Advertising on Google AdWords can be one of the most cost-effective ways to increase your e-commerce sales, but only if done right.
Generating more and more sales is the ultimate dream of any e-commerce owner who sells online.
You can use Google AdWords to boost traffic and sales for your e-commerce website. Click To Tweet
Google AdWords is a remarkable platform that bridges the gap between the needs of the customers and your products.
Although other platforms have been gaining popularity, Google AdWords still leads the way to let the consumers get the right information about the product and them make the respective purchase.
Google AdWords had proved its worth of being a platform that catches potential customers when they are actively searching to buy what you have to offer.
It offers an extremely high level of accuracy and enables you to reach an exact target audience at the right time and location.
In this blog post, I am going to tell you about the AdWords Growth Hacks that every e-commerce owner should know to fetch far-sighted and long term results.
1. Using Google Shopping Campaigns to maximize benefits
Google Shopping is an online advertising platform that is specially designed for e-commerce owners to promote and sell their products online.
If you are an e-commerce owner looking to promote your products online, boost website traffic and find potential customers, then Google Shopping is a perfect match for you.
Google Shopping Ads are based on 2 platforms:
(i) Google AdWords is a platform where the shopping campaigns are created and the budget is set. Here, the bids are managed and optimizations are made in accordance with the performance of the campaigns.
(ii) Google Merchant Center is a platform that contains your product feed and details.
When a search match results from the database of your Google Merchant Center account, then only your shopping ads will get triggered.
These ads display a product picture, price information and the brand name of the store.
Benefits of using Google Shopping Ads
Better Click Through Rate
The Google Shopping Campaigns work using the product image and description that makes it more relevant and targeted to the users and their needs. Therefore, the CTR for the shopping campaign is much higher than the keywords based ads.
Broader Presence
According to the relevance of the search, more than one of your shopping ads can appear. This means having more visibility in front of your potential customers.
Important things to note with Google Shopping Ads
(i) You should make proper and efficient use of negative keywords. This will prevent your ads from being displayed for irrelevant search queries. For example, is you sell guitars but you do not sell violins, you can specify violin as an exclusion to tell Google not to show your ads when someone searches for violins.
(ii) You can also exclude the keywords that do not have a purchase intent. Like the keywords that do not have the product name, model number, brand etc.
(iii) You can set up Custom Filters based on your product feed.
(iv) Separate Campaigns by Priority. If you have multiple shopping campaigns that have the same product then you can use campaign priorities based on high, medium and low options.
(v) Another important thing to remember is that Image of the product plays a crucial role in the conversion cycle. Ensure that the image you use is of high quality.
To know more about the Google Shopping Campaigns, you can read my previous blog-Are You Running Google Shopping Ads in the Right Way.
2. Use Impression Share to Increase Sales
AdWords can provide an excellent source of qualified traffic who have a high chance of converting to sales for e-commerce websites.
However, there are a lot of e-commerce owners who spend more that they really need to in order to attract the potential buyers. This simply happens because of lack of careful monitoring.
For this reason, it becomes very important for you to monitor the below-mentioned metric.
Impression share is a critical component of AdWords that is often overlooked. Click To Tweet
Impression share is metric in your AdWords account the number of impressions you have received divided by the estimated number of impressions that were available.
The Lost IS (Budget) refers to the percentage of impressions that were not received by your ad due to lack of budget for that campaign.
The Lost IS (Rank) refers to the percentage of impressions that your ad missed out due to the low rank.
There is a common belief that customers only search, click and buy.
Although, this happens the majority of the times. But then this is not true in every case.
During the purchase journey, the customers search and click on a lot of ads before making the final purchase. They use different keywords and refine their search overtime.
Thus, here the importance of the impression share becomes crucial.
If your impressions share for a particular campaign is low, I’m afraid you are missing on a lot of impressions, clicks, and conversions because then your ads may not appear on the first page.
To improve your impression share you can ensure that you use the keywords that are relevant to your ad copy and landing page.
You can also experiment with the bids to see what kind of an impact it has on your impression share.
The more relevant are the keywords to the ad copy and the landing page will make your ads super relevant thereby increasing your impression share.
With increased impression share, your ads will get displayed more quickly for the relevant searches that will increase the CTR for your ads and you will be able to generate more sales.
The Impression Share is often an overlooked metric but it can be a great way to identify additional opportunities and drive more sales.
If you find that you are missing impressions due to lack of budget or because of Ad Rank, you should possibly have a look at the ROI your campaign is generating and focus on the areas that need improvements so that you can generate more sales.
It is also important to monitor the impression share to avoid losing impressions during the peak sale time and also to ensure that you do not miss out some significant volume of sales.
3. Landing Page Optimization
A landing page is that page of your website where the visitors are directed after they click on your ads.
The Landing Page is responsible for converting most of your visitors into customers. Click To Tweet
Whatever your business goal might be, optimizing the landing page will ultimately generate higher conversions for you.
The very first thing to keep in mind is that the landing page is different from the homepage.
The very first mistake made with respect to the landing page is that a lot of advertisers still direct the visitors to the homepage instead of directing them to the landing page.
