Advice on PPC for ecommerce start up

[Claire H]

Hi,

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has ran a PPC campaign alongside their online store. I'm in the process of setting up my own online store selling homeware and gifts. I will be involved in other types of marketing as well including social media, press releases etc. but as noone will know my brand to start off with I thought PPC would be a good way to drive traffic to the site from day 1. I just wondered if anyone has any experiences of PPC (good or bad) and also whether you went through and agency or managed adwords yourself?

Many thanks

 

[Toni Anicic]

If you're gonna run it on your own, make sure you first learn a lot about it since price per click and conversion rates you might receive can vary significantly depending on the way your campaigns are set.

I suggest you to start from here - https://support.google.com/adwords/topic/3374694?hl=en&ref_topic=3119106 and maybe even go through some of the official AdWords tests to make sure you understand how the system works.

If your niche is highly competitive, you might be better off hiring a really experienced agency to run your campaigns as someone who just entered the AdWords world, it would be hard to achieve a positive ROI competing with experienced competitors with years of data and testing behind their campaigns.

Any way you go, I wish you good luck!

 

[Ninja Commerce]

Hi Claire.

Just to start off, we are an agency, so I can't answer your question directly. But I cant give you some tips to help you hopefully.

Firstly, PPC is tricky, but it is certainly possible to set up a profitable campaign. You will greatly increase your chances if you do the work upfront before you launch your campaign.

How easy PPC will be for you will depend on what you are selling. If your product is fairly unique you will probably find it is less competitive than say if you just retail the same products as X other companies.

Either way, the most important thing is the return on investment, so put in the work to set up your tracking, learn what all the numbers mean and be obsessive about them.

Income = traffic (number of clicks) x conversion rate x average profit per sale
Costs = traffic (number of clicks) x average cost per click

As long as income is greater than costs, you obviously make a profit - that's all that really matters.

Set up conversion tracking before you launch your PPC campaign and you will be able to work out all of the above numbers - in fact Google does most of the work for you.

You can track conversion rate by campaign, by individual ad group and even by keyword.

This means that you can see if the campaign is profitable. Any keywords or adgroups which are not profitable can be paused - this is essentially pruning your loss making campaigns - hopefully you will be left with some ad groups which ARE profitable.

As soon as your campaign is break even, you can put your effort into optimizing ads to reduce cost per click and also optimizing your site to increase conversion rate.

For most businesses successful PPC is all about making small improvements - all you need to do is get those numbers past break even and into profitable, and then you can start increasing your budget and expanding your campaign.

Hope that helps. Good luck.

 

[Claire H]

Thanks for your response Think Traffic. How much would you recommend spending per month on PPC? Do you recommend display, search ads or PLA's or a mix of both? I sell more unusual homeware so it's not the kind of products you see everyone selling on Amazon or Ebay. Hopefully this would give me more of an advantage.

 

[Ninja Commerce]

Hi Claire.

No worries. Unfortunately I can't really answer those questions with anything more helpful than "it depends".

How much you spend at first depends on your budget. You should assume that at first your campaign will be loss making (it might not be, but assume worst case).

So you want to spend as little as possible in order to get the data you need to figure out things like conversion rate etc... You need enough traffic for those numbers to be statistically significant, before you can start making decisions based on them.

As soon as your campaign reaches a point of being profitable, even if only slightly, you should increase your budget. In theory at that point you are making more than you're spending, so spend as much as you can.

After that, any further improvements to your costs per click or your website's conversion rate will just improve your margin.

As for the type of Ads to use, try using all of them. Make sure that you track conversion rates and cost per sale and see which ones work best.

If you track for conversions you can see which types of Ads bring you the most sales (a much better statistic than just tracking for click through rate).

As long as you familiarise yourself with all of the numbers, there's no reason why you shouldn't turn a profit. And yes, in my experience your type of products can do quite well.

 

[Paprika]

Hi Claire,

A good place to start with Pay per Click for ecommerce is with Google Shopping ads (replacing PLAs). These are the ads with pictures of the product. They generally get good conversion (provided your photos and website are good) at a very reasonable cost.

These are relatively straightforward to set up (you'll need a product feed which most shopping carts provide) and can be very cost effective. I have clients who manage these themselves (with a bit of support) while for others I manage the campaigns for them.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like a chat about them.

 

[umbrella-technologies]

Before starting PPC Campaigns, Add Google analytics and Tag Manager. Create Goals and Tags to understand the behaviour of visitors on your website. And then accordingly plan your strategy for PPC. In Adwords use remarketing, will help you in better conversions.

 

[antropy]

A good place to start with Pay per Click for ecommerce is with Google Shopping ads (replacing PLAs).

I agree, from experience with our clients they get a far better return from Shopping PLA rather than AdWords.

 

[Peter Bowen]

Hi Claire,

I'm more experienced in using PPC for generating leads rather than making online sales but this article I wrote talks about some of the pitfalls of using PPC for ecommerce: http://www.pete-bowen.com/google-adwords/things-you-should-never-advertise-on-google

 

[altonroot]

To be honest with you, please refer all the things yourself if you want to run campaign on your own. I have seen many people who are running campaigns without analyzing much of the data and literally wasting their money. At first sight, it looks very easy, but optimize it to get best ROI is very difficult. I would also suggest you to go for Google Shopping ads first then you will get more ideas. There are huge importance of negative keywords as well. I would recommend you to hire someone in initial stage.

 

[plymgary]

A few things I do....

1. Don't waste money on mobile PPC ads unless your site is optimised for mobiles. I've set the mobile section to -100% in Google and will look at upping it once the site is mobile friendly.

2. Search partners seem to be a waste of time. Most of mine came from EBay and Amazon where I assume the viewer is just looking for a bargain. My business isn't price led. As I can't turn off specific sites, I disabled SP altogether.

3. Make use of negative keywords. Check campaign-->ad group-->details--->search terms-->all. You can see the unrelated keywords people have used to find you and put them into your negative list.

There's lots of other things to consider too, but I'd be here all day!