PM Digital has released Holiday Dashboard, a new tool that helps online retailers track their paid search campaign metrics, gauge year-over-year sales performance and forecast overall holiday sales.
The interactive division of Paradyszmatera acts as both a search management and direct marketing (including e-mail campaigns and landing page optimization) agency for clients like
Bloomingdale's, J. Crew and Harvard Business School.
The Holiday Dashboard is a module that resides in PM Digital's existing campaign management and reporting tool. The module compiles data for
two predefined holiday periods--October 1 through December 31, and then additional weeks for retailers whose fiscal calendars run through the end of January--and allows marketers to compare
year-over-year daily sales.
In addition, the Holiday Dashboard offers graphic and numeric reports that track a search campaign's KPIs such as click volume, CPCs and conversions for the previous
two weeks. For sales forecasts, the module uses the previous year's sales and indexes them against new factors like promotions and shipping discounts, as well as actual sales-to-date.
According
to Suzy Sandberg, PM Digital's president, the company began working on the Holiday Dashboard about a year ago when it realized that the overall client mix had shifted dramatically to online retail.
"They may advertise year-round, but online retailers' focus from January to October is the holiday season," Sandberg says. "Every dollar that they spend is trying to make an impact on those 6
weeks--because for many of them, that's where 35% of their overall revenue comes from."
Sandberg says that while New York-based PM Digital has plans to extend the Holiday Dashboard's forecasting
model to the full year and incorporate the tools into the overall dashboard, the company is waiting to gauge retailer satisfaction with the functionality, and the accuracy of the algorithms.
"We
built this tool because we didn't want our clients to have to crunch the numbers and graphs themselves," Sandberg says. "So seeing them circulate the data within the company and be satisfied with the
forecasts will be our ultimate success metrics."