The E-commerce Marketers Guide to PPC Advertising
Do you have an eCommerce business online that seems to be getting nowhere? Then PPC advertising might be a great opportunity for you!
In this post we will be talking about the best PPC campaigns for eCommerce websites and the marketing guide for PPC advertising as a whole, so let’s break it down!
Optimise your product pages
Let’s start with the first step when it comes to PPC advertising, the landing page.
Having an optimised landing page is the most important aspect of PPC, as this is all about first impressions to the user you want to make sure the page UX is easy for the user to navigate through and to convert, below are the top areas to focus on when optimising your product page:
Things to consider when optimising your product page:
- Page speed / Load time
- Quality images / a range of product images to view
- Detailed description
- Clear navigation across the site
- Product CTA’s
With these areas in mind, you will have a successful landing page. If you’re selling multiple products on your eCommerce site, then it is best practice for each advert to have its own landing page for that specific category allowing for targeted conversions.
For example, if you’re selling jungle print wallpaper, then you would want to link to that specific product category page rather than the home page that consists of multiple different products and information.
Your home page carries too much information and shoppers won’t want to navigate through your site wasting time; so make it easy for them, take them to a specific page.
You’re here to make the customer journey as easy as possible!
Find the right PPC campaign type for your business
With an E-Commerce website, there are two campaigns that you want to focus on when it comes to PPC; Google search campaigns and Google Shopping campaigns.
Google Search Campaigns vs Google Shopping
Research shows that in 2019 shopping ads were dominating compared to other search ads.
Shopping ads amounted to 60% of all clicks for Google paid to advertise. And in their most recent study, they’ve found that this number has basically stayed the same.
However, a study by Clutch found that 49% of the people they polled were more likely to click on a text. In comparison, 31% would click on a Shopping ad instead (the other 16% went to video ads).
Meaning that search campaigns may be more effective. See the breakdown below.
Google Search Campaigns
Google search campaigns are text-based ads that appear in the top and bottom three positions on a web page.
Text ads will typically show right above and below the organic results. Often there will be 3 or 4 grouped together, but this can vary depending on the search.
Google text ads allow you to advertise both your products and services as search results through written copy. These do not include image ads.
Search campaigns allow you more control over what you can show to the user online, unlike shopping ads you are able to show you ads to who specifically through bidding on certain keywords meaning you have more control over your bids and campaign budget.
If your product is quite a broad or popular searched item then you might want more specific control over this with search campaigns so you can pin this down to keyword areas rather than letting it loose in the competitive shopping area of Google.
Another positive for search campaigns is that you can add extensions to your ads that aren’t available for shopping ads, so if you have an offers page or related products you can add these as site links and even location extensions that give shoppers extra information about your product or service.
Google Shopping Campaigns
Google Shopping ads are the ads you see showing images at the very top of the search results page. They have a dedicated tab, which shows the price, review and a short description of the product.
Unlike search campaigns, you can’t actually bid on keywords, these are found by the descriptive title displayed on the photo.
Shopping ads can be very competitive in price as there are no specific bidding techniques on this, you can however create a negative keyword list for your shopping ads.
Managing your E-Commerce PPC account
When it comes to managing your E-commerce PPC account, keyword management is the most important action of all, you have to balance out broad and ultra-specific keywords with the correct bid management for your account budget.
E-Commerce PPC can be very competitive. There are endless keyword terms you have to filter out for your products so making a negative keyword list for each campaign is so crucial for your account.
For example, you might be selling high-end sofas but be pulled through search terms like “cheap sofa” or “sofa deals online” which is the wrong audience.
Knowing how to specify your audience is certainly key, if you think you need help with setting up your PPC campaigns then speak to one of our PPC experts today.
As for shopping campaigns do not bid on keywords, you may want to escape the vicious cycle of paying for expensive clicks on the more general and competitive keywords terms on your product, you can do this by targeting the specific end of the spectrum by including the model numbers, part names, or UPC codes on your product title making it more specific for the user searches.
It’s always important to check what is going on in your neighbourhood too, take a look at what your competitors are doing and outshine them with more eye-catching ad copy and see what they’re bidding on, but don’t bid on their brand, it’s apples and oranges baby and you want to prioritise your keyword spend.
What have you gained from our E-commerce guide to PPC Advertising?
We hope by reading this post you have more of an insight on E-Commerce PPC advertising and what is best for your business, we can’t give away all the tricks in the book, however, if you need some PPC advice or would like to invest in PPC with Lightbox, you can get in touch with us here.
