E-commerce campaigns – All you need to know
This week, we have prepared an extract for you on what you need to know about e-commerce campaigns used by online shops and e-commerce stores. In the article we will go through all the cornerstones of what you need to know about webshops and webshop advertising to make your e-commerce campaigns successful and to measure them properly.
What are the basic requirements for a successful Ads campaign for a webshop?
To get results with Google Ads for your online shop, you first need to define your main goals. It is important to lay these out at the beginning of the planning stage, as different key objectives require different advertising approaches. Let’s see what steps you need to take to succeed.
- Preliminary survey: research, competitor analysis, budget
- Business objectives: profit? revenue? awareness raising?
- Set up appropriate metrics: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Merchand Center
- Set up advertising objectives and Google Ads campaigns to match them
- Measure results and analyze them, draw the necessary conclusions and make adjustments
You need clear business objectives, a realistic market assessment, proper preparation and planning, professional measurement and a professional campaign strategy that matches your objectives to achieve the right results. Read more on the subject here.
The essence of a good online store
Nowadays, creating a new webshop is not as difficult as it used to be, and with many webshop engines you can link your own webshop without any web development knowledge. However, the devil is in the detail, as some of the advanced settings required for advertising can be difficult, not to mention the search engine optimisation aspects.
What should you look out for when setting up a new webshop?
- You must meet the technical requirements: SEO
- You must create a user-friendly interface: UX
- The page must load at an appropriate speed: Website load speed
- Ease of use: checkout process
- Provide payment methods
- Appropriate measurements
When designing a well-functioning webshop, seo-suitability, a user-friendly interface, a good shopping experience, good measurability, and for simple tasks, ease of use and a transparent admin interface are key. To ensure that the soup does not cost more than the meat, it is worth considering the channels through which you plan to drive traffic to the website and choosing a suitable webshop engine. For more information, click on our detailed description.
Webshop advertising
In order to make your online store a success, you need to meet a number of basic requirements and do a lot of strategic planning. What do you need and what should you look for to ensure that the digital marketing agency you hire can effectively support you in achieving your online store sales goals?
1. Pay attention to the questions the agency asks before launching campaigns. Examples include:
- Do you have a business and digital marketing strategy?
- What is the main business objective of your webshop?
- What ROAS objectives do you have?
Of course, you must have the right answers to these questions to succeed.
2. Define what your expectations are. Your goals should be clear, realistic and measurable.
3. Agency promises: a responsible digital marketing agency can only promise honesty, partnership and maximum professional attention to your online shop campaigns. Due to the complexity of the whole process, no specific result guarantee can be given.
In the case of an online shop, there are several other important conditions for a good return on investment, not only on the campaign side. For more thoughts on this topic, read this article.
Where to run webshop ads?
If you want to promote your start-up or existing online shop with online advertising, the question may arise: where is the best place to advertise your online shop, which of the two biggest online advertising platforms to choose, Google ads or Facebook ads?
For webshops, it is usually best to use Google and Facebook ads in a smart combination. Both online advertising platforms are strong in different ways.
What are the most important things to know?
- If you want to advertise primarily to potential customers in the final stages of the purchase decision process and you don’t have your own data assets, Google Ads may be a better choice.
- If you know your target audience very well, you should use Facebook advertising.
- You can advertise on Facebook with a significantly lower daily advertising budget, while Google Shopping ads will be much more expensive.
- You can reach almost the same number of users on the two advertising platforms, but if your online shop is targeting the under-24s, Facebook may not be the optimal choice, as this age group is much less likely to patronize this platform than, for example, YouTube.
- On both platforms, you can choose from specific ad formats developed specifically for online shops: Google Shopping Ads and Catalogue Ads.
If you want to increase the traffic of your online shop with online advertising, you should choose one of the two biggest online advertising platforms. For more help, see our previous blog article.
Let’s look at the types of Google Ads campaigns
Google Ads offers a range of campaign types to promote your product or service. There are some that can serve both B2B and e-commerce purposes, but there are also some that are specifically optimised for ecommerce.
What are the prerequisites for e-commerce campaigns?
