How to brief your performance marketing agency about your webshop ads?
In order to make your webshop a success, you must meet a number of basic conditions and carry out a thorough strategic planning work!
Nowadays, one of the keys to the success of a webshop is the right advertisement, which in the case of webshops is executed mostly in the online space.
But what does it take for a trusted online marketing agency to effectively support you in achieving your webshop sales goals? We’ll show you this in this blog post.
What questions should an online marketing agency ask you?
If you turn to a performance marketing agency to effectively support the growth of your webshop’s revenue or even increase its ROI with so-called PPC ads, they will ask you a number of questions before giving you a price estimate.
The purpose of these questions is for the agency to assess how serious your intentions are, how well you are aware of the key elements of e-commerce success, and how well you can support the performance of your online webshop ads with your own inputs and market knowledge.
Sympathetic or not, the truth is that even though you are the client, at a serious digital marketing agency you certainly have to go through a preliminary examination in order to be able to close a contract with them. The reason for this is that no matter how professional the agency is, no matter how professional your online advertisements are, they will not solve the any critical problems of the webshop itself (e.g. the basic problems of usability and conversion path of the webshop).
What questions do you need to have a clear answer to?
If you are dealing with an experienced, highly professional and fair performance marketing agency, they will most definitely ask you the following questions:
- Do you have a current business and marketing strategy and if so, what is the role of PPC ads in it?
- What is the current main business goal of the webshop? – increase the revenue of an existing webshop, maximize profits or launch a brand new webshop?
- What are your secondary, recurring marketing goals? – increase awareness, sweep out inventory, introduce a new product / brand to the market?
- Are you planning to run seasonal campaigns in addition to your ongoing campaigns, such as weekly / monthly promotions?
- Do you want to advertise with a fixed monthly advertising budget, or if we reach your revenue / ROAS goals, will the budget be “unlimited” as long as it brings you the expected return on investment?
- What are the main brands / product categories / products you want to focus more on?
- What are the ROAS goals for each product / product category / brand, if you do not know this separately, then on average, at the webshop level, what is your set – and realistic – ROAS goal?
- What is the maximum volume of orders that can be fulfilled on a daily basis? – If your goal is to generate billions in revenue or spend millions on advertising budget, you have to be able to fulfill the increased number of orders.
- Have you had any previous PPC ads, if yes, what was your experience with it, what did you think worked and what didn’t? (If you had an overview of the ads, if not, the agency can also retrieve this data from your Google Ads, Facebook ads and Google Analytics accounts.)
- Does the key business decision maker (executive or sales manager or e-commerce manager) have real decision-making power over PPC ads?
What are the realistic expectations for a webshop?
If you contact an online marketing agency specifically to improve the performance of your e-commerce business, you need to be able to define clear goals that online advertising can align with.
The set goals should be measurable, clear, unambiguous and realistic!
Expect the online marketing agency to draw your attention to any critical issues connected to your PPC advertising that may prevent you from achieving your webshop goals, e.g. webshop usability issues, mobile view usage issues, conversion path errors, deficiencies.
Keep in mind that in order to maximize the performance of your digital ads, all other elements that affect their performance must be on point.
What is a good ROAS for webshop PPC ads?
This is a very common question, and the answer is not black or white, it “depends”.
What determines which ROAS can you expect for your webshop PPC ads?
- The quality of the webshop (usability, SEO and CRO aspects)
- The payment methods offered
- The offered delivery options, delivery time, shipping fee
- The available product range
- The average basket value
- The strength and changes of the online advertising competition due to new market entrants
- From our market position
- Etc.
In the case of some webshops (e.g. high average basket value and strong market competition) the return may be optimal even for ROAS 3, while for other webshops ROAS above 10 may be poor return (high product cost ratio and low average basket value).
Spectacular webshop traffic growth (3x) in just one month, coupled with outstanding ROAS improvement (monthly growth from 3.8 to 6.8) with Google ads.
Influencing ROAS and revenue balance, based on seasonal emphasis for a webshop with Google ads.
What can a responsible PPC agency promise you about the campaigns of your webshop?
A responsible online marketing- or performance marketing agency can only promise honesty, partnership and maximum professional attention to our webshop campaigns. They cannot guarantee a specific result for a number of reasons, due to the multifactor model presented above.
If you want to transfer your own global business risk over to the PPC agency in a success fee based agreement, you can find a partner in a smaller agency, but certainly not in a larger agency who sees the entire webshop ecosystem’s complexity and clearly sees what they can influence through your ppc campaigns and what they can not. A responsible performance marketing agency is unlikely to take the risk for external factors, over which it has no influence.
In the case of a webshop, there are many other important conditions for a proper return, not just on the campaign side. A fair agency will draw your attention to any shortcomings right from the start of the collaboration, not just months later – after they have plucked you off well.
Ask the selected agency if the basic conditions on the webshop side are met to achieve optimal results, before starting the cooperation!
The numbers don’t lie, let’s believe the numbers! Many webshop-side problems can be clearly justified by studying webshop analytics carefully (e.g., the rate of the cart abandoners).
Let’s be vigilant, set realistic plans for our webshop, get to know our market and choose the right online marketing agency partner to make your webshop a success!