PPC for Ecommerce: 8 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for your ecommerce business helps you to target people that are searching for your products and ready to purchase. And you can reach them with the many tools that are available on the number one PPC platform, Google Ads.

 

That includes using a number of creatives including text ads, product listings, image ads and more. So, you can setup different campaign types and reach them at different moments on various devices.

 

If you’re already running PPC campaigns, then managing them is important for you. So, each week and month there are actions that you need to take to ensure you are achieving your campaign goals.

 

In this article I’ve listed eight campaign management tips to help you run exceptional campaigns in Google Ads. These will help you get started effectively and continue monitoring and managing them to improve your ROI.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

 

One of the first actions you should take in your PPC account is to setup conversion tracking for your ecommerce store. This will help you track sales from your Search and Shopping campaigns and see which keywords and products are converting.

 

You can setup this conversion tracking in your Google Ads PPC account on the Conversions page and click the blue button to get started. This will bring up the page below and you can setup tracking for your website.

 

 

Also, consider setting up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics instead. This is more advanced tracking and will help you to track sales and the value for your shopping ads.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

 

Your Shopping and Search campaigns will show you the searches that are triggering your text ads and product listings. So, it’s crucial that you ensure these searches are relevant to your business to help you achieve a good conversion rate.

 

To prevent any searches that are not relevant, you should add negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level. Or you can add them to a negative keyword list as you find them in your search terms report.

 

 

3. Check Recommendations

 

An effective PPC marketing campaign management tactic for your ecommerce business is to regularly update the recommendations in your campaigns. You’ll find these on the Recommendations page and you can apply the relevant ones and dismiss any that are not.

 

 

Updating the Recommendations page weekly will help to improve your Optimisation score and bring it closer to 100%.

 

But you should check each recommendation carefully. Not all of them will be relevant for your business, so you should dismiss any that are not.

 

4. Find new keywords

 

For your keyword-based campaign types like Search campaigns, you will use keywords to target your customers. The keywords you use determine the type of searches that you get and how well you do for conversions. And you can continue looking for new keywords to add to drive more traffic and conversions.

 

So, use the Keyword Planner tool to identify new keywords to add and also check your search terms report. The search terms report for your Shopping campaigns will also give you ideas for new keywords to add to your Search campaigns.

 

5. Update bid strategy

 

A prominent recommendation that you are likely to see relates to changing bid strategy. This usually appears when you’ve been running ads for some time and managing your ads and getting click and conversion data. The machine learning system may find an opportunity with another bid strategy and recommend that.

 

And because you would have started with an automated bid strategy like Maximise Clicks or manual bidding, you may see a recommendation to change to a Smart bid strategy like Target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA). But you’ll need to review this carefully first to see if it will improve your campaign.

 

There are other bid strategies that you can test too. And you’ll see these in campaign setting and reviewing each in line with your goals will be helpful.

 

 

6. Do competitor analysis

 

To run exceptional PPC campaigns for your ecommerce business, you should review and analyse competitors in your space. So, check what they are doing in their PPC campaigns and how that can help your advertising.

 

SERanking is a platform that will help you with this. It will reveal how much other ecommerce businesses are spending in Google Ads per month on average. And you’ll see what keywords and search terms they are bidding on and how much they pay for each click on average. The Competitor tool in this platform will help you with this.

 

 

7. Consider broad match type keywords

 

For your Search campaigns, you should regularly review your search queries in line with the match types that you are getting. For phrase and exact match types you’ll have greater control over the searches that you get, as compared to broad match type keywords.

 

However, adding broad match type keywords will help you drive more clicks and some long tail searches that will convert better. And this could make your account perform better overall.

 

But, you should have a good negative keyword list to block searches that are not relevant. And this is especially important when you have broad match keywords.

 

8. Check Quality Scores

 

Quality Score is a keyword metric that is only relevant for Search campaigns and not others like Shopping and Display. So, it helps improve your campaign when you focus on the ad relevance, expected click through rate and landing page experience. These are the factors that determine your quality scores.

 

 

So, aim to get each of the factors to at least above average in performance and that will help to bring your scores closer to 10/10.

 

Case Study

 

Sofabed Barn is an ecommerce retailer of sofa beds and chair beds and provides a quality service to its customers. However, like many businesses in this space that are new to Google Ads, they were struggling to get a good return for their budget. So, they contacted me to provide them support. I setup a Shopping campaign and their average cost per click (CPC) dropped to 11p and conversions increased. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

 

PPC advertising for ecommerce businesses is a service that I offer. And I’ve worked with many over the 13+ years I’ve been a Google Ads specialist. Contact me below to discuss your requirements.