Google Ads for Ecommerce: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

A Google Ads campaign for an ecommerce business is the most effective way to promote and sell products on the web. It provides you with great control over your advertising features and budgets and better results than other digital and offline channels.

Whatever website platform you use, whether it’s Shopify or WordPress or another, there are many plugins and themes that can help you get started quickly.

There are also a number of campaign types you can setup including Search, Shopping, Display, Video, Performance and so on. But Search is one of the best to start with and that is what I’ll be covering in this article to help you get launched quickly.

So, here are my suggestions for how to setup your ecommerce campaign and start advertising your products. If you don’t have an account yet, first head over to ads.google.com to create one and follow the instructions there to create it. And then follow the guidelines below to setup your Search campaign.

Campaign objective

The “Sales” objective is the best option for an ecommerce website, to help drive customers to make an online purchase. This objective then determines the features you will have to setup and manage your campaign.

This objective can also help you drive visitors to your physical shops to purchase locally.

Campaign type

With Google Ads for ecommerce you have two primary campaign types to setup: Search and Shopping.

With Search you create text ads and add keywords to bid on and drive traffic to your website. This campaign is quicker to setup and within a few hours you can be up and running.

Shopping setup is a lot different, and requires that you provide a data feed of your products in your Merchant Centre account and link it to your Google Ads account. Your feed will go through a review process after setup and that usually takes up to three working days. When the products are approved, you can then create your account in Google Ads and start advertising.

So, my advice is to setup a Search campaign first and test your ads and keywords and then later setup a Shopping campaign to increase sales and traffic.

Budgets

When creating a Google Ads campaign for an ecommerce business, you can set whatever budget you like. This can be as little as $100 or £100 per month or even thousands each month, depending on affordability.

However, with a small budget, it will take longer to see which are your best performing keywords and products and to optimise the campaign effectively. So, start with at least $800 or £500 per month and increase it as you see performance improve.

To set your daily budget, take your monthly budget and divide it by 30.4, which is the average number of days per month (assuming you want to run your ads on all days).

Bidding

Some of the bid strategies available to other campaign types are not available for ecommerce businesses. For example, if you decide to setup a Shopping campaign you have access to target return on ad spend (tROAS), Maximise Clicks and Manual CPC bid strategies.

And if you decide to go down the Search campaign route, you have additional bid strategies like Maximise Conversion Value, Maximise Conversions and Target Impression Share.

However, whichever campaign type you create, you should start with the Maximise Clicks bid strategy to get as many clicks as possible for your budget. And then when you have a lot more data, maybe two or three weeks later or a few months later, you can switch to another bid strategy like Manual CPC, if you want to control your bids manually at the ad group or keyword level.

Keywords

Because you are setting up a Search campaign and then a Shopping campaign later, you will need to do some keyword research. The keywords you find should be highly targeted to the products that you are selling.

In your account, you will find the Keyword Planner tool under Tools &Settings. Use this tool to find the keywords you will bid on and use the forecasting tool there to see the click volume potential and what you are likely to spend.

This keyword research exercise will also help you set and adjust your budget. In fact, it’s often a good idea to start with keyword research and then create the campaign after and set your budget.

Text ads

A Google Ads campaign for ecommerce websites focuses on creating search text ads to promote products that drive online sales. There are different types of text ads you can run in your campaign but the most relevant are Responsive search ads.

This format gives you up to 15 headlines and four description lines to promote each of your products. And the Google Ads system rotates each of these to match the context when your ads appear to make them relevant to searchers.

So, try to add as many headlines and descriptions as possible, because this gives the system a better chance to make ads relevant and targeted.

Ad schedule

One of the major benefits of advertising in Google Ads for ecommerce businesses is that ads can be easily customised to run at any time. Using the ad schedule feature you can set the days and hours when you would like your ads to run.

Over the last ten years or so, the way people search and buy has changed significantly and they are even doing that on the go, on their mobile devices. People are buying on their mobiles a lot more, as mobile speed and responsiveness have improved.

So, it’s advisable to run your ads 24/7 initially to see which are the best times for your products. Then you can narrow it down as you look at your time segment reports to see how they are performing.

Where your ads appear

Whether you create a Search or Shopping campaign, your ads will appear on Google in the search results. The Search Ads are text ads and they appear at the top or bottom of the search results page, and the Shopping ads appear usually at the top right of the text ads or above them.

 

Shopping ads also appear on the Shopping tab and on this page you can get more details about the products you are interested in

Search and Shopping ads are also eligible on the Google networks on partner websites, including their own properties like YouTube, Maps, and the vast Display network of millions of websites and apps.

Case Study

Sofabed Barn are an online retailer of sofa beds and chair beds who offer an outstanding range of quality products. They contacted me to setup some new campaigns and I recommended a Shopping campaign. The new campaign helped to reduce the average cost per acquisition below £5 and cost per click dropped to just 11p. Read the full case study.

Get in Touch

Want to know more about how a Google Ads campaign for your ecommerce business could be beneficial to your sales? Use the form below to contact me and to discuss further.