When you have an e-Commerce website and you’d like to get more orders, AdWords is a great option.
As for all AdWords Campaigns, before you get you get your campaign running you’ll need to work out:
- The target geographic area where the ads will show
- The maximum daily budget that you’d like to spend
- What hours of the day your ads will run
- Which products you will advertise
- Which pages of your website the ads will be directed to
- What keywords you would like to use to trigger your ads to show.
If your budget is limited, it’s also worth looking at what keywords you get organic traffic for, so that you don’t end up paying for the same keywords in your AdWords campaign.
For e-Commerce AdWords campaigns, read on to discover three additional things that you should know in order to get the best possible return from your advertising spend.
1. How does your pricing compare to your competitors?
If you have an online store you’ll already know that the market is really price sensitive.
As well as competing with local businesses, you might have online competitors from other parts of the world who offer free shipping and/or lower prices.
A person can easily click on several ads to compare pricing before they decide where to place their order.
If your pricing isn’t competitive, or your business isn’t unique in some other way to make people want to buy from you, you might not get the return you hoped for from AdWords.
2. How will you track the results?
The best possible scenario for tracking results is to set up AdWords Conversion Tracking.
For an e-Commerce store, the best conversion to track is a completed order. Conversion Tracking provides information about how much you spent on AdWords clicks in order to get each order. It also provides information about the conversion cost of each keyword.
Conversion Tracking allows you to optimise your campaigns by allowing you to focus on the keywords that lead to conversions efficiently, and pausing those that don’t convert.
Conversion Tracking is relatively straight-forward to set up if you have a payment gateway and orders are transacted on your domain. In this case a piece of code is added to the final “order confirmation” page.
Similarly, a Goal can be set up in your Google Analytics account to track which source of traffic generated orders. This means that you can compare how well each traffic source converts to find out what your best traffic sources are.
If your payments are transacted via PayPal or another service that’s not part of your website, tracking conversions is more difficult. Either work with a really savvy web developer or you can also read this information from Loves Data.
When Conversion Tracking can’t be set up, what are the other options for tracking the return from your AdWords spend?
If it’s a new website with low traffic from other sources and when you run an AdWords campaign you start getting orders, it’s a reasonable link that the orders were generated by AdWords. But what happens when traffic from other sources increases?
Other scenarios are worth considering but if you’re serious about investing in Google AdWords in the long term to increase orders, get your website set up in a way that Conversion Tracking and Goals can be set up.
3. How much is an order worth?
Once you have Conversion Tracking set up you’ll get valuable insights into how much you spend on AdWords to get each order.
Over time your campaigns and website can be optimised to improve your conversion rate but right from the start you should know what an order is worth.
The value of an order relates to the profit on the order, and potential life-time value of a new customer.
For example you might sell a product for $50, of which the profit is $25. If you spend more than $25 to get the order then you’ve blown all your profit. If you have a loss leading strategy of spending money to get new customers because you have a great marketing program that allows you to get repeat orders from existing customers, you might consider this scenario OK. But if you need to make a profit from each order then you don’t want to spend more than the profit to get it!
This scenario is different for each business owner and varies depending upon the size of the order but you’ll need to work out what an order is worth in order to evaluate the return from your AdWords spend.
Need help with AdWords e-Commerce optimisation?
As well as optimising your ads for conversions, there are many other options for optimising your ads, for example:
- Changing your Ad Copy
- Changing your Keyword Match Types
- Adding Sitelinks Extensions
- Scheduling ads for times when they convert more efficiently
- Adding negative keywords.
If you need help making the most of Google AdWords for an e-Commerce website, give me a call on 03 9340 9018. I’m happy to do a free account review and get back to you with recommendations.
Until next time
Melinda
P.S. Also read Why it doesn’t pay to run good ads to a bad website
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Melinda aka Mel is a Google Partner, Google Ads & Consultant, Speaker and Trainer and co-owner of Click-Winning Content.
Mel provides results-driven services to organisations around the world and is committed to never using an acronym without explaining it first. She also likes greyhounds as pets, grand slam tennis, cracked pepper and Melbourne sunsets.
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