PPC strategies in a competitive ecommerce market
-
Hello,
What's the top 5 things to keep in mind when doing PPC in a competitive ecommerce market? Our competitors are buying PPC leads based on gathering long term customers that only have to get bought once and then they are repeat customers with no more cost.
Thus, PPC cost is through the roof in this niche.
Anyways, what's the top 5 pieces of advice you would give and you're also welcome to reference any good or harder to find references for me to read or watch.
Thank you,
Bob
-
Hi BobGW,
Wow, what a question to ask; it's fairly subjective and dependent on quite a few variables (like experience, life cycle of the campaign, ect), but that means we should get lots of answers!
Here is my Top 5 contribution (in no particular order):
Optimize Your Landing Page
I like to optimize the bottlenecks first and that means making sure that my website and landing pages are ready to receive paid search traffic.
Ask yourself these questions:
- does my website load as fast / faster than my competitors?
- Are the call to actions clear and on my landing pages?
- Is all the on-page SEO complete?
Make it Easy to Purchase & Proper Ecommerce Tracking
Make sure that your purchase funnel is simple and easy. Only capture the necessary information (save the extra for follow up emails and visits) and reduce any unnecessary steps in the checkout process.
Have thorough and accurate Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking integrated (make sure to link your Adwords account to your GA profile as well).
Develop an Efficient Adwords Account Architecture
A proper account infrastructure highly impacts the success of a campaign. Take the time to brainstorm how it's best to lay out your company's campaigns and ad groups. Many times referring to the website's navigation (sitemap) can help develop this portion.
Keyword Research & Maintenance
Once you have your campaigns and ad groups decided, you can begin to fill them with keywords (often times keywords will help you identify new ad groups or campaigns needed too). Remember to keep the keywords focused and tightly grouped.
Consistently set time aside to go through your keyword reports and matched search query reports in order to improve your keywords, add negative keywords, and identify new groups of keywords.
Research, Experiment, Promote, & Improve
Learn as much about Web Analytics as you can and how it applies to your Ecommerce strategy. Invest in the appropriate marketing tools for competitive research, SEO, and analytics. If you don't already love digging huge data, then you should get acquainted with it as quick as possible.
Make sure to continually test new ads, ad copy, banners, ect. Find the higher performing ads and ditch the ones that are costing you money.
Have campaigns ready to go for special occasions like Flash Sales, holidays, graduations, ect.
Making sure to keep a disciplined routine with your PPC campaigns will have a high impact on their success. The consistent, incremental improvement is usually what contributes the most for long-term success.
Bonus: Understand Your Customer Lifetime Value
"Our competitors are buying PPC leads based on gathering long term customers that only have to get bought once and then they are repeat customers with no more cost."
It sounds like your competitors have an understanding of the customer Lifetime Value of their customer's. In addition to Sales Revenue, as a metric for measuring success, they could be using the CLV of all the new customer's acquired.
I would highly suggest an ecommerce company compute its CLV to most accurately understand its Customer Acquisition Cost, which will enable the marketer to do a better job in the PPC market.
-
1- check what words competitors use with sites like semrush , keyword spy
2- run words that show intent to buy or buy in larger amounts- buy, wholesale, item sku, item full name, bulk, etc
3- be competitive on price and have a nice selection
4- google shopping tends to give you better cpa
5- weed out negatives and structure tight campaigns based on user intent with exact keywords if possible
6- track calls, sales, micro conv etc
7- pray
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Baidu PPC Agency Recommendations
I have a client that is a perfect fit for the Chinese market, but have had issues with reseller agencies that don't really know what they are doing. Does anyone have any agency recommendations? I am only spending a few grand a month.
