Ecommerce is one of the most demanding and competitive areas in search engine marketing. Whatever business you’re in, you’re likely up against behemoths like Amazon, as well as the threat of gritty niche entrepreneurs nibbling at your heels. Retailers must adopt more advanced strategies to stay ahead of the competition as more monetary investments shift to Shopping ads and competition grows. Strategise your Ecommerce PPC ads in a way to get the most out of your budget. Follow these simple strategies to gain benefits:
Step 1: Understand the Demand Curve
Analyse past years’ Analytics, AdWords, and Bing Ads data to see how your target audiences behavior changes throughout the year. Take into account the day of the week and other seasonal variations that may vary from year to year.
Examine indicators such as the day a holiday falls on each year, seasonal fluctuations, and trends people are following to best estimate when demand will alter next. To better estimate when demand will change this time, understand how the curve evolves with each factor.
Step 2: Optimise Ad Timing
Giving your advertising the best chance of being seen at the correct time – when the searcher is ready to buy – is a fundamental component of inbound marketing. Your advertising should generate more impressions, a greater click-through rate, and eventually, more sales if done right. Submit a file containing product information to Google to improve your shopping feed. If you host your ecommerce site on Shopify, there are a number of excellent apps for integrating your products with Google Shopping.
To boost your feed’s visibility in the SERPs, you’ll need to grow and optimise it after it’s up and running (Search Engine Results Pages). This involves making sure it has all of the important terms and features, as well as the ability to add specificity to improve conversion rates. You may also want to test your graphics, messaging, and custom rules on a regular basis to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
Step 3: Organise Campaigns and Ad Sets
This is the most important phase in creating an ecommerce PPC plan. A PPC account will have many campaigns, each with its own set of ad groups. Your keywords and the ads that are connected to them are shown in ad groups. A separate search campaign should be created for your brand keywords. Because visitors searching for these terms are already aware of your brand, this style of the ad will perform differently than advertisements for specific products or features. As a result, brand campaigns should be reported individually. If your company sells a variety of products that fall into several categories, you should organise your campaigns and ad groups by product type. You can then sort your campaigns by the percentage of low, medium, and high margins. Selling low-margin products at a loss is probably not something you want to do.
Step 4: Use Long Tail Keywords
High volume, low competition keywords are the best. Finding the best keywords may take some time and effort, so look into what your competitors are ranking for. Avoid broad-tail keywords like “clothing” or “mobile phone,” which are high-level terms with millions of hits, making it tough to rank your page. Consumers who are in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey (and have not yet made a purchase decision) are likely to search for these keywords. Instead, use long tail keywords like “Ethnic clothing or Office clothing” or “Samsung A7 Mobile Phone”.
Because of the reduced search traffic and competition, long-tail keywords are generally easier to rank for. Consumers generally look for these keywords during the consideration and decision stages of the buying process (when they intend to make a purchase decision.)
Step 5: Shortlist Negative Keywords
Create a list of negative keywords to target right away. A negative keyword informs Google about the terms for which your ads should not be displayed. If you’re selling refurbished furniture, for example, you don’t want your advertisements to show up when people search for “new furniture,” therefore “new” is a negative keyword. Negative keywords are critical to a PPC campaign’s success since they ensure that your ads appear only for the most relevant targeted keywords, boosting the chances of conversion.
Step 6: Use Extensions
Ad extensions are bits of extra information that can boost click-through rates significantly. Extensions will be available for ads that appear in the top spot on Google. Without having to create new ads, ad extensions also provide a space to promote events, special offers, and more product information. The following are the ad extensions that are currently available:
Sitelinks: These are clickable links to other pages on your website; they’re very useful for brand searches, but they’re also worth using in non-brand campaigns.
Location: These ad extensions are ideal for ecommerce firms with physical locations, as it provides directions to your store using Google Maps integration. Connecting your Google Ads account to your Google My Business account will allow you to apply for this extension.
Call: These ad call extensions display your company’s phone number. Users using mobile devices can call you directly by tapping the number.
Reviews: Third-party review extensions enable you to include ratings from sites like Trustpilot in your adverts, instantly establishing your brand as credible.
App: The app extension gives you direct access to download your company’s mobile app from Google Play or the Apple App Store.
CTA: Extensions of callouts are not clickable. They are intended to draw attention to certain information, particularly user perks such as special deals, free delivery, and free returns. On mobile and desktop, two to six callouts can be displayed per ad.
Step 7: Optimise Landing Page
Make sure your website’s landing pages are optimised. Sending traffic to a page that isn’t optimised for conversion will result in a low conversion rate and less profitable ads. When creating an ad, make sure the URL you use is appropriate to the keyword you’re targeting. Users will either exit or bounce if they arrive on a page that does not contain products or information relevant to their search, resulting in a poor user experience and a negative impact on both PPC and SEO performance.
