This is the fifth and final post of the DoubleClick Search Holiday Series. Today, we cover planning ahead, the last of five steps outlined in our new DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays. Your performance in 2015 should propel your performance next year. Here’s how to get ready for 2016.

• Use executive reports: A DoubleClick Search executive report displays your metrics for revenue, costs, trends, and other high-level concepts, all presented in understandable charts and tables. Create your report once, or schedule a daily update throughout the holiday season.
• Review your purchase details. For holiday planning, you want to be strategic about which items you highlight from your sales. So, look at your purchase detail reports to see which similar items were top sellers this year, and use that as a guide for where to put your effort in 2016.
• Leave bid strategies running, but adjust for any changes to your goals: If your return on ad spend or cost-per-action requirements change, adjust your bid strategy goals and DoubleClick Search will bring your bids back into line.
• Save your budget pacing reports: You can go back and see how you paced to get ready for 2016.

That’s it, the last of the five steps to holiday campaign success. We hope these posts will help you during the busy 2015 holiday period. To recap, here are all the steps again:

1. Prepare: Unify your data for insights and action, add more data to maximize conversions, use labels to track your promotions, and integrate offline data.
2. Automate: Use bulksheets, automated rules, and inventory-aware campaigns to make your life easier.
3. Measure: Gain valuable insights by setting up scheduled reports, budget pacing reports, formula columns, and Floodlight activity columns, then analyze and monitor your performance.
4. Optimize: Use real-time data to make adjustments with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, Adaptive Shopping campaigns, and remarketing.
5. Plan ahead: Create executive reports, review purchase details to see how well you did this year, and save your budget pacing reports.

Be sure to read the entire DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays.

Don’t forget to register now for tomorrow’s webinar on October 29th at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT to learn tips and tools to maximize performance and profits during the holiday period from Henry Tappen, Product Manager at DoubleClick Search.

Happy Holidays!

Nick Macrae Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search