As an ecommerce business, the number of visitors your website receives on any given day is incredibly important. A lack of visitors to your website is as alarming as a brick and mortar store that’s devoid of customers.
While there are a number of worthwhile and effective digital marketing methods (SEO, Conversion Rate Optimization, Content Marketing) to compel audiences to visit your site, there is one approach that is incredibly powerful for ecommerce businesses: Pay Per Click.
In recent years, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has risen to the top of the digital marketing list as one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website, generate conversions and increase sales for ecommerce businesses.
Why?
PPC advertising allows your business the opportunity to target specific audiences so it can reach potential customers at the best time in the right place.
However, creating and launching successful PPC campaigns requires a lot of planning and strategy. And if you or your team are not familiar with the specifics of PPC advertising, you or your team may end up investing in PPC campaigns that underperform and don’t deliver optimal results.
In the following article, we’ll provide you with an easy-to-understand checklist that can help you build better PPC campaigns for your ecommerce business.
What Is PPC Advertising And How Does It Work?
Since you may be unfamiliar with PPC advertising, it’s probably a good idea to give you a brief explanation of this digital marketing method.
Pay-per-click advertising, typically abbreviated to PPC, is a digital marketing strategy that lets businesses place ads on search engine results pages (SERP) such as Google and Bing. However, these ads can also appear on other websites as well such as YouTube.
Unlike many forms of traditional advertising such as print or TV, PPC advertising doesn’t charge a flat fee to run an ad. Businesses only pay when an audience member clicks on their PPC ad.
Here’s how PPC advertising works:
- A business creates an ad.
- Next, the business bids on certain keywords that are related to their brand, products or services.
- When a user searches on Google or Bing, the ad appears at the top of the search engine results.
- If the user clicks on the ad, the business pays a fee to the search engine or website where the ad appeared.
The cost-effectiveness of PPC advertising makes it an increasingly attractive proposition for businesses, especially if they have limited marketing budgets.
Now that you know a little more about PPC advertising and how it works, let’s look at some of the important steps you can take to ensure your PPC advertising campaign is successful.
1. Define Your PPC Goals
Before you begin planning or creating any marketing campaigns, you need to know what it is you want to achieve. PPC campaigns are no different.
The first step you need to take before creating your first PPC campaign is to define your goals.
Do you want to create awareness of your brand and drive more visitors to your site? Perhaps, you want to promote a new product that you just launched? Or, is your top priority to increase your sales?
By defining your goals in advance, you understand the direction your campaign needs to take. This allows you to create a campaign that is completely aligned with your specific business objectives.
2. Pick The Right Keywords
Now that you have decided what the goals of your campaign are, you can move onto the next part of your campaign creation process.
Conducting keyword research is vital for the success of your campaign. Since audiences are searching for specific words and phrases to answer their search engine queries, it’s important to include these keywords in your PPC campaign.
By identifying relevant keywords your target audience uses to find brands or products that are similar to your ecommerce business, you can then implement them in your PPC ads so they can appear more prominently on the user’s search results.
So, how do you find the keywords that are relevant to your audiences’ needs and wants? One of the best ways to determine which keywords are best suited for your ads is to use a tool like Google Ads Keyword Planner.
This free tool that’s available in the Google Ads platform, allows you to generate relevant keywords. Additionally, it also provides bid estimations for those keywords to help with your overall campaign strategy and adjust your PPC marketing budget accordingly.
Besides finding the best keywords for your ads, it’s also important to rule out words that can negatively impact your campaign results.
Using a tool like Google Ads Planner lets you identify negative keywords, too. These keywords and phrases that you don’t want to trigger your ads in search results (and result in unnecessary fees that can deplete your campaign budget).
For instance, if your ecommerce website sells men’s business suits, you wouldn’t want your ads to appear in search results for “men’s tracksuits”. By adding “men’s tracksuits” to the list of negative keywords, you can block your ads from appearing in search results related to that phrase.
3. Create And Optimize Landing Pages
Ok, you’ve defined your goals and identified which keywords are (and are not) best suited for your audiences’ queries. While you might expect the next step to involve creating your campaign and its corresponding ad, we’re not yet ready for that part of the process.
Before you create your ad, it’s important to have your landing page in place.
What’s a landing page?
As the name implies, your landing page is the dedicated page that the audience will land on when they click your PPC ad.