There is a clear difference between the homepage and the landing page. The homepage is the introductory page of your website while the landing page is a single objective conversion page.
So, do not make this mistake of directing your visitors to the landing page, instead create separate landing pages that elaborately explain your product.
You are an e-commerce owner and you deal with products. So the landing page optimization tricks will be slightly different.
(i) Include a High-Quality Image
The first and the foremost thing that a visitor notices in your ads in the image of the product.
The users like to see the things before they buy them. Since you are selling your products online, they can not hold or feel the product.
All they can do is to look at the image of the product. Thus, you should use high-quality product images with multiple angle shots. Because the product images have the potential to either make or break your campaigns.
To create high-quality product images you should use a consistent image with clear background avoid any kind of distractions.
(ii) Have a Product Zoom Feature
Since you are selling products online so people can’t really hold the product.
Therefore, to make it easy for the visitors to know the minute details of the product, ensure to include a product zoom feature.
(iii) Incorporate a Wish List to Increase Sales
The Wishlist button comes handy when a certain customer likes a product but is unable to buy it straight away.
The Wishlist button helps the people to remember these products and buy them when the time is suitable.
(iv) Ensure to have a Product Size Chart
A lot of products like apparels, shoes, and accessories come in various size. Not all the people that are searching for your product will have the same size.
If you fail to provide a range of size to your visitors, they will reach out to some other site and you will lose potential customers.
Always mention the range of size that your product is available in and do not forget to include a product size chart with all the relevant information.
(v) State the Shipping Cost clearly
A lot of times it is the shipping cost that prevents the visitor from making a purchase. A lot of websites do not include the shipping cost in the beginning and when the visitor is about to make the final payment, the shipping cost suddenly appears making the customer reluctant in purchasing the product.
Therefore, to avoid confusion and reduce bounce rate, you should state the shipping cost clearly.
If you are delivering the product without a shipping cost, you need to state that also clearly to initiate more sales. Because the visitors are more likely to purchase a product when there is Free Shipping.
(vi) Show the Expected Delivery Date on the Product and Cart Page
It is a human tendency that customers do not like to wait long for their products. Waiting for the product sometimes makes the visitor bounce back.
By including a guaranteed delivery date you can initiate more conversions and sales.
(vii) Recommend Similar Products
Recommending similar products is a great way to introduce more products and increase sales.
If a visitor has purchased a footwear, you can recommend similar products to her just like the ones given in the image below.
(viii) Use Reviews
Before buying the things online a lot of people base their buying decisions on the customer reviews.
The customers trust online reviews just like the personal recommendation.
So to increase the sales it becomes very important to include customer reviews on your product page.
4. Making Most Out of The Dynamic Search Ads
Generally, an e-commerce store has to manage a lot of products. Sometimes even hundreds and thousands of it.
Many times managing the ads and keywords for each of their products takes a lot of time and effort.
For this problem, Google provides a solution that is named as the Dynamic Search Ads.
The Dynamic Search Ads are the ones that are created by Google for you. Click To Tweet
It allows you to target your users by using the content on various pages of your website.
This saves your time. Because now you don’t need to choose the keywords that a user might use to find your product.
Rather, Google automatically crawls through your website to see which searches are a good match for your products.
When the search query of the customer is relevant to your products then Google dynamically an ad headline that includes words from the customer’s search and the content of the landing page on your website.
Basically, the DSA works best for those e-commerce owners who have a rich content website. Since the Dynamic Search Ads are created by taking the relevant information from the landing page, thus, it becomes really important to have rich content in the website to get the best results from DSA.
DSA quickly directs the potential customers to what they want on your site.
How to Create a Dynamic Search Ads Campaign
(i) Login to your AdWords Account.
(ii) Click on the Campaign tab and select “Search Network Only” campaign from the drop down menu.
(iii) Select the campaign type “Dynamic Search Ads”.
(iv) Insert your website domain and then move on to the option of targeting specific pages.
The Dynamic Search Ads acts as a time saver for a lot of e-commerce owners.
Because now rather than investing a lot of time to match keywords to landing pages and creating ads, you can let Google create relevant ads which match the query of the user
Before you go ahead with DSA Campaigns, it is better to determine your target pages. In DSA Campaigns you can target the entire pages, specific pages or specific categories according to the need.
Also, you can prevent your ads from showing the out of stocks products.
After you choose the target pages, Google then looks for the searches that have relevance with your products. After locating a search that is a good match for your dynamic search ads, Google then generates a headline.
The headlines contain the search phrase and the content from the landing page that was chosen for your ad.
Google dynamically creates the headline and the URL. You have to just write down the two description lines.
Important things to note with Dynamic Search Ads
(i) The position of the Dynamic Search Ads is same as the normal text ads. The DSA enters the auction just like the keyword based ads and later the position of your ads is decided by the Maximum CPC that you have selected for your dynamic ad target and the Quality Score of the dynamic search ads.