- Set up a Google Merchant Center account
- Set up e-commerce metrics (Google Analytics 4)
- Set up dynamic remarketing tags
If you are happy with this, you need to choose the right advertising solution. What are they?
- Google Shopping campaign
- Dynamic display remarketing campaign
- Search campaign
- Performance Max campaign type
You can find out more about which of the different types of campaign you should choose and what the benefits are here.
Mistakes that stop your online shop from growing
Whether you are launching a new online shop or looking to increase the traffic, or revenue, of your existing shop, there are critical conditions that need to be met for your online advertising to achieve your goals and generate more revenue.
What does a good online shop need to do?
- Good usability
- Adequate quality and quantity of information
- Flawless technical requirements
- Reliable measurements
Failure to meet the basic requirements set out above for any online shop will, in principle, preclude the generation of meaningful customer traffic for any online shop, regardless of the online advertising channel.
What mistakes can you make?
- You are not running the right ad campaigns.
- You expect growth exclusively from ppc ads.
- You can’t service the increased orders.
- Your product offering doesn’t match real demand.
- You are not taking advantage of cross-sell/up-sell opportunities.
- You lack marketing automation.
If you are starting a new online shop, pay attention to the critical conditions and bear in mind that starting a new online shop requires a significant investment that will only pay off later. More on this in this article.
Why are your customers leaving your basket?
Knowing the reasons for shopping cart abandonment is key for every e-commerce site manager and marketing manager. Baymard has been tracking the global average cart abandonment rate for 12 years, which currently stands at 69.8%.
The reasons for cart abandonment are numerous, but we list just a few of them here:
- Complex password requirements
- CAPTCHA
- Mandatory registration / login
How can you reduce this percentage? We’ve put together some simple tips for you in this article, which you can improve to achieve visible results in this area.
How do you evaluate e-commerce results?
As a webshop owner, your main business objective is usually to increase the revenue of your webshop and to improve the return on investment (optimal revenue to cost ratio).
- Check out the webshop usage indicators. E.g. transaction rate, bounce rate
- Look at the performance of your webshop products. E.g. which is the most popular, which product is the most profitable to sell
- Check the business aspects of your webshop. Have you achieved your sales targets?
- Study the individual ppc ads. How did the channels you used perform?
- Look at the financial expectations. Did you reach your profit targets?
Whether you’re looking to increase the revenue of an established online shop, improve its profitability or start a new one, there are basically very similar aspects to consider to determine whether you’re on the right track. You can read more about these in this article or check your results so far using our online ROAS calculator.
Webshops and search engine optimisation
As summarized in the previous section, when creating a new online store, you need to pay attention to several key factors in order to optimize the store in terms of both future online advertising, catching the right organic search traffic and the willingness of visitors to the website to buy.
As a first step, proper search engine optimization, as strange as it may sound, has a major impact not only on the capture of free search traffic, but also on the performance of paid online advertising.
How to get started?
1. Conduct thorough keyword research: this is based on the product range, nature and positioning of your online shop, as well as search terms used by similar online shops identified as direct competitors.
2. Your online shop should be user-friendly: Google Page Experience.
3. Get the url structure right: getting the url structure right for an online shop is important not only for Google, but also for users. A breadcrumb menu, for example, not only helps users navigate, but also improves the search engine optimization of the webshop.
4. Have the right product pages: have the right url structure for each product, as mentioned in point 3, and have the right images and product descriptions.
5. Think about search engines: use schema markup.
6. Have quality backlinks on your site.
One of the keys to your online shop’s success is proper search engine optimization. Do the initial keyword research, don’t forget the long-tail keywords, build an optimal url structure, optimize your product pages and finally create a user-friendly webshop. For more details on search engine optimization, see this article.
In summary
Whether you want to optimize the traffic of your existing webshop or you are just starting a new one, there are a lot of conditions you need to meet, without which you can be sure that you will not be able to achieve the right success and goals. To do this, it is advisable to choose a professional partner (we have provided useful tips in this article). Contact us if you want to entrust your business to a truly professional team.