When running an eCommerce store, Google Ads and shopping ads will be your best friend. Your potential customers are using search engines every day to find the products they need, so you could be missing out on a steady stream of sales if you’re not making the most of PPC advertising.
There are many different ways to run PPC campaigns, and each one has a place in your eCommerce marketing strategy. Like any form of online advertising, you will need to pay close attention to your bids and budgets to ensure you don’t overspend.
Your digital marketing strategy should also be continually evolving. Every day your PPC ads are running, you’re building a larger data set. This can help you to make decisions from a place of insight rather than instinct.
PPC, or pay per click, is a branch of digital marketing that involves bidding for advertising space in search engines, social media and other websites. You can either promote specific products in shopping ads, or you can promote your entire store.
For shopping ads, you will decide which products you want to advertise and then create a feed with all of the information the ad platform needs to create your ads. You will then decide which keywords and search query terms you want to bid for and how much you are willing to spend.
For other eCommerce PPC ads, you will create your own text ads that will appear in the top of search results. You can enhance your ads with extensions to help improve the user experience.
PPC for eCommerce is not something you can set up once and leave running. Regular monitoring is essential to remove irrelevant keywords, optimise budgets and update ads.
Many companies run PPC in tandem with SEO. The PPC keyword research helps to inform SEO campaigns by highlighting search trends. If you can rank organically for specific keywords, this can help to drive down your PPC budget or increase traffic, conversions and sales.
Before you get started with PPC for eCommerce, consider the following tips from our PPC experts. We’ve helped companies of all sizes to set up and optimise eCommerce PPC campaigns for all types of products. We know what the search engines want to see and how to optimise your Google shopping ads for success.
It’s tempting to charge in, guns blazing, but there is a better way to approach this. Starting with a smaller budget and building up can help you to create better-informed campaigns.
Eventually, you will want to set a schedule for your Google Ads based on when your customers are most active. But until you have this valuable data, you’ll need to run ads around the clock.
Rather than waste a large budget during the testing phases, start low and go slow so your campaign dashboards can collect data.
Your negative keyword list will never be full or complete. Instead, you should always be looking for words and phrases to add to the list to optimise your budget.
Negative keywords help to weed out the semantically similar but irrelevant terms that are doing nothing but wasting your budget. Be ruthless in the culling of keywords to make sure your PPC ads only appear for high-intent search terms that are relevant to your products.
If you’re running any PPC campaigns, you may as well be thinking about SEO. The keyword research is already done, and you’re actively looking for ways to optimise the on-page content. This is half of the work for any decent SEO campaign.
Running PPC campaigns in tandem with search campaigns can also help to optimise your pay-per-click budget. Once you hold the top spot for a high-value keyword, you can either dominate the search engine results page for that term, or you can switch off PPC spend and focus this budget on another area.
When running any multi-channel digital marketing campaign, it makes sense to streamline your workload by not duplicating work. Even if your eCommerce PPC and SEO campaigns are handled by different agencies, make sure there is open communication so you aren’t wasting ad spend.
PPC is a data-driven game, but there is still room for creativity. It’s common to get caught up in the numbers to the point where you can no longer see what the customer sees. Remember that you’re trying to inspire customers to part with their hard-earned cash, so they need to feel inspired by the product.
If you can’t see the woods for the trees, ask for a second opinion. This will help you to spot areas where you are falling short on your landing pages.
Remember that the user expects a seamless experience from the moment they see your eCommerce PPC ads in the search results. Focus on creating landing pages that are designed to convert. This means the product they are interested in should be front and centre, but other products should be easily accessible from the page. Up-sell and cross-sell your way to healthy revenue streams.
With PPC advertising, you have the perfect opportunity to optimise your ad text, landing pages and more. A/B testing will enable you to make assumptions you have about your target audience and put them to the test.
It might take longer to set up, but creating and running smart split testing tests can help to inform your targeting and shape your business. It can also help to optimise your PPC spend so you can focus on more profitable areas.
If you’re not sure where to get started with split testing, here are 50 PPC experiments you could consider.
You’re already running an eCommerce business, so we’re confident you’ve got your hands full. One of the key benefits of paying for PPC management is the bespoke support you receive.
While it is possible to learn how to set up and monitor ads using Google’s Skillshop, there is no replacement for eCommerce PPC experience.
We recommend working with a PPC management company that takes to get to know your business and your customers. If you’re ready to start running PPC ads, get in touch with Assisted today.