Advanced Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Techniques for Your Ecommerce Site

How to use PPC for an Ecommerce Website

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PPC advertising is one of the typical types of internet advertising that is popular with both small and large enterprises. As an e-commerce company, you should explore e-commerce advertising since it is data-driven, readily scalable, and provides a high ROI.

What exactly is e-commerce advertising?

The process of marketing an online shop by acquiring physical and online ad space is known as e-commerce advertising. The majority of e-commerce advertising methods target online ad space, such as that found on a search engine, social media network, or website.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a type of internet advertising in which you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It makes no difference how many times your ad is shown or how many people view it — you just pay for genuine clicks.

You may serve your advertising on a variety of platforms, the two largest and most well-known of which being Google and Facebook.

Every ad that appears above Google search results and the majority of the advertising that appears on Facebook are PPC advertisements. Google shopping advertisements, for example, are one of the most prominent e-commerce PPC uses.

What is PPC for e-commerce?

PPC for e-commerce, often known as eCommerce PPC, is an online advertising approach that uses PPC adverts to promote an online store and its items. These advertisements may appear on search engines, social media networks, and websites. Because it targets ready-to-buy customers, PPC for e-commerce works effectively for driving sales.

How does e-commerce PPC work?

PPC for e-commerce is rather simple. To begin a campaign, you must first complete the following steps:

1. Creating advertisements

For most e-commerce PPC campaigns, ad development is relatively basic. These ads are often smaller though certain platforms do provide larger ad sizes and consist of a headline, a few lines of ad language, and, in some circumstances, an image. You do not even need graphics if you are only using Google's Ads platform — just a link to your landing page, a headline, and two lines of writing!

2. Choosing Keywords

You choose which terms will activate your ad using the Google Ads PPC approach. For example, if you own an e-commerce business that offers camping equipment, you may use keywords like "best tent for winter" or "best warm weather sleeping bag." Users will only see your ad if they search for those keywords or close versions of them.

3. Bidding

After you have built your e-commerce marketing strategy and chosen your keywords, you can determine how much you are prepared to "bid" for your ad to be displayed.

The typical bid fluctuates depending on how competitive the keywords you have chosen are. If you target a high-volume, profitable term that many different businesses are pursuing, you will wind up spending more per click than if you target a lesser volume keyword.

This is one of the many reasons why thorough keyword research is critical for e-commerce PPC!

Advantages of PPC for e-commerce sites

For a variety of reasons, PPC is a great advertising technique for e-commerce enterprises.

A. It is compatible with the e-commerce business model.

Data is at the heart of e-commerce. The majority of the business models may be represented by numbers in a spreadsheet.

PPC for e-commerce works effectively since it is integrated into the framework. You may meticulously track your advertising initiatives, even down to the last penny.

Furthermore, the method of optimizing an e-commerce site for conversions is comparable to optimizing a PPC campaign for more clicks, thus e-commerce store owners frequently find it intuitive.

B. You decide on your own budget.

PPC is also an excellent choice because you can run campaigns on a small or large scale. To get the benefits of e-commerce PPC advertising, you do not need a large budget.

While traditional advertising frequently necessitates a large or complete payment upfront before seeing results, PPC is the polar opposite. You do not have to pay until you start seeing results, and even then, you may change your budget on the fly.

C. You can get quite specific with your advertisements

The ability to be extremely targeted with your advertisements is maybe the most advantageous part of PPC for e-commerce firms. You have complete control over what you advertise and who you advertise to.

Assume you own a clothes e-commerce store. If you have a new sweater line in, you may create a set of advertising only for those sweaters.

This ensures that your advertisements are only ever seen to individuals who you know are seeking what you are promoting in the first place. You cannot get much more specialized than with eCommerce PPC.

Advanced Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Techniques for Your Ecommerce Site

Typically, e-commerce is one of the most competitive search engine marketing verticals (SEM). We will look at some sophisticated PPC methods that you may use with your E-Commerce sites and campaigns.

