As an eCommerce entrepreneur, are you looking for a popular platform to advertise your campaign? Are you really struggling to target your audience? Well, in today’s world, nothing is impossible.
How about using Google AdWords to advertise your products?
This can be one of the most cost-effective approaches for marketing your eCommerce store. All it requires is the constant monitoring of your campaign. You have to keep yourself up to date with upcoming and latest trends and development in the market.
Does that sound tricky and difficult to you?
Then read this thoroughly and learn the easiest tactics to handle your AdWords campaign, which will ultimately help you to turn potential customers into real ones.
How Google AdWords Can Help You
First and foremost, it’s important to learn how Google AdWords Conversion Tracking can help you with your e-commerce deals.
Ostensibly, you are using Google AdWords to increase traffic for your eCommerce business. For that, a portion of your marketing budget is spent on clicks per week. On the other hand, you also have to maintain your cost after utilizing your daily budget through your campaign setting.
Now, at the end of the week, you have much of the information you need, such as how many clicks you have received on your ads, the final calculation of the sale and the estimates of what you have spent on each click. However, there’s still a problem. You don’t know how many of these clicks are actually getting translated into sales on your site.
Oops! You probably haven’t thought about it, right? You must be thinking that if there’s no way to track the value and return of these clicks, then why would you spend money on pay per click ads?
Well, there’s a solution in the form of a powerful tool called AdWords Conversion Tracking (Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Guide PDF) , which helps you track ROI (return on investment) based on the number of clicks on your ads. Most importantly, it lets you know whether a click leads to a sale or an action on your website.
Conversion and Keyword Tracking
By this time you must be curious enough to learn why conversion tracking is important. With conversion tracking you can track specific keywords leading to a conversion as well the value of a conversion at a keyword level.
To begin with, let’s see how conversion tracking functions. Conversion tracking requires you to insert a code snippet on the landing page where the visitor lands after a conversion. This page can be either a ‘thank you for signing up in the newsletter’ or ‘thank you for shopping with us’ landing page. Google AdWords provides you with the code you need to insert on the related pages of your website.
For instance, if you want to track the sale of a party wear dress, you would insert the code snippet on the page the customer lands on after purchasing the dress. Here, is an example of when a click translates to a conversion:
- The customer clicks on the ad and searches for the party wear dress.
- They browse the website and make a purchase once they find the dress they want.
- You can now track this purchase with conversion tracking. Moreover, the purchase is also equated with the pertinent keywords “party wear dress.”
Understanding the keyword matching concept is important in order to successfully run the Google AdWords campaign. The right keyword is one of the primary factors for your eCommerce store as well as for the Google AdWords campaign.
Keyword matching is simple. Google points out which keyword searches are the most appropriate for your ad.
Keyword Categories
There are a few categories of Google AdWords keyword matches. How are these categories best utilized to increase your sales?
Exact match: Exact match helps you to run your campaign in an economical manner. Your ad will be displayed according to the exact term you have specified without any variants. It targets only those who are looking for the definite product you are offering.
For example, if you specify the keyword “red dress” the exact match keyword will only show ads on that specific word and nothing else.
Broad match: The keywords specified to broad match will show ads on a wide array of variation of that particular keyword. The variation may include abbreviations, singular plural forms, or may be acronyms.
For example, if you specify the keyword ‘ dress’ to the ad group, your ad will also be displayed to someone who is looking for ‘short dress’ or ‘black dress’ or may be completely irrelevant as ‘skirts.’ You can receive a wide set of data concerning to the keywords the customers are using to find you.
Phrase match: A phrase match keyword allows your ad to show for those keyword searches that match your keywords as well as words before or after it.
For example, the keyword is “red dresses.” Anyone who is searching for ‘party wear red dress’ is also eligible to view your ad. However, those looking for ‘red gown’ cannot view your ad.
If you have not started using Google AdWords for your eCommerce store, by this time, (I am sure) you will not give a second thought to it.
It is worth spending your money on AdWords to drive traffic and prosper in your eCommerce business.
With keyword types you should also be aware of Modified Broad Match, which is where you use a “+” sign in front of keywords to more closely match your ad with the appropriate search queries. For example, by using the keyword +red +shoes you ensure that the query will have both these keywords, not variations like magenta or slippers.
Also, with negative keywords you can ensure your ads DON’T show for searches with certain words like “free” or “tutorial”.
William Johnson
Hi Robert,
Yes, you have gone to the deeper part of its analysis by using + sign. Thanks. Negative keywords save our ad spend and give us the targeted traffic which leads to higher CTR. I have been using negative keywords for my campaigns , but not too much as it may ruin my traffic count also.
Good insights from you, thanks. Keep sharing.
Interesting. I’m not an expert in adwords, but I understand their significance. Thanks for the explanatory post.
William Johnson
Thanks Koenig for your feedback. I will keep writing more on AdWords in my next series.
This is an excellent overview of “the basics”. It covers the most important question that advertisers find themselves asking when they approach Adwords: “Does it work, and will it work for me?”. Understanding some of the low-level nuance can definitely assuage some users and let them see the immense potential advantage of using Adwords.
Phil Richards
An excellent post William on setting up and using Ad-words.
Ad-words is an excellent method to turn on traffic and I have used it extensively. I would have 2 recommendations for anyone considering trying it out for themselves though.
1. Set a daily spending limit so that you don’t spend too much each day before analyzing your traffic.
2. Use negative keywords extensively to filter out the lower quality traffic
Great analysis. We had recently conducted a webinar on Google Adwords. Some really good questions were posed at us and we have compiled some of them in the form of an FAQ. I would like to share the article for the benefit of your readers: http://www.leadsquared.com/google-adwords-faq-leadsquared-webinar/
Businesses should look at Google Adwords as a platform in the same way the stock market is a platform. Anyone can advertise and anyone can buy stocks. In both cases you can earn or lose a lot of money, especially since the Adwords has become much more competitive in the last 3 years.
In all cases it is usually best to consult an EXPERT before starting your investment. I know that in the Adwords world these “consultations” are usually free and you will get a more holistic analysis on HOW to go about it (you site, offerings, landing pages, etc…) since Adwords is only one ingredient in your online success.