Tips for setting up a successful ecommerce AdWords campaign

Google AdWords is one of the most powerful advertising avenues in the world, but also one of the most intimidating and confusing. This tool has a massive interface, tons of options and its functionality is constantly being updated. It’s no wonder why so many businesses prefer to outsource their AdWords campaigns to professional agencies, it can be a stressful job setting things up.

Aside from that, I wanted to shed some light on AdWords in this post by giving you five tips for setting up a successful ecommerce Adwords campaign.

1. Track everything

In marketing, facts tell. Never bring an opinion to a marketing debate, bring facts. You will never know if your Adwords campaign is successful unless you track conversions.

The first thing you need to do is set up Google Analytics and ecommerce tracking, the second thing you need to do is make sure your Analytics is connected with your Adwords account. In doing so, you will be able to track the sales that come through each Adwords campaign. This gives you the ability to see which campaigns are working and which are not.

Your first order of business is to get things tracking!

2. Have a strong landing page

There is no point in sending traffic to a page that isn’t built to convert; this would just be a waste of money. Utilizing landing pages gives marketers the ability to create, test, optimize, and convert on their own without needing IT/development help. 

Just remember your website is supposed to be an asset to your business, so please invest in creating a website and landing pages that will help you profit in the long run!

3. Use proper messaging

When you create an ad in Google AdWords, you get to target people based on what they are searching for. This means you should be really specific with your ads to really target your ideal customers. This does two things for you

1. It creates higher conversions because your ad is directly speaking to what somebody is searching on Google.
2. Increasing click-through rates on your ads, which in turn decreases your cost per click and overall ad spend.  

Best practices and examples

If your product and landing page is about dog sweaters, you will want to make sure you only target people in Adwords who are searching for dog sweaters, not dog jackets, not dog hoodies, not dog clothes, but specifically “dog sweaters”.

Now you want your ads to include the keywords that you are targeting. This will help with your quality score in Google Adwords and reduce the overall cost per click. It will also help with your CTR.

Now think of this in the consumer's mind.

1. The shopper goes to Google and is looking for dog sweaters.
2. The first ad he sees, says, “Buy High-Quality Dog Sweaters”.
3. When he clicks on the ad, it brings him to the page that is specifically for dog sweaters and nothing else.

See how everything falls in line. There is no disruption in the messaging from the Google search, to the ad and then to the landing page. The messaging stayed the same throughout the entire process. I know this seems pretty straightforward, but lots of people are messing this up with their AdWords campaigns. 

Normally you want everything to line up like this to have the best chance for success with your campaigns. This is why you will want to have multiple landing pages and multiple ad groups built out to make sure every ad you create in Google AdWords lines up with the same messaging. If you like wasting money, you can skip this part.  

4. Use extensions

Another very useful tip that you should be applying to every campaign you set up is extensions.

These are extra snippets you get to apply to your ads. There are many different options like address, phone number, site links...etc. You are going to want to take full advantage of these for a couple of reasons.

1. When you add extensions it increases your quality score in Google Adwords.
2. It will increase CTR as you can take up much more digital real estate with your ads.

5. Test & optimize

Last but not least, you need to constantly be testing and optimizing your campaigns. You will rarely get a successful campaign right off the jump. You will need to run splits tests on your ads, you will need to run split tests on landing pages, you will need to check and see what keywords convert and which ones don’t with all your campaigns and adjust your spend accordingly.  

This is how you build a successful campaign. It’s not about throwing ads up and hoping for the best, it’s about constantly optimizing your campaign so that you can get it converting exactly how you want it through constant testing.

What’s next?

Now that you know what you need to be doing, you need to start taking action on the points mentioned above. If you already have campaigns running, check to see if they are following the tips mentioned in this article and make the necessary changes. If you're still hesitating to start your first campaign, just realize you will never get things perfect the first time. You need to start and learn as you go to really understand how to run a successful campaign because no matter how much information you read or learn, practical knowledge will always be the best learning experience.

If this doesn't sound like something you want to do and would rather outsource it to a professional agency, contact us today and we will be more than happy to put you in touch with one of our partner agencies that can help you out!