-themed XML sitemap that includes your most important pages.
- Review the prioritization of your technical tickets — can you free up resources for your dev team? Do you have any tickets that need to be pushed up for success?
- Check that all the links on your promo/ holiday pages are working. Obviously there is so much more we can say here, and you likely have your own checklists that you run through already. If so, and you’re feeling generous, feel free to share with everyone! You can use the comments feature to do that and we’ll try to read out what we can during the Q&A.
- Monitor your query data to detect trends in questions your audience is asking — ask yourself, “How can we help?”
- This is important all the time, but especially in times like we’re in right now. Your audience is searching — if you do SEO for an e-commerce website, your audience might be looking to you for supplies like hand sanitizer and toilet paper. If you’re a publisher, your audience is likely looking for up-to-date information on the virus — what to do, where it’s spread, etc. During the holidays, as we saw a bit earlier, that search demand will likely change. It’s all about keeping our finger on the pulse of what our unique audience is looking for at any given moment in time.
- Zach announces that it’s time for Q&A. He’s going to read the questions (this shouldn’t go longer than about 10 minutes). I’ll flag the questions I want to answer (have to expand questions window) so Zach knows what to read out. After time runs out, remind everyone to keep window open for the fireside chat after.
- Zach thank kam - intro kelli and martin briefly — kelli first question to martin is “tell us about yourself” so he can give his own bio