With the share of digital ad spend at 29.9% in 2015 and expected to increase to 39.3% in 2019* the digital advertising marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive for ecommerce retailers.
With this in mind, optimising paid search should be a priority for all retail marketers in 2016. Let’s take a look at some of the most important pay-per-click tips for online retail:
1) Segment Campaigns
Google Shopping and AdWords allow you to bid at product or keyword level, however, this is a feature that many advertisers fail to adopt. It is particularly important in online retail to segment your Google Shopping campaigns to the finest level possible, because your inventory may be seasonal and individual items have different bidding values.
Let’s take ‘women’s clothes’ for example. You could easily just create a single ad group containing all women’s clothes ads; however, this could easily lead to poor performance. It would be a much better decision to segment your products into groups such as ‘blouses’ ‘jumpers’, ‘trousers’ ‘shorts’ etc.
Doing so will allow you to have much better control over bids and bid according to seasonality for example. However this could be taken a step further: it is actually possible to bid for each individual product, so if you know that yellow shorts sell better than the green ones, you can adapt your bids accordingly.
2) Focus on environmental factors
When reviewing your campaign performance, it is tempting to focus on the reasons why you are not making sales, but perhaps you should also be looking at when your campaigns are performing their best?
By looking at the reasons for “good performance,” you may find that your sales can be influenced by environmental factors such as the time of the day, the user’s device or the weather, to which you can also adapt your bidding strategy.
3) Use geographic bid modifiers
For both AdWords and Google Shopping campaigns, consider implementing geographic bid modifiers. Do you only deliver to a certain region? Restrict who can see your ads. Are there some areas that convert better than others? Bid up!
Ivan is a professional digital marketer and advertiser.
He’s been doing this forever and there are few people that know the ins-and-outs like he does at the strategic, technical, and optimizational / practical level.
Whether you’re thinking about advertising for the first time, or looking for help identifying issues and / or correcting current campaigns, Ivan will make the process a truly simple one.
He does not speak computer geek.
He discusses with you in plain and easy terms exactly what we need to do (and never tries to sell you on unneeded extras).
He cares deeply about creating useful and effective campaigns that highlight your brand — and he can be as much or as little involved as you need; from sharing insights with your trafficking team to actually being your team.
Contact Ivan with your digital advertising or marketing related concerns.