INTRO
If you're like most e-commerce business owners, you're always looking for ways to increase sales and profits, and you know that online traffic is the key to your success. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site and increase sales is through Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads.
In this blog post, we'll share tips on how to set up PPC ads for your e-commerce sales funnel and boost your bottom line. We'll also give you some tips on how to optimize your ads for better results.
If you're ready to start seeing more sales, keep reading!
GOOGLE ADS CAMPAIGN TYPES
There are several campaign types available for you to use, and we are going to briefly cover them here. When we come down to creating a structure of the campaigns, we will be using all of them except the Shopping one.
Search
These are very intuitive and perhaps the most popular ones. They allow you to create ads that will be shown in the Google Search Results.
The good thing about these types of campaigns is that you are allowed to choose the keywords you wish your ads to be shown for, which allows you to be very precise with your targeting.
Display
Essentially image ads that are shown on all the websites and apps Google Adsense has created or Google has partnered with in any other way.
You have an option to pick broad keywords that are related to websites or apps on which you wish to show your ads on.
Discovery
This one is the most known for its Gmail ads, but Discovery, in some cases, actually combines video and display ads opportunities as well, meaning that with it you can tap into different channels to see what might work for you best.
Video
This type of campaign is here to help you get your creativity in front of YouTube viewers and get them to direct their attention to you.
Shopping
Worth mentioning, even though we will not cover this one in detail or use them in our strategy. They are connected to your Google Merchant Center, meaning that without a complete and approved profile on the GMC, you will not be able to run Google Shopping ads, which are the ads shown on the Google Search Shopping tab.
Even if we stopped here and pretended that this is all there is to it, it's clear that Google PPC is massive. Luckily for you, the fun does not stop here. There are Ads extensions that can help improve the performance of your ads.
AD EXTENSIONS
There are 11 currently available extensions in the Google Ads Manager. We are going to cover the ones that we recommend you to use with your campaigns around your sales funnel.
When extensions show, an ad is more prominent and, typically, performs better - in other words, more people click on it. The quality of your ad and the strength of your bid can affect whether your extension shows or not.
Callout Extension
Add additional text to your ad, like “free delivery” or “24/7 customer support.”
Image Extension
Image extensions allow advertisers to upload rich, relevant visuals to complement their existing text ads.
Structured Snippet Extension
Showcase information that potential customers will find most valuable by selecting a predefined header (like product or service category) and listing items.
Price Extension
Showcase your services or product categories with their prices, so that people can browse your products right from your ad.
Promotion Extension
Promotion extensions can add more value to your Search Network text ads by highlighting your sales and promotions for people that are searching for the best deals your business has to offer.
SALES FUNNEL GOOGLE PPC STRUCTURE
The first front of your sales funnel is your product page, therefore the first step is to bring the visitors to it.
If you have an offer created around your product, you can use display and discovery campaigns in addition to the search campaigns.
In this case, display and discovery will have no targeting set up, just so you can reach the most people you possibly can, and you will use around 3-5 different creatives (visuals), again to make sure people notice your product ads.
Do not forget to use custom tracking parameters for display and discovery campaigns, because you want to know which creative produced the best results. It is best to set that up on the ad level.
For the search ad campaign, you should have an ad group for every benefit around your product or offer. You will then fill each ad group with its adequate and relevant keywords, and create only one responsive ad per ad group. Make sure the copy in the responsive ads mirrors the benefits it is about and the keywords people will search.
Our suggestion is, unless your product is something very specific, to start with phrase match type of keywords in your ad groups.
In some cases, it also makes sense to include some special characters into the ad copy like [], @, etc.
With this setup, you have the traffic coming from people's Gmail inboxes, Google Display network, and even Youtube videos because of the discovery campaign, not to mention the Google search results.
Also, do not forget to use callout, image, or structured snipper ad extension on the search campaign.
How to decide on the CPA (cost per action) on these campaigns? In this case, CPA is the link click, because you want people to visit your product page.
If you remember from the previous article, about the e-commerce sales funnel, we mentioned something called EPV.
Since we presume that you have the sales funnel wrapped around your product or offer, that means you already know the performance data of it, and of course, the EPV.
We will use some general data, where anything above 2% of visitor conversion means good sales funnel for a cold audience, and if your average order is, for example, $100, we can do simpler calculations, meaning:
- 2% CVR means 2 out of every 100 visitors make a purchase
- $100 average purchase
Which equals $200 in sales on every 100 visitors.
Your EPV is then $200/100 = $2, meaning you are “earning” $2 for every visit with your sales funnel. That also means you can afford a CPA of anything less or equals $2.
Now, you can use that information to set your target CPA on the above campaigns to $2, to ensure your campaigns are profitable for your system from the start.
With this, you solved the traffic flow to your product page, leading people into your sales funnel. However, as you’ve seen, your sales funnel is converting at only 2%, meaning that 98 people out of every hundred leave your site without a purchase.
That also means you now have an option to create a separate campaign to target these specific people, those who clicked your ad and haven't bought the product in the 7 day period after clicking.
For retargeting these people, your best chances are to use video and display campaigns, and we do suggest using both, just to make sure you can reach most of them.
And this is the basic setup for your sales funnel with Google PPC, but let’s go back to the diagram:
We can see that more possibilities can happen, and we will cover them briefly now.
NEXT STEPS
From the diagram, it is clear that the person who clicked your ad can just come and buy your main product or offer. If a person bought your main product but no order bump, upsell, down-sell or OTO, you can then present the complete sales funnel to them via email.
Your OTO offer is the one you only want to show the buyers, meaning customers. In any of the cases where the person has bought anything other than just the main product (order bump included), you can then retarget them with a display and video campaign and offer them your OTO only. This campaign should work in a way that is shown to people who did not purchase the OTO initially of course and should last no more than 7-14 days. That means if a person did not buy the OTO in that timeframe, you remove them from the targeting for it.
If you have set all that up, then the next logical step is to generate more traffic from another channel, which in this case will be Facebook and Instagram ads.
SUMMARY
Google is a powerful platform in general. No wonder their PPC is the #1 channel in the e-commerce world. But if you do not use it properly, you could end up burning your money for almost nothing in return. The best way is to set them up around your sales funnel. That way you will have far less room for failure and throwing money down the rabbit hole.
If you want to succeed in e-commerce, it is high time that you start using Google PPC. It may seem daunting at first, but with the help of a professional, you can set up a campaign that will work perfectly for your business and sales funnels.
Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Schedule a free consultation today and we’ll show you how PPC can work wonders for your bottom line.
