8 Most Important Paid Search Tips For Online Retail Businesses

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!

Keep reading…