Google Ads for Clothing Retailers: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads is the best platform for clothing retailers looking to promote their products online. It has the right ad types to help you increase sales and achieve brand awareness with your target markets.

There are many tools available in Google Ads that you can use to advertise your business. There are keyword research and forecasting tools, sales tracking tools, campaign setup tools and many more.

And your choice of tools depends on what you want to achieve.

Getting started is easy. All you need to do is create an account at ads.google.com first and you can do that in a few minutes. Next, you’ll create your first pay per click (PPC) campaign, and I’ve included instructions below that will help you to do that from the Campaigns page.

 

Campaign objective

The primary Google Ads objective that clothing retailers should focus on is ‘Sales’. And you can drive sales on your website or from your store if you have one.

Using an objective can help your campaign achieve a specific outcome because you’ll see suggested campaign settings aimed to help you obtain that objective.

 

Campaign type

A Sales objective presents you with a number of campaign types to setup like Search, Shopping, Display and Video. Each of these Google Ads campaign types will help clothing retailers to drive sales online or offline to their stores.

Search and Shopping are the best to setup because they target people who are actively looking for your products. With Search you’ll add keywords and bid on them, whereas with a Shopping campaign you’ll create a product feed and upload it to your Google Merchant Centre account and your products will appear on Google when people do a search.

In this article we will focus on creating a Search campaign for your clothing business.

 

Budget

Budget is an important factor for your Google Ads campaign. For clothing retailers the challenge is always to know what budget to set at the beginning of the campaign and when to increase it.

Because Google Ads allows you to set a daily budget, you can change this as often as you like. And you are able to share budgets with other campaigns to monitor how much you are spending easily and control it effectively.

For clothing retailers, a good test budget to start with is $1000 or £700 for the first month. And as performance improves and as you get more sales you can increase it in subsequent months.

 

Bidding

Google Ads has a number of bidding strategies that clothing retailers can use to promote their websites and products. These include automated and manual bidding strategies and each serves its specific purpose.

For new campaigns, Maximise Clicks is one of the best bid strategies to start with. It will help to get as much traffic as possible for your budget.

And later you can check the Recommendations page for any bid suggestion changes.

 

Keywords

Use the Keyword Planner tool to find keywords that you should add to your campaign.

The tool comes up with suggestions based on what people have searched for in the last few months. And you can add these to a plan and do some forecasting to see what traffic volumes you’re likely to get.

Also, start by using phrase and exact match keywords. Later you can add broad match keywords when you want to increase click volumes.

This is an example of a keyword in phrase and exact match type formats.

“womens shoes” – phrase match keyword
[womens shoes] – exact match keyword

 

Text ads

In your campaign, you should create up to 15 tightly-themes ad groups. These ad groups should relate to specific products or categories and the keywords in there should be closely related.

Follow the ‘rule of two’ which states that every keyword in the ad group should have two of the primary words in them. That helps to ensure the ads are well targeted to the search queries and helps to achieve high click through rates and Quality Scores.

You should create Responsive search ads in each ad group. These provide you with 15 headlines and four description lines to include all the benefits and features that relate to your products.

 

Ad schedule

The default setting in Ad schedule is for ads to run at all times. For clothing retailers this is the best setting because people search for retailers at all times and even when they are on their mobile phones on the go.

And they search in the evenings and weekends too when they are relaxed and have more time, and usually will complete their transactions then.

The Time reports will also reveal when you are getting sales and clicks and you can then adjust your bids to the best times or advertise only then.

 

Where your ads appear

For Search campaigns, your ads are eligible to appear on Google and its search partners. This is to target people that are looking for a clothing retailer online and also searching with specific keywords like ‘leather hats’ for example.

The search partners list drives a high number of traffic too and you can increase your clicks and sales by opting into this. And the Display network places your ads on third party websites that display image ads to people who are browsing.

 

Case Study

Wombat is an online retailer that sells products that are inspired by the Australian outdoors. They had campaigns that were performing poorly and they needed help to fix this. I setup new Search and Shopping campaigns and this helped to improve sales and the cost per click (CPC) dropped to just 17p per click on average. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

As a Google Ads Expert I manage campaigns for clothing retailers regularly and I’m able to setup and manage an effective campaign for you. Use the form below to contact me to discuss.