5 Essential eCommerce AdWords Tips

Advertising your eCommerce store on Google AdWords can be a very powerful tool for your business (that’s if it’s used effectively – of course).

There are many best practices, tools and features that you can use to attract customers to your website and generate sales. Here are 5 essential eCommerce AdWords tips to help make your campaigns a success:

Negative Keywords

It is very easy for an advertiser to waste money on AdWords management through poor keyword choice and keyword match choice, as well as the lack of negative Keywords.

Negative Keywords are a great way to cut out wasted spend and increase overall ROI, so if any of your Campaigns haven’t got these present then you really should start adding them in. They allow you to specify certain search queries that you want to show for. For example, if you only sell new items then you can add in the negative of ‘used’ and this will ensure that your ads won’t show for searches with this in.

Once you’ve added in your more generic negative Keywords, you will then want to be looking at adding in more product specific ones. These could be based on the colours, sizes, shapes that you have in stock. By doing this, you increase the overall relevance of the traffic going to the site and therefore you should expect to see some much better results.

Ad Extensions

There are many Ad Extensions that you can apply to your Campaigns or even Ad Groups that will really help improve the overall performance and attract potential customers to your website.

By making sure that you have all available, relevant Ad Extensions in place you can ensure that your ads stand out from the crowd, and as a result of this,  receive a much better CTR (Click-Through Rate) – Ads with more Extensions enabled have a much higher chance of receiving that click from the user, as opposed to an ad that doesn’t.

Another great reason to apply all Ad Extensions is that you can highlight more specific information in your ads that you couldn’t maybe fit into the standard text ad. This could be ‘Free Delivery’ or ‘Free Returns’ or example. Including more information in your ads can help the user decide which shop to purchase from.

Impression Share

Impression Share is a very important metric in AdWords, especially for eCommerce stores where users will browse around a lot between competitor’s websites. Impression Share is the metric in the Google AdWords account that shows you the percentage of Impressions that you have received out of the total number that you could have received.

If the Impression Share in your account is low this means you are missing out on Impressions, potential Clicks and Conversions. Ideally, you want to aim to get the figure as close to 100% as possible because if users are browsing between multiple sites, and your ad isn’t in the search results on the 2nd/3rd/4th/5th search then you will miss out on that sales.

Landing Page Optimisation

Landing pages will be very important to turn those Clicks into Sales. This is an essential part of any website and it is often overlooked by the advertiser. There isn’t much point in having a well-optimised campaign running that is sending users to a poor Landing Page because the Conversion Rate will be very low. Conversion rate optimisation could be the difference of a positive ROI and a negative ROI.

It’s also good to bear in mind that the Landing Page does affect the Keyword’s Quality Score, so not only will it help convert more users it might help you show ads higher up in the search results whilst paying less money for each Click.

Conversion Tracking

Lastly and most importantly is Conversion Tracking. This should be a must for all AdWords campaigns as it’s very difficult to judge what sort of return you are getting from your Campaigns. For most websites you will be wanting to track the ‘thank you’ pages and the newsletter sign ups, for example. In combination with this, you will want to set up eCommerce tracking for your online store.

This will allow you to see exactly how much revenue your campaigns are bringing in and you will be able to calculate whether the campaigns are making you a profit or not – There’s no point in paying £40 for a sale when the product only costs £20 as then you are making a loss! The data you get back from this will also help you optimise campaigns further to try and increase your overall return.

There are a lot more features that could have been put into this article. If there are any that you feel are a must then please leave a comment below.

Related Content

eCommerce Marketing Specialists

Which eCommerce Platform is the Best Choice

Speak with a SpecialistLearn AdWords With a Pro