The average eCommerce customer will visit up to 9 times before they make their first purchase. Very few first-time customers will purchase one their first visit to your site.
The number of visits and time elapsed from the first visit to purchase increases as the value of the purchase increases with high ticket items $1000+ almost always requiring multiple visits before the first purchase is completed.
What this means is that you need to stay top of your customer’s mind while they are considering their purchase.
You need to remember that your customer is considering not just which product to buy next but also WHO to buy it from.
Remarketing is the solution to the WHO part of that equation.
Effective remarketing is the key to your business staying top of your prospective customer’s minds until they are ready to make a purchase. Remarketing gives you an opportunity to get in front of your competitors.
Google AdWords provides a suite of retargeting options that all eCommerce stores should use. You may well be familiar with retargeting on the Google Display Network but did you also know that you can retarget past visitors using Search Text Ads?
At a minimum you should be using the following Google remarketing options;
You can use these options to target the following;
We won’t go into how to set up each of these types of remarketing in this post (it would turn into a book) but your first step is to check your account to see what remarketing you currently have set up.
4. You aren’t using negative keywords in Google Shopping
Google Shopping ads differ from search text ads in that you don’t actively set target keywords for Google to show your ads to.
Instead, Google matches your products with search terms that they believe are relevant when their searchers make them. Generally, Google does a good job of this but sometimes they miss the mark.
Negative keywords are our way of guiding Google and making sure that our ads are only showing for relevant search traffic.
If you don’t have any negative keywords set in your Google Shopping campaigns it is almost 100% likely that your ads are showing to some traffic that will either never click your ads or never buy from you.
This is a problem as low CTRs affect your overall performance and a low conversion rate means you could be losing money.
Check your negative keyword lists today and make sure that you are a) using them and b) that they are up to date.
Keyword targeting for Google Shopping
Did you know that you can actually target keywords in Google Shopping?
This piece of knowledge is a breakthrough for many eCommerce business owners.
Keyword targeting is one of the most significant ways to reduce costs, increase CTRs and increase ROAS for Google Shopping ads.
But you don’t do it in the same direct way that you do for search text ads. You don’t actually “set” target keywords.
Instead, you reverse target keywords by telling Google which search terms you don’t want to show for. Using Negative Keywords.
If you tell Google what keywords you don’t want your ads to display to then you are effectively telling them which search terms you do want your ads to display to.
Having this level of control over your Shopping ads can drastically reduce your costs and increase your return on ad spend.
5. You aren’t using a funnel method for Google Shopping
Once you have been exploring the search term report for your Google Shopping campaigns you will notice that there are a broad range of different search terms that your ads are showing for. Some will seem very relevant and others will be broader and less relevant.
You could easily group search terms into the following categories;
If I sell coffee tables then each of these categories is going to be relevant to my business. But are they all as relevant as each other?
Is each of these categories as likely to convert to sales as each other?
If was selling coffee tables would I be prepared to pay the same amount for someone searching “coffee table” to come to my site and someone who is searching “Freedom Furniture brown wooden coffee table”?
Well, if I’m selling a brown wooden coffee table made by Freedom Furniture then I definitely want to make sure that I get as many people making the last search as possible. I would be prepared to pay the maximum I can profitably do to get that person to my site
On the flip side, while “coffee table” is still relevant to me, there are a lot of coffee tables on the market and maybe that person isn’t interested in the type of coffee tables that I have. They might convert but the chance is much lower than the Brand & Product specific term. So, therefore, I don’t want to spend as much to get them to my site because I will need more of those visitors to make a sale.
If you are running a single campaign, single ad group strategy with Google Shopping it isn’t really possible to prioritize one type of relevant search term over another.
Nor can you choose to bid more for one type of relevant search term over another.
You can just choose the binary option of yes/no for your ads to display for individual search terms.
It is possible however in Google Shopping to develop a multi-campaign, multi-ad group “funnel” to prioritize one type of relevant search term over another.
The benefits of doing so can be;
There are different Shopping funnel methods that you could implement depending on your market and the search behavior of your visitors.
What is important is that you start implementing a Shopping funnel today.
6. You aren’t using Google Analytics to help you measure your results
Google AdWords has a pretty good reporting interface compared to most PPC platforms. You can get a lot out of it.
It does, however, pale into insignificance next to Google Analytics.
While most people know that Analytics provides the complete view of all of your websites traffic many people are unaware of the specific AdWords and eCommerce data that it can provide.
Effective use of Analytics alongside the data provided by AdWords will enable you to make the most informed decisions and assumptions about what is working possible. This, in turn, will help you decide where and how much to spend to get the best possible result.
Analytics can be overwhelming but even if you only use a quarter of its potential regularly you will be in a much better place than if you don’t use it at all.
Want to know where to get started? Check out this great video we put together to help you get started. In the description, you will find a link to a Bonus FREE AdWords Campaign Report download that you can use in your account. It’s the same one that we use in our own stores!
To get this happening in your search text ads you will need to use an AdWords Script (outlined in point 17).
To set a Script all you have to do is visit the Bulk Operations option in the left side navigation (down the bottom of the nav) and click “Scripts”
Then it’s just a matter of choosing to add a new script, give it a name, enter the javascript, preview and set it to run.
If you have an existing active account you will already have a wealth of keyword data from your existing Shopping or Text Ad campaigns. Start with that.
An equation like “I spent $X dollars in X days and it resulted in X sales in that timeframe”.
That’s an important set of data to be considering but it does miss the bigger picture.
Consider this; if I pay $20 on AdWords to make a sale of $300 with a margin before ad spend of $50 it looks ok.
This content was originally published here.