Paid traffic can prove to be the quickest way for an online business to make money. A well-executed Google PPC campaign can bring you visitors who are serious about buying from your website, and with the proper bidding, you can boost your sales considerably. However, making this paid traffic pay off proves to be difficult. If managing it in-house feels overwhelming, partnering with a certified Google Ads agency in Dubai is often the faster path to getting it right, since Google’s own certifications and Partner program are designed to reward agencies that know the platform inside out.
Below, we break down the core pieces of an effective ecommerce PPC strategy starting with Google Ads and Google Shopping, and moving through the supporting channels that make paid campaigns work even harder.
Google Shopping Ads: Put Your Products Directly on the SERP
Google Shopping Ads display your product images, price, and name without needing shoppers to go through a generic search listing before clicking through. Since the ads are shown for searches that are focused on products rather than general keywords, it means that the ad audience consists of users who have moved past the initial stages of their purchase decision-making process.
While conventional text ads depend on the keyword bidding process to work, Shopping Ads depend on the information gathered by Google in your product feed — that includes title, description, category, image, and price of your product. Your product feed is therefore one of the most essential elements of your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign for ecommerce. An ambiguous product title will never show up, but a structured title (including brand name, specifications, and distinctive characteristics of the product) definitely will.
Google Ads for Ecommerce: Get More Out of Audience Targeting
The most useful thing about Google Ads in relation to ecommerce is that you can target your advertisements to people whose interests and behaviors match those of your current customers. You do not have to show your ads to everyone who uses a certain keyword.
Two audience types worth knowing:
- Affinity audiences — people likely to be interested in your product because of their broader lifestyle and habits
- In-market audiences — people who are actively researching or ready to buy in a specific product category
When you combine these messages from the audience with your Shopping and Search campaigns, you make sure that the money used for advertising goes towards people who have a real chance of becoming your customers.
Display Advertising: Building Awareness Further Up the Funnel
Display advertising will allow you to increase your brand awareness beyond the search engine result pages and can be seen everywhere: from websites to apps and social networks. This type of advertising is often charged either CPC or CPM and uses great design together with a clear call-to-action.
The advantage of display ads is their versatility: they can be displayed on almost any kind of website in almost any size and form. Such forms of advertising present great opportunities in terms of targeting audiences, and retargeting can be employed where PPC marketing for e-commerce is used.
Retargeting display advertising presents another way of reaching out to potential customers who showed an interest in what you are selling.
One thing to note here is that ad-blocking software may affect your ability to show your display advertisements because they block all such types of ads. Because of this, display ads generally perform best when used for brand awareness and recall early in the funnel, or for nurturing loyalty among existing customers rather than as your primary conversion driver.
Email Marketing: Turning Interest Into Sales
Email marketing is not paid advertising but complements the Google pay-per-click campaign because it nurtures those who have previously come into contact with your brand. The majority of your email subscribers are either loyal clients or potential clients with an interest in what you are selling.
A simple way to grow your list: offer something in return for a sign-up, such as a discount code delivered through a website pop-up. Once someone’s on your list, cart-abandonment reminders and limited-time offers can bring them back to complete a purchase tapping into the same urgency that makes exclusive or invite-only sales so effective for building buzz around new product launches.
In email marketing, another advantage that one can enjoy is the ability to communicate with his/her clients directly without the interference of any other social media site. It is a great thing to have many followers in a social media website, but again it all depends on the site.
Organic SEO: The Long-Term Complement to Paid Search
SEO is a longer-term investment, but a durable one and it pairs naturally with your PPC efforts. Moreover, it can also be seen that SEO has been bringing quite a lot of traffic to websites and, thus, SEO cannot be seen as anything less important than paid listings.
In order to properly implement the SEO strategy on your ecommerce website, it becomes necessary that all your content, images, URL, and meta tags be related to the keyword you want to target through your SEO efforts. The reason behind it is that the search engine bots will be able to understand what the page is all about.
Content marketing supports this effort further. Researching what your audience is searching for and creating blog posts or product videos around those topics adds value for both search engines and customers — reinforcing the same keywords your Google Ads for ecommerce campaigns are already targeting.
Remarketing: Recovering Lost Interest
The need for Remarketing lies in the problem of cart abandonment, and that is one of the major issues of eCommerce. People who leave items in the cart have demonstrated their intention; all that needs to be done is give them a little push and establish a bit of credibility.
Some common forms of remarketing include giving out discount codes to people who abandon carts or displaying the products they left in the cart via display advertisements. Due to the nature of remarketing, i.e., targeting people who are aware of you and have purchase intentions, the ROI on this form of PPC can be very high.
Influencer and Affiliate Marketing
Influencer marketing makes use of existing trust, since people who trust the creator are likely to trust the products that he recommends. It is affordable and targeted, and long term relationships with the influencers will ensure that their followers become your followers as well.
Affiliate marketing operates under a similar concept, but the performance aspect comes in due to commissions paid to the partners for generating sales. Think of it as a results-only extension of your marketing team.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing turns satisfied customers into promoters. Humans tend to endorse the items they enjoy, but a concrete incentive such as a discount code or an award when one reaches some specific stage makes this occur more often. Dropbox’s referral program, which rewarded both the referrer and the new user with extra storage, remains one of the most famous examples of how powerful this can be at scale.
User Experience and Social Proof
Despite whatever size of advertising budget you have, you will never be able to make up for having a slow checkout procedure. It is important that your users should be able to go from your landing page to the checkout as fast as possible. So, loading times, easy navigation, and easy checkout process will play a big part in affecting your conversion rates.
Finally, the importance of social proof cannot be underestimated when talking about the process of conversion. Reviews that you have on your site, on social media, and on Google will give the necessary trust to your potential buyers. All testimonials, case studies, awards, and return policy will give them the necessary trust.
Metrics That Matter for Ecommerce PPC
Conversion rate and revenue tracking are absolutely necessary to know how well each channel performs, but two more metrics should be considered:
- Time-to-purchase – how fast your buyer converts into a customer, either in minutes, days, or even weeks. Knowing about this will help you to optimize the whole shopping process, because for some products it’s important to let a customer do some research prior to making a purchase.
- Clicks-to-purchase – how many clicks it takes a customer to convert. It helps to see which elements engage users and which not.
Bringing It All Together
It is very rare for one particular channel to be able to deliver maximum growth potential for an ecommerce business. Traffic from Google Shopping Ads and Search campaigns can immediately attract high intent visitors, whereas SEO and content will ensure long term visibility and social proof will help close the sale.
If you’d rather have experts manage the strategy, bidding, and optimization for you, working with an experienced Google Ads agency Dubai businesses trust can make the difference between ad spend that drains your budget and ad spend that reliably grows your ecommerce revenue. At Redberries, we help online stores build and manage PPC campaigns from Google Shopping to remarketing that are designed to convert.