(ii) The Dynamic Search Ads gives you full flexibility over the types of products that you want to show. For example, you don’t want to show ads for “out of stock” products. With the keyword-based ads, this task becomes quite time-consuming, of you have hundreds and thousands of products. The DSA makes your work quite flexible and easy here because when you add the dynamic ad targets, you can simply exclude the landing pages that contain “out of stock” products.
(iii) Reporting the metrics like the Conversion Rate, CTR, CPC etc in DSA is as easy as with the keyword based ads. You can also compare the performance of your Dynamic Search Ads with your keyword based ads.
(iv) You should also use negative keywords with your Dynamic Search ads to get the best results. Negative keyword also prevents Google from matching your web site to anything.
(v) If the nature of your website is dynamic i.e. if your website changes regularly, then you should avoid using DSA Campaigns
5. Taking Conversion Tracking into Account
Conversion Tracking is a method that lets you know that from where the conversion came from, what all factors led to that conversion and where is your budget getting wasted.
It is a powerful tool that allows you to identify how properly your ad campaign is working to generate conversions.
With the data that is recorded by conversion tracking, you can see which of your campaigns are working and which are not working.
By viewing these areas, you can optimize bids, ad texts and keywords accordingly.
A conversion could be an online purchase, an inquiry through a contact form, sign up to a newsletter or subscribing through an email. But in the case of eCommerce websites, it is usually the sales.
Conversion tracking is important for an e-commerce owner because it allows you to track the ROI of the clicks on your ads. It also helps you to know if a click can lead to an action on your website.
By this, you can identify the most valuable keywords in addition to the keywords that are not providing value to you.
According to this important information, you can optimize the keywords.
Next, after identifying the keywords that initiated a conversion, you can also cross reference the value of each conversion with the amount spent on clicks for each of those keywords.
For example, if you spent 2 Dollars on a keyword named “X” and it resulted in a purchase worth 20 Dollars. And you have access to data that allows you to evaluate the value of that specific keyword.
You can now assign more budget to campaigns that have similar keywords or you can even introduce more variations of that keyword to initiate more sales.
Conversion tracking is exceptionally easy to implement. All you need to do is insert a snippet of code on the landing page that a visitor reaches after they have completed a conversion.
This could possibly be a “Thank You Page”.
AdWords gets this code for you to paste on your relevant landing pages. You can get this code you go ahead with the signup steps for conversion tracking.
If you are an e-commerce owner and wants to track the purchase of your product on your online store then you must implement conversion tracking in your AdWords strategy.
6. Increase Brand Awareness through Customer Match
Customer Match is a feature in Google that shows ads to your customers based on the data that you share with Google which is further based on the data about your customers.
It allows you to show your specific ads to searchers who are logged in with their email addresses on Google, YouTube or Gmail.
Customer match is a very useful strategy if you have a strong email database. Click To Tweet
It shows your highly targeted ads to potential or existing customers at specific times.
Customer Match works in the following way:
(i) You will have to upload a data file of email addresses that your customers have given you.
(ii) You will then have to create or update a campaign to target your Customer Match audience.
(iii) When these users are signed into their Google Accounts, they will see your ads when they use Google Search, YouTube or Gmail.
Suppose you are an e-commerce owner that deals in shoes. The keyword “shoes” is very expensive to advertise because it is very broad and also has very high competition.
With Customer Match, you can show your ads to searchers who have previously made a purchase from you and now search for “shoes”.
Although the cost of the keyword will not get lowered but since the interest of the searcher is high so there are more chances that the purchase will be made.
It is a fact that the customer who returns have more chances of conversion than the new ones.
Here are some ideas on how you can you use Customer Match into profitable use:
(i) Convert Subscribers into Customers
If you have leads who have subscribed to your newsletter, you can use Customer Match to show specific ads to these people. This is highly effective because by subscribing to your newsletter they have already shown interest in your website. Hence, they are more likely to convert into customers.
(ii) Convert Past Purchasers into Future Customers
People who have made a past purchase from your website are more likely to make a purchase again. By using Customer Match, segment the past purchasers into groups like one-time purchasers, two-time purchasers and so on.
Remember, the more the customer purchases from your site, the more you should invest in bringing him back.
Since the conversion rate is high for the past purchasers, so they are worth the high bids and CPC.
(iii) Revive the Seasonal Shoppers
If your product gets purchased in a particular season, then you can reach out to existing customers at the right time.
If a customer purchased rain boots in the rainy season the same customer could be looking for a pair of sandals in the summer season or warm boots in the winters.
With Customer Match, you get a chance to invite that customer and offer the products that go are much needed during that season.
I have already discussed Customer Match and RLSA in detail in my previous blog.
Conclusion
While getting the most from the Google AdWords Ecommerce Campaigns requires some time and attention in detail. It is actually worth putting that much of effort.
For e-commerce owners, Google Adwords is a perfect platform to connect interested shoppers with your products.
If you are an e-commerce owner, looking to expand your customer base and sell more products. By far Google Adwords is the best platform ever. Only the right approach and management is what that makes the difference. Hopefully, the above growth hacks were helpful enough to let you increase your e-commerce sales with Google AdWords.
Originally published at adstriangle.com on June 23, 2017.
