eCommerce industry is growing rapidly nowadays.
According to a recent study, there are over 1.3 million eCommerce companies in the US alone.
Now that’s not a small figure.
So, as an eCommerce business owner, it’s crucial for you to identify and implement marketing strategies that provide as much ROI as possible for your business.
This is where the PPC marketing strategy comes into the picture.
PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising and it’s one of the highly effective marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses.
And if you execute it correctly, it can most certainly help you to boost your eCommerce revenue.
How Does PPC Marketing Work?
PPC is indeed a spectacular marketing strategy for increasing ROI, and just only for eCommerce businesses but for all kinds of businesses.
This is mainly because, in PPC marketing, you have complete control over how much you’ll pay for each ad.
You see, PPC operates on a bidding system, which allows you to decide how much you want to bid for each keyword.
And the good news is, the average Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for eCommerce is only $1.16 USD.
This is, in fact, the lowest CPC compared to any other industry.
And the low CPC associated with your ads, the less it’ll cost you to advertise your products while charging the same price for the products.
For example, let’s suppose that you spend $100 on your eCommerce PPC campaign and you make $250 in revenue from your ads, then your ROI is 150%!
In simple words, you earn $2.50 in revenue for each $1 that you spend on PPC marketing.
And in this article, I’ll share with you 3 outstanding strategies to boost your eCommerce revenue with PPC marketing.
3 Outstanding PPC Strategies to Boost eCommerce Revenue
Now that you have a basic understanding of PPC, let’s move forward and discuss the 3 outstanding PPC strategies you can implement to boost your eCommerce business revenue.
eCommerce PPC Strategy #1 – Shopping Ads
Shopping Ads are basically a new form of ads, which are also known as product ads.
Every major ad platform has its own version of this type of ad.
For example, Google has Google Shopping Ads and Facebook has Facebook Product Ads.
Now, the majority of eCommerce business owners often start with Google Shopping Ads, so I will be mainly talking about Google Shopping Ads here.
If you own an eCommerce store, then it’s always recommended to prefer Google Shopping Ads instead of traditional text-based ads.
One of the reasons why is because simply because Shopping Ads are extremely eye-catching than traditional text-based ads.
Plus, Shopping Ads also allow you to include additional elements such as pricing and promotions.
To learn more about Google Shopping Ads Campaign, read Google’s Guide.
That being said, here are a couple of best practices to keep in mind while setting up your first Shopping Ads campaign:
- Use High-Quality Images – This is pretty simple. If your product images are not particularly appealing, you’ll definitely lose to the competing listings that have better-looking product images than you.
- Be Specific – Instead of writing a general description like “Wool Socks for Men”, be more specific about your product like “Matt Black Jockey Men’s Wool Socks, Size 8, Machine Washable”.
- Pricing – When pricing your products in Google Shopping Ads, you need to take of 2 main things. First, you need to make sure that the product price you enter in your Google Shopping Campaign matches with the one on your eCommerce store.
Secondly, If you’re selling the same exact product as your competitors, make sure you’ve set competitive pricing. For instance, if your competitors have priced their product cheaper than yours, then you most probably won’t get as many clicks on your Shopping Ad.
eCommerce PPC Strategy #2 – Retargeting Ads
To further increase your chances of getting more clicks on your Shopping Ads and boost your eCommerce revenue, you should really consider running a remarketing or retargeting campaign.
Here’s how a Retargeting or Remarketing Ad works – A potential customer comes to your online store, browses a couple of pairs of boots, then immediately exits when they realize they’ve something important to do.
With retargeting ads, when these customers later open their Facebook App or Youtube App on their smartphone during the lunch break, boom! They’ll see the exact pair of boots they saw on your online store.
This strategy basically tempts these potential customers to revisit your online store and make the purchase.
To learn more about retargeting ads, read Google’s remarketing guide.
Likewise, if you want to run a retargeting campaign on Facebook, read Dynamic Ads.
Now, if you decide to run retargeting campaigns to increase your eCommerce revenue, one most important thing you should keep in mind is that you must give your potential customers some kind of incentive such as a promo code to increase the chances of making more sales.
eCommerce PPC Strategy #3 – Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are basically keywords that you should tell the ad platform to NOT to show your ads for.
For example, let’s suppose you sell wine or water glasses. However, in order to reach a broader audience, you mistakenly bid on the keyword “glasses”.
Now, what will happen is, a searcher enters the keyword “glasses” in Google while looking for reading glasses, and your Google Shopping Ad feature wine glasses will show up alongside with Warby Parker’s.
And when the searcher accidentally clicks on your ad only to found out he clicked on the wrong link, he or she will immediately close your webpage, driving up your bill.
So, after creating your Google Ad campaign, it’s extremely crucial to identify and add all negative keywords that are obviously wasting your ad budget.
One way to do this is by regularly tracking your campaigns, identifying all the negative keywords for which you’re getting a lot of clicks, and adding them to your Negative Keywords list in your Google Ad campaign to instruct Google to stop showing your ads for those keywords.
To analyze for which keywords you’re getting hits from, simply check out the Search Terms Report in your Google Ad Campaign.
Concluding Thoughts…
Like I said earlier, when it comes to eCommerce PPC, tracking is the key.
Now, I totally understand that setting up your first ever PPC campaign seems pretty intimidating. But by implementing the above 3 eCommerce strategies, you’ll most certainly be well on your way to generating positive results.
With that being said, if you’ve any questions regarding eCommerce PPC, I would love to answer them in the comments!
