to maximize your ecommerce advertising budget and spend for maximum ROI
We want to make the most of our PPC for our clients.
How do we do this?
This article will help you to focus your efforts on eight key areas for improving ROI.
It’s not too late to test these before the holiday season begins.
1. Investing in upper-funnel strategies
Most advertisers are too focused on the last-click conversion metrics and revenue metrics, and they opt for tactics at the bottom of their funnel. Don’t.
When we reduced our investment in awareness tactics, we saw an overall decline of more than 50% in efficiency for a clothing brand. This was immediately reversed after we returned the spend.
It is important to measure the impact of your efforts by making small incremental changes.
2. Run on different campaign types
Diversifying your investments, just like your 401K is important.
Some may claim that certain campaigns can replace your existing campaign types and complement keyword campaigns. This is especially true for Performance Max and Shopping.
Always take the time to test out new things. Google introduces new campaign types gradually. Advertisers should also follow suit and adopt these new campaign types gradually.
We’ve found that Performance Max doesn’t pick up the full volume of Shopping when it is fully paused.
The number of clicks dropped by 20% in comparison to the period before we stopped shopping. Traffic almost immediately rebounded when we reactivated shopping.
We can maintain control and gain insight by running on historical campaign types. This is something we all strive for in our work.
3. Your business goals and audience strategy should be aligned
My experience is that segmenting customers into new and returning ones, as long as the volume is high enough, can help improve overall performance.
It is advantageous to use automated bid strategies to allow you to separate your targets for areas that perform differently. You might see a higher ROAS for returning customers, and a lower ROAS for new ones.
4. Keep your segments in their place
When Google says to consolidate your campaigns, you should take their advice to a certain extent. However, there is value in segmentation.
If you are selling other brands, and you bid on these terms, they can be expensive and could consume your budget when grouped together with non-brand terms.
Segment your data based on what works best for you, whether it’s profit margin, type of product, price, etc. This will help you to analyze faster (work smarter and not harder!) It will allow for faster analysis (work smarter, not harder!)
Segmenting our Shopping and Performance Max campaign by product type has proven to be effective for us (and inadvertently also by client profitability).
In one campaign, we have a number of top-selling products on which the client makes excellent margins. All other product categories are in their own campaigns.
Budgets that are tighter allow us to put money where it will return the best results for our clients and optimize towards different ROAS goals based on product profit margins.
5. Automation: Lean on it
It may seem contradictory, however, automation is the way to go. Automation is not going away. It will only increase in popularity.
Learn how to automate your campaigns and you will be ahead of the game when Google forces us all to use it. Do it if you need to.
In every test that I’ve run, I have found that automated bid strategies outperform enhanced CPC (which will be removed from Shopping campaigns in the future).
Try Performance Max, especially if you are focusing on new customers in your audience strategy. We drive an average of 50% more new customers through Performance campaigns than with traditional Shopping campaigns.
6. Consider data-driven attribution
It’s time you looked into Data-driven Attribution. It’s a scary thing to switch attribution settings, just like quitting as an ad manager and becoming a comedian.
It is only a matter time before Google adopts this model or one similar to it, just as they did when they discontinued the first-click, linear time decay, and position-based models.
DDA is especially useful for purchases that require a lot of consideration, where the user may take more time to shop around. This will help advertisers better understand the impact of top-of-funnel campaigns.
7. Be specific in your creativity
It’s not just about how you target and set up your campaigns. Creative plays an important role in campaigns.
The creative ideal should be as specific and precise as possible.
In recent years, it has become more difficult to get ad copy or images that are perfectly tailored. It’s still possible!
I’ve found that using RSAs and incorporating different types of products or services helps.
You can then let Google’s AI choose the most relevant headlines and descriptions to serve for a particular search. Don’t be scared to use an RSA that sells both sneakers and boots in the same ad.
Focus on seasonal updates of creatives that use best-selling products and regularly in stock and show them being used.
Lifestyle-type images work great. It’s no fun to see a display advertisement for something you like, only to click on it and find out that the item is sold out. The marketer also loses money.
All of this is meaningless if you don’t push budgets where they will have the greatest impact on your business. You can cut out inefficient people, products and times from your campaigns. (Or even your life, if you are feeling particularly ambitious).
8. Trim fat wherever you can
It is a fact that the economy is uncertain and marketing budgets are being cut. It’s time to focus on the areas where you aren’t performing as well and less on the ones that do.
Sales are better than ever. We see lower-cost items moving. Shoppers want to buy, but they want to do so in a way that is more cost-conscious.
Sale products are a great way to attract new customers for the programs that we manage. Grab them with the sale price so they will come back to buy full-priced products.
It’s a good time to make sure your goals are aligned with the business. Consider your lifetime value (LTV), cost of goods (COGs), and whether the ROI (return on advertising spend) or CAC (customer acquisition cost) you’ve set still equates to profitability.
PPC Strategy Adaptation for Maximum Budget Performance
The key to success is to find a balance between the structure you choose and the best practices Google has identified.
You may have to experiment a bit, but by using the tips and advice above, you will be able to improve your efficiency, and grow your business.
The post How you can optimize your ecommerce advertising budget and spend for the best ROI first appeared on Search Engineland.