Whatever business you are in, be cautious of the reality that tough rivals will constantly want to level the playing field. As these businesses expand, it will be up to you to design proper tactics to respond to these types of scenarios.

1. Use Brand and Non-Brand Keyword Segmentation.

With keyword-based text advertisements, businesses can readily grasp a consumer's window of intent and adjust appropriately. Shopping advertisements, on the other hand, were developed using a product-based bidding mechanism, which means that Google's auction determines which goods appear for a certain search result.

Because merchants cannot bid differentially on a consumer during their buying cycle, this approach eliminates a crucial part of optimization and bid management. While this might be discouraging, it does not have to be!

There is a fix to the disadvantage of product bidding:

2. Keyword segmentation

You can manage how much you bid for different sorts of inquiries by using the shopping parameter, campaign priority.

What is the process through which campaign priorities are determined?

When you have the same product in numerous shopping campaigns, you may use the campaign priority – high, medium, or low – to choose which campaign should participate in the auction for that product.

Regardless matter how much you spend, the highest priority campaign will always join the auction first. To develop a shopping keyword segmentation structure, merchants must first construct three campaigns for the same product or group of items, each with a different priority level - high, medium, and low.

The priority settings will function as a funnel, filtering out more precise terms through negatives. Shopping keyword segmentation enables advertisers to:

  • Control the SERP for branded words.
  • Bids should be optimized depending on non-brand performance.
  • Control which goods are advertised at various stages of the purchasing experience.

Shopping keyword segmentation is a smart strategy for ensuring that you are generating purchases on high intent inquiries while reducing cost on unproductive head terms.

3. Dynamic Search Ads Are a Tool, Not a Complement

Use the power of Dynamic Search Ads to broaden your keyword set at a cheaper cost.

When it comes to e-commerce advertising, the most reasonable keywords are frequently the most expensive and least lucrative. There is assaying that around 15% of daily searches are not fresh to Google; you can locate them using wide match with a higher CPC, but it's more economical to let DSA do the hard job for you.

Here are a few things to bear in mind while creating a DSA campaign:

  • Your keywords are pages and URLs. To enhance copy relevance, split similar portions of the site into their own ad groups.
  • Use negatives in the same way! Prevent DSAs from accessing useless pages. I doubt any relevant questions would come from sites about careers or return policies.
  • Use a comprehensive suite of extensions in the same way that you would for a keyword targeting campaign. They will certainly experience less traffic owing to their lower ad rank, but it's preferable to have them there.
  • Use any and all available audiences. Spend the majority of your work optimizing for humans and leave the keywords to the search engines.

To retain control, it is typical practice to deploy all converting keywords from a DSA campaign into a standard keyword-targeted campaign.

While this is an economical technique to assure maximum volume, CPCs frequently soar to the point of being wasteful when targeting every inquiry rather than when DSAs think it is most likely to convert.

Unless a single query has a high volume or is underperforming in comparison to keyword targeting, it is best to leave them alone.

4. Make use of Google Showcase Shopping Ads

Google introduced a new ad style, Showcase Shopping advertisements, in 2016. This solution aims to improve e-commerce, retail, and fashion advertisers' consumer positioning.

Consider Google Showcase Shopping advertisements to be your online showroom. It is the service your online clients are seeking for window shopping. Using vibrant, high-quality digital photos, you may gather together various e-commerce, fashion, and retail items.

You can complement current items with a number of lesser goods, or you may combine numerous “me-too” goods into a larger reduced deal. Showcase adverts appear on mobile search results and are intended to target more general non-brand searches.

The ad in the SERP includes a brand-specific, bespoke hero picture related to the search query, as well as two smaller images. The genuine goods are depicted in these smaller photos. When a user clicks on the ad, it displays the customized hero picture, a customized description to assist establish the business, and up to ten particular items.

