There’s more to Pay Per Click (PPC) than meets the eye.
“PPC is one of the trickiest parts of eCommerce for any business owner,” says Craig Rhode, our Director of Digital Strategy.
“Not understanding the how, what, or where to spend your ad money can cost you a lot of wasted spend without any results.”
If you’re still on the fence about whether to commit to this marketing strategy, you’ve come to the right place.
In this post, we’ll shed light on what PPC brings to the table and why you should run a campaign for your eCommerce business. Whether you wish to do this with your team or hire PPC specialists to do the job for you, it’s important to know your business’s options for growing your business utilizing PPC for eCommerce.
1. Boost Brand Awareness
For new online stores, it’s hard to get in front of your target audience, especially when the majority of them already customers of your competitors.
In this case, it doesn’t matter if you have a great product in tow – you simply cannot compete against other eCommerce brands on a level playing field.
This is where paid search comes into play to help tip the scales in your favor.
Doing keyword research and bidding for terms where your ad copy will appear on the top of Google searches is a winning strategy.
By playing your hand well with your PPC strategies, you can immediately make a splash in the eCommerce market and potentially fast-track your way to the level of your top competitors, if not higher!
2. Complements SEO Strategy
Unlike PPC ads, SEO takes a while to take effect. You won’t appear on the first page of SERPs for quite some time. And that’s only if you optimized your content and have built authority with your site.
Did you know? Only 22% of pages that appear on the first page were published within a year. (Source: Ahrefs)
On the upside, SEO is much more sustainable than eCommerce PPC campaigns in the long run. To keep driving traffic to your site via PPC, you must constantly spend for your ad groups to appear on search.
With SEO, all you must do is monitor the search rankings of your pages without spending a dime. Granted, you’ll need to tweak the page to constantly work your way up to the top of organic search. But you don’t have to spend money every time to appear on search engines.
That isn’t to say that one is better than the other. On the contrary, SEO needs PPC and vice versa to generate the most traffic and awareness to your eCommerce business.
Paid ads allow you to quickly get noticed by your target audience, while SEO enables you to build a site that will rank on SERPs even without the need for PPC – it’s a win-win!
3. Create Highly Targeted Campaigns
Traditional marketing relies on display ads and billboards, hoping that your audience happens to notice your ad and become a customer. Online marketing allows you to target those exact people so only they can see your ads.
Normally, ads serve different purposes, from driving more traffic to one’s site to increase brand awareness, which we covered above.
But as an eCommerce brand, you’ll need to generate more customers from the ads you run.
In this case, creating shopping campaigns is the way to go.
This type of ad shows information about your product (name, price, seller) before you click on the page. You can see these ads on select commercial intent keywords, or you can hop onto Google Shopping to see product ads related to your search query.
With these ads, people who click on your product know its details and are much more likely to purchase it.
Ad retargeting is another method that lets you leverage PPC. You can set up a campaign that leaves a cookie on the browsers of people who clicked on a link to your site. They will then keep seeing your ads on different sites.
Why will prospects keep seeing your ads? Because they visited your site in the first place. This informs ad networks that people are interested in your site. As a result, they will keep seeing your ads until they clear their browser cookies.
It all goes back to precise targeting. eCommerce PPC allows you to market directly to your audience without the risk of targeting people who have no interest in your brand.
4. Maximize Budget
The beauty of Pay Per Click is in the name – you only pay for the number of clicks your ads received.
As part of researching keywords to bid on Google AdWords, you must know how much each click costs for that search term. Not all keywords cost the same – some are more expensive because they have higher search volume and more precise search intent, among other factors.
You can see the approximate cost of a keyword using Google Keyword Planner.
The range of costs helps you decide which keywords to bid on that fit your budget. You can take on expensive keywords but keep in mind that you’ll only have a few clicks before your budget runs out. Whereas bidding for moderately priced keywords allows you to show your ads and convert even more people.
The delicate balance of budget and keyword allows you to properly strategize on how you should approach your PPC campaigns so you can make the most out of your return of investment.
5. Data-Driven and Scalable
Once you’ve concluded your ad campaign, you need to delve deep into the results to gain insights into your PPC performance.
Learn which keyword and ad copy generated the most clicks on SERPs. From here, determine why they received the most clicks and replicate the process once again on your upcoming campaign.
At the same time, determine which aspects of your PPC strategy didn’t work. You can tweak the tactics of your strategy and run them again one more time, hoping for better results. Or you can just scrap those that failed and double down on the tactics that worked.
As you can see, PPC helps you build upon the previous campaign by creating better-performing ones using the data provided by tools like Google AdWords. By diligently working to improve your PPC for eCommerce, you can keep generating more revenue for your business!
Invest in PPC for eCommerce
With the growing number of online stores popping up in today’s world on top of established ones, you must use any opportunity to gain an advantage over your competitors.
And with the reasons mentioned, it’s a no-brainer to run Bing ads and Google ads for your eCommerce business.
It’s just a matter of getting PPC experts to help you navigate through the murky waters of keyword research, bidding, and ad copywriting to maximize your results. You don’t want to set aside a budget for a campaign that won’t generate results.
Ultimately, you want your PPC to work, and that only happens if you have an experienced person spearheading the operations.
“Even though it’s an extra cost, a true PPC professional should be able to find the right niche, audience, and targeting to double your investment,” says Craig. And at Romain Berg, we agree wholeheartedly!
If you have questions about this post or want to learn more about running the best campaign using PPC for eCommerce, leave us a message and we’ll get back to you shortly.