Next Level PPC Strategies for eCommerce Advertising!

Advertising geeks around the world are looking forward to the emerging era of E-Commerce advertising. New advertising genres are establishing strong roots in the marketing pool on a daily. Finding appropriate techniques which can reap powerful marketing strategies for your business can become tough. When competition is at its peak, it doesn't matter how much you spend, but rather the ROI you managed to receive as the end result! Here is the million dollar question:

“What can be done to make your eCommerce business strive in the next level of marketing?”

1. Campaign Structuring

Start with the best suitable campaign structuring to make the most of the advertising platform. Many online retailers fail to structure their account, due to which they lag behind in the race with their competitors. It is essential to organize the eCommerce campaign before proceeding any further. The AdWords account should reflect the structure of the website the business owns, which makes it easier to structure the campaign. One thing to keep in mind is that you should never bundle up multiple products into a single campaign with a couple of ad groups. It is always better to create separate campaigns for each product or product brand. For example, if you run an online sports shop, make sure you have a separate campaign for each product.

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2. Shopping Campaigns

On the mission to serve the right information to the right user at the right time, Google announced the testing of its new method of advertising features called Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in November, 2009. The Google Merchant center tool can be used for setting up a PLA where the product image, price, and merchant name can be uploaded as an XML or text file. This was a great innovation from Google and many advertisers have greatly benefitted from it.

Since the regular PLAs were limited and only selected merchandisers were able to create and run campaigns, Google introduced AdWords Shopping campaigns in October, 2013. With Google’s unleashing of Shopping campaigns, the new campaign type for PLAs, people are able to browse for a wide variety of products and find high-quality imagery as well as relevant product information such as brand and price. With Shopping campaigns, you can create the product groups for the items you want to bid on, as well as streamline how you manage and bid on your products, report your performance, and find opportunities to grow your traffic from Google.

After a three month beta period with an introduction limited to a number of advertisers, the shopping campaign has been rolled out to all users globally. Based on the great feedback from advertisers, Google has also added the feature to edit the bulk product groups, API support, and the bid simulator. Here is an official notification from Google regarding Shopping campaigns upgrade:

Regular Product Listing Ads campaigns are going away. Upgrade to Shopping campaigns!
Shopping campaigns are here with a better, more retail-centric way to manage your Product Listing Ads. We’re retiring regular Product Listing Ads campaigns in late August. Upgrade to Shopping campaigns today for a better way to promote your products. Learn more.

Now it’s time to find out how to utilize Shopping campaigns for eCommerce advertising.

When a regular user types something on Google search, the first impression is always based on the image results, in turn leading to heavy user clicks and conversions. For example, if you search for ‘Nike shoes’, the results are pretty impressive! A wide variety of shoes appear, listed along in the search results with the appropriate product descriptions, images, and prices. This saves time and allows the user to establish more insight about the product. Having a shopping campaign for an eCommerce site will raise the CTR and conversions, and the ROI will be very high compared to other ads.

Shopping campaign Benefits:

• Retail-centric campaign management
  • Browse your products in AdWords
  • Merchandise your products into product groups
  • Promote your sales with campaign priorities

Retail-centric campaign management permits you to browse your commodities inventory directory in AdWords and create groups of products that you want to target. For example, if you want to sell samsung handsets, you can refer to all types of mobiles in your datafeed and create campaigns for the types of handsets that you want to promote.

• Advanced reporting
  • View performance data by product attribute
  • Analyse item-level performance regardless of structure

With advanced reporting, you can track the performance of shopping by monitoring the ‘product group ads performance report’ through the product group tab or the account dimension tab.

Dimension > View - drop-down menu > Shopping >  choose the attribute you want to analyse

• Competitive landscape data
  
  • Track your competition with benchmark CTR and max CPC
  • Get insight into your competitive landscape with impression share
  • Estimate your impression and click opportunity with Bid Simulator

Google has offered a unique property called Benchmarking to monitor and improve the ad performance in shopping campaigns. Benchmarking data can help in comparing the product’s performance with its competitors. Below is an example of a competitor's bid.

Benchmark clickthrough rate (CTR) shows you how other Product Listing Ads for similar products are performing based on how often people who see the ad click on it.

Benchmark maximum cost-per-click (max. CPC) tells you how other advertisers are bidding on similar products.

3. Dynamic Marketing

Dynamic search ads allow you to show relevant ads without wasting your budget on products that are out of stock. With dynamic search ads, the existing text on your website is scanned, and Google serves up ads whenever a query matches the text on your site. When a user searches for something related to your website, Google will automatically crawl the site, dynamically generate a headline for the ad based on the user query, and display it. This process doesn’t make it necessary to add keywords individually to the accounts, thus getting control over larger campaigns and saving time. Adding individual keywords is only required for larger eCommerce websites with thousands of products or listings that frequently change.

In order to drive more ad queries without featuring the number of keywords, you need to use a simple snippet code which should be placed in the ad title text box. The code will automatically replace for the user search query when it displays for a user.

The following snippet code has been used for DSA keyword insertion;

{Keyword: Mobiles}

One of the most important things that you need to ensure while setting up a DSA is to add a set of negative keywords into the campaign. The reason for this is because there might be a chance of firing the ads for irrelevant search terms which can crash the budget plans.

4. Brand Promotion through Video Advertising

Video is the future of content marketing. Presently, more than half of companies use this medium for their brand building and business targets. YouTube receives more than one billion unique visitors every month – that's more than any other channel, apart from Facebook.

Below are the seven ways video outperforms static web content in the ruthless competition for market share.

• Video Attracts New, Relevant Search Traffic
• Video Assets Can be Easily Syndicated
• Videos Encourage Sharing
• Video Engages Site Visitors
• Video’s "Halo Effect" Drives Conversions
• Video Increases Customer Loyalty
• Video Creates Online Personalization
• Video Production Costs Are Falling, ROI Is Rising

All marketing techniques are unpredictable, therefore grabbing the best methods for business promotions is a good idea. Considering most sites have over a thousand products, eCommerce advertising campaigns are becoming harder to manage. Close monitoring of accounts are necessary in order to beat the competition, who's goal is always the same as yours; “ High ROI with Lower CPL”.