Since the landing page is the place where you want to turn a visitor into a customer, it has to make a positive impression. Creating a landing page that is visually appealing to your audience, and loads quickly on their preferred device is essential to its success. If the page’s design looks cluttered or outdated, the visitor’s first impression of your brand won’t be very good.
And if the landing page takes too long to load or isn’t mobile friendly, the visitors’ will leave the page as fast as they can.
Additionally, optimizing your landing page for conversions is equally important to its appealing design. To compel visitors to convert to customers, your landing page should have clear and engaging messaging that uses relevant keywords to explain the purpose of the page – and relate to the audiences’ queries and interests.
Finally, the landing page should include a brief but effective call to action button or message to entice the audience to click and achieve the intended goal of your ad (learn more about your products, fill out a form, contact your team for a demonstration or make a purchase).
4. Set Up Your PPC Campaigns
Once you have your landing page created and optimized, it’s time to start setting up your PPC ad campaign.
First, you need to determine and choose the campaign type that best fits your intended goals.
For ecommerce purposes, your business should review and choose one of the following campaign types below:
- Search Ads: This is the most common type of campaign for PPC advertising. These ads appear when audiences use a relevant keyword in their search engine query. The ad appears in the search results and the audience clicks on it if the ad is compelling.
- Display Ads: This campaign type displays ads on websites and apps that are part of the Google Display Network. These ads target the interests and behaviors of the target audience and appear on sites or apps that are relevant to these factors.
- Video Ads: Like its name suggests, this campaign type displays video ads on platforms such as YouTube when visitors search for content that is relevant to your brand/product. This ad type is a great choice if your product would normally require a great deal of text to explain or is difficult to understand.
- Shopping Ads: This is another campaign type that is highly effective for ecommerce businesses. These ads appear on search engine results pages when the audience searches for a particular product. It works when ecommerce advertisers upload their product inventory to the Google Merchant Center. If a user clicks on their ad, they are directed to a product page on the ecommerce site.
Since each campaign type has its own unique advantages for ecommerce, your business should review them carefully and choose the type that best fits your goals and meets your target audiences’ needs and interests.
5. Create Effective PPC Ads
You’ve reached the step of the process that requires you to create the ads that will be used in your PPC campaign.
Your ad needs to stand out in search results, immediately grab the attention of your target audience, and convince them to take action.
To make your ads appealing to your target audience, we recommend:
- Engaging your audience with an attention-grabbing headline.
- Appealing to their interests with clear, concise messaging that uses relevant keywords that match their queries.
- Employing Google Ad Extensions to provide your audience with additional helpful information such as product pricing.
Now you’ve completed all of these steps, your ads are ready to meet their target audience.
However, the process isn’t over.
6. Monitor, Test And Refine Your Campaigns
For your PPC campaign to be successful, it needs ongoing monitoring, testing and refinement.
You should monitor your active PPC campaigns on a daily basis and make any necessary adjustments based on their current performance.
You can also determine if one campaign style is more effective than the other by performing A/B testing. Test different ad messaging, multiple landing pages designs, and distinct keywords to see which ad is performing best.
Then you can make any refinements to ensure that your campaign delivers the best results.
7. Track And Analyze Your PPC Results
Finally, we come to the last step of the process: Tracking and analyzing the campaign results.
Using tools like Google Analytics, you can review your website traffic, conversion rates and revenue. Not only will this data help you understand how your completed campaign performed, it can also be used to inform your future campaigns.
By tracking and analyzing your results, you can better optimize your next campaign and make more data-driven decisions about your overall PPC advertising strategy.
Experience Optimal PPC Results With Expert Help
Clearly, PPC for ecommerce is an effective way to achieve your business goals and objectives.
By following the checklist above, you’ll have a better understanding of this marketing strategy so you can make more informed decisions when it comes to launching your first PPC campaign.
If you still find the world of PPC advertising a bit confusing or you simply don’t have the necessary bandwidth to pursue this marketing channel, we can help.
Results Repeat is ready to be your full-time ecommerce PPC management team.
Our PPC experts can help your ecommerce business
- Define its goals.
- Find the keywords that are relevant to its audience.
- Create and optimize first-class landing pages.
- Choose the best campaign type.
- Create engaging and compelling PPC ads.
- Monitor, test and refine your ads for maximum effectiveness.
- Track and analyze campaign results to inform future campaigns and overall ecommerce PPC strategy.
Ready to enter the exciting world of PPC for ecommerce?
Contact us today to learn more about our expert ecommerce PPC management services!