Aside from the aesthetic variations, Showcase Shopping advertisements employ maximum CPE (cost per engagement) bidding, which means advertisers specify the max amount they are ready to spend for an interaction. They are then paid when a user expands the ad and spends 10 seconds or more within the ad, or when a user clicks on a link to the site before the 10 seconds are up.

Showcase advertising continued to acquire mobile click share in 2018, and this trend is expected to continue in 2019.This ad type is an excellent branding tool, geared toward user engagement rather than user acquisition, and works best as an upper-funnel technique.

5. Local Inventory Ads can help you connect online and offline

According to Google, over 80% of buyers will go into a store if the vendor has an item they need right away. Local inventory advertisements are one of the most effective strategies to address this expectation of rapid in-store availability. This ad type is an excellent approach to attract consumers to your business by showcasing goods available in surrounding retailers.

Local inventory advertisements appear on mobile inquiries with a local intent (for example, "dresses near me"), and are displayed if the user is within 35 miles of a business.

Users are led to your Google-hosted local storefront page when they click on your ad. Your customized storefront page includes a product description, an illustration of the product, your website's URL, your phone number, the operating hours of your shop, and a map that shows how to get to your shop.

Customers may easily purchase straight from your website by clicking through. Local inventory advertising is a terrific choice for any brick-and-mortar marketers, but it may be difficult to set up and maintain. Advertisers must guarantee that in-store availability and inventory counts are updated on a daily basis in the feed.

Google developed a local feed partnership initiative to make the onboarding and maintenance of local feeds easier. This new service enables third-party inventory data providers to supply Google with sales and inventory data on behalf of merchants.

When an advertiser runs local inventory ads, various sources, such as Google Ads and Google Analytics, are advised for measuring impact. Retailers may improve campaigns for in-store visits and subsequent offline and online sales by tracking important data such as in-store visitation and online orders, as well as using other data.

6. Target the Less Obvious Audience

Demographics, customer match, and retargeting are just a few of the more sophisticated audience tools that Google and Bing have produced in recent memory. Advertisers may personalize messages, raise or lower prices, and generally target everything or whoever they choose!

In-market audiences are among the most often used (and recommended) audiences, which means Google may target consumers who are actively exploring a major purchase.

If you are an insurance firm, adding an audience of customers who are looking for insurance sounds like a no-brainer, right? The problem is that your rivals are all doing the same thing.

Consider utilizing audiences to discover what else your target audience enjoys and then target them accordingly.

If you are selling handbags or jewelry, males who want to buy something for their significant other's birthday or anniversary can be a good fit.

Aurprising Stats about Advertisements infographics

7. Re-evaluate your key performance indicators (KPIs)

Return on Ad Spend (or ROAS as we like to call it) may be a risky measure. It is a single moment in time, examining simply whether or not a single order was profitable.

Only optimizing for single-purchase ROAS will limit your capacity to compete in difficult auctions. As a better true north statistic, consider looking at Cost Per Acquired Customer, Customer Lifetime Value, or one-year customer payback.

Consider targeting micro-conversions or "steps" as a means to offer value without breaking the bank for real top-of-the-funnel prospecting search phrases. Optimize for email list subscriptions, or utilize early-stage phrases to create retargeting pools for subsequent marketing.

This is it for today’s blog. I hope you liked it and you’ve learned a thing or two about PPC campaigns. Do share your feedback with me and if you have an e-commerce site that you want to market properly, contact Prism, the best advertising agency in Dubai and we will take care of your advertising so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. Thank you and Goodbye.

Lovetto Nazareth

About The Author: Lovetto Nazareth

Lovetto Nazareth is a digital marketing consultant and agency owner of Prism Digital. He has been in the advertising and digital marketing business for the last 2 decades and has managed thousands of campaigns and generated millions of dollars of new leads. He is an avid adventure sports enthusiast and a singer-songwriter. Follow him on social media on @Lovetto Nazareth

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