Paid Search Marketing | | JerrodDavid0 -
How to track in Google Analytics 2 different subdomains (one for website, the other for PPC landing pages)
Hello Mozers! I have a website with organic visits/goals on www.site.com and a few AdWords Campaign landing pages on lp.site.com whose goals are tracked with both adwords conversion monitoring AND analytics (not imported from analytics into Adword). The landing pages of the campaign have nothing to do with the web site (different cms, they don't link each other, totally isolated) and viceversa. Given that, what would it be the best practice to configure Google Analytics to track the website (www.site.com) AND a PPC campagin (lp.site.com)? I have been told to set up different views of the same property, but do I really need that? Please let me know what are you thinking. Thank you very much. DoMiSoL Rossini
Paid Search Marketing | | DoMiSoL0 -
PPC for Luxury Goods Website
Hi Mozzers, I am starting a PPC campaign for a website that sells high-end products. The search volume for the generics is very high but I think the conversion rate on those will be quite low given the price of the products. Does anyone have any experience in doing PPC for high-end retailers and what type of keyword I should be bidding on? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | KarlBantleman0 -
Youtube ad video ppc
anyone has any experience with youtube for adwords and how its converting, etc? tips on how to really narrow it down to keyword level and making sure impressions are based on your preferences? Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | PaulDylan0 -
PPC Keyword Phrases and Options
Sorry in advance.... I've used search on the SEOMoz site and Google but not found an exact answer to my question. I am looking at starting PPC campaign - do I need all variations of these keywords or is google clever enough to work on dashes etc... I want the keyword phrase to come up with loads of different locations. Do I need to input them all separately like I have below? 1. Keyword Sample Phrase 2. Keyword-Sample Phrase 3. KeywordSample Phrase 4. Keyword Sample Phrases 5. Keyword Sample Phrase Location 6. Keyword-Sample Phrase Location 7. KeywordSample Phrase Location 8. Keyword Sample Phrases Location Thanks in advance....
Paid Search Marketing | | JohnW-UK0 -
Starting Out With PPC, Need Some Advice
We are starting out with PPC for our site. I wanted to know what the best starting point is for our site. First, some basic info: We sell thousands of products from a large number of manufacturers We can offer the same prices as competitors, but we can't beat their prices Here are my questions: What would be my USP if my prices are the same, and we have the same store policies as competitors? Is it best to start with product pages (as opposed to keywords)? Meaning, setting up a feed via MC and connecting to our adwords account. Any advice is appreciated 🙂
Paid Search Marketing | | inhouseseo0 -
Index or Noindex PPC Landing Pages?
Hi all, We have thousands of PPC landing pages for our products. Usually, these pages are very similar and may differ only slightly for the keyword in question. The landing pages are sitting in a sub-domain of our site. From SEO perspective, assuming we don't want to get hit by Panda, Penguin and other animals Google stuffed into its ranking algorithm...Is it a good idea not to index these landing pages at all (i.e. add meta robots - noindex, nofollow to these pages)? What say you? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | ShivaS0 -
SEO for PPC landing pages
After completing several months of on-page SEO for my site (one keyphrase per URL) and getting an "A" from SEOmoz on each page, now I'm venturing into PPC AdWords for the first time. From what I've read you pretty much want one landing page per keyword/ad. So if I want to target 100 PPC keywords I need 100 landing pages. And each landing page needs to be SEO'd as if you were doing it for organic search purposes so that your ad has a chance at a high Quality Score (8 to 10). I realize that an ad's QS is 2/3rds driven by its CTR but in the beginning when the ad is new the initial QS assigned seems to be driven more by landing page relevancy and some historical attributes of the AdWords account in which the ad or Campaign is located. My question is: What, if anything, do you do different on a page designed to be a PPC landing page as compared to a regular page you would SEO for organic search benefits? Also, should you do any of the off-page things (external links with relevant anchor text) for PPC landing pages? I'm envisioning landing pages that only exist to receive PPC ad clicks and that will not be linked to from my site directly. Each landing page talks a bit about the keyword the user was searching on and then directs them to the most relevant page(s) within my site. Maybe that's flawed? Thanks for any tips...
Paid Search Marketing | | scanlin0