How to stop wasting money when advertising your ecommerce store

Have you run Google Ads in the past and found you got a lot of traffic but not many sales?
When advertising online with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising most people make a few basic mistakes.

This article will show you how to avoid those mistakes and get a better return from your ad spend.

Need more traffic?

A common problem with online stores is gaining traction. You might have a great website with cool products but you aren’t getting enough eyes to your site. How to get the word out?

This brings ecommerce store owners to dabble with PPC advertising. They set up their Google Ads campaign and get traffic but not many sales. This is where most people get it wrong. The great thing about online advertising is that it is so precise.
We can advertise the right product to the right audience or would be customer when they are searching online.

So to make advertising online you need to take advantage of it’s unique benefits.

If you are sending traffic to your website’s homepage, you are doing it wrong.

This is the number one problem I see when store owners advertise online. They set up a Google Text Ad and send the traffic straight to their site’s homepage.

Why is it wrong?

Let’s say your ecommerce store sells shoes. Setting up an ad for the keyword “shoes” and sending that traffic to your homepage you are leaving it up to customer to find the shoes they want.

If you want to buy a car does the car sales man point you in the direction of the car lot and leave you to it? No. They want to know what type of car you want. What colour. Whether you want a fast one. Or a fuel efficient one.

By breaking up ad groups into categories and creating separate ads for them we can get the right ad in front of the right customer.
We can make our ads more specific and send them to the products they want.

By doing this you can decrease the amount you pay per click too. Broad keywords tend to cost more than more descriptive keywords. It is hard work bidding for the word “shoes” against a huge shoe company with a million dollar ad budget. But “woman’s long distance running shoes” could be cheaper.

How to do online advertising right.

In Google’s documentation it recommends send traffic to specific landing pages. In fact Google takes the page you are sending traffic to into account when calculating bids for keywords. A bid for the keyword “red girl’s dancing shoes” will cost more and be less effective if your homepage is your landing page than if you send the traffic to the girls dancing shoes category page.

So create you keywords based on the categories of your ecommerce store. Then make a list of relevant keywords and a few ads for that category. By combining the power of a relevant keyword, advert and landing page you should pay less per click and get more sales.

Google Shopping Ads

When running an PPC ad campaign for an ecommerce store it is best to use a combination of both text search ads and Google Shopping Ads.

Google Shopping Ads can be very effective. You may have seen them before at the top of the search results page.

Each ad contains the product image, product title, price and a link to the product. These ads are as specific as possible. They lead right to the product and make it more likely that someone will make a purchase.

Google Ad campaign Tips

• Base your keywords and ad groups on the categories in your store
• Include 5-20 keywords per ad group
• Send traffic to category pages. Not the home page
• Make your ads, keywords and specific
• Use Google Shopping Ads and Text Ads
• Measure conversions on your site

By advertising for specific, not general searches you will pay less per click and reach the right customers. Don’t worry if your ads get clicked on less individually. Remember, we want highly targeted traffic.

Also don’t worry about spending more by having so many ads and ad groups. How much you want to pay is set at the campaign level and applies to all the ads. You are only paying for clicks, not impressions.

Advertising online with PPC advertising can be overwhelming because of all the options. If you need help or advice, please get in touch.