PPC Crash Course for E-Commerce Part 3

Continuing from the last two weeks, we’ve covered what platforms could be a good fit for your business along with researching the best keywords for your products. Then, we went over how to structure your account and set up budgets for your ads. Today, in our final part, we’re going to go over global campaign settings and how to set up split testing for your ads. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Location, Location, Location

The old real-estate adage applies to PPC in a very big way. When you upload your campaigns and ad groups, your campaign settings will automatically be set to the default settings in AdWords. So, before you set anything to live, you’re going to want to review and customize those settings to make sure that your ads are being displayed to the right people in the right places.

The first thing you’re going to want to review is the geographic locations that you want to show your ad in. You can determine how limited you want to show your ad in case you only ship to a few different places outside of the US. If you’re not limited by that, the best way to start is by including the countries that you know you receive a lot of orders from. If you plan on targeting different languages you can do this at this point as well. Additionally, you can fine-tune this feature to target specific regions or cities within the other countries and make the search as granular as you’d like (see examples below).

Country Targeting in Google AdWords
Country Targeting in Google AdWords

City Targeting in Google AdWords
City Targeting in Google AdWords

It’s All About The Networking

In addition to choosing where geographically your ads show, you can also choose where on Google’s network the ads will show. Well, outside of the ads being served on the search results, you can choose to have the ads served with Google’s search partners as well. For example if you put together a text ad, this ad could appear on non-Google websites, such as AOL search (yes, it still exists), Ask.com, in addition to other Google sites such as Google Maps, YouTube, and other parts of the Google-verse. This setting is just as granular as the geo-targeting setting above. You can pick and choose where your ad will display and whom it will display with. If there is a site or Google product that you don’t want displaying your ad, this is where you can include or exclude specific partners and sites.

Additionally, once you get some AdWords experience under your belt, there’s a whole other network known as the Google Display Network, that showcases your ads on additional sites outside of Google’s search partner network. For example, if you ever wondered how a Google AdWords ad appeared in a banner ad on The Weather Channel’s website, this is how. However, I wouldn’t recommend tooling around with this until you get some campaigns under your belt. However, if you’re feeling particularly confident in your AdWord abilities, you can find out more information on it here.

Also, you can choose if you want to include or exclude mobile devices and tablets. However, if you sell something online I would highly recommend that you advertise on these devices. Especially now that more than 50% of internet users are accessing stores and websites from a mobile device.

Ad Testing – Making Sure The Ad Brings Your “A” Game

Ad testing is very important, as it lets you find which ad is the best one for your keywords. Ads are the way you showcase your product to the world with PPC so you want to make sure you get the ad right the first time. Where E-Commerce is concerned, ad testing is all about your product segmentation. Having your ads be relevant to your keyword lists that is associated with that ad group is where your ads will shine and make sure it has a high quality score. To sum up what quality score is, is a way provided by Google to help you pay less for your ads.

Let’s take the knitting supply store we’ve been using for this series, and they want their ad to showcase their stainless steel knitting needles. If the keyword is, “stainless steel knitting needles” then they should call that out in their ad. With split testing, you want to set up two ads per ad group to test against each other to see which is running better, however, both still need to be calling out the product within the ads. What you’re testing is different benefits and features that the customer might be looking for, different destination URLs that are linked to the ads, display URLs, call-to-actions, and dynamic keyword insertion. So, this is how one of their ads could read:

Stainless Steel Knitting Needles
Our Products Are Top Notch!
Get Your Stainless Steel Knitting Needles Today!

And the other ad could read:

Industrial Strength Knitting Needles
High-Quality Stainless Steel Knitting Needles On Sale.
Get 15% Off Your First Purchase!

From these two ads, you’ll be able to track through the AdWords platform which one is being received and converting better.

Well, that’s it for our crash course! Now you’re all ready to set up and start your first ad campaign with PPC! While this outline gives you the important first steps, there is a lot of other things that can affect your campaigns after they’re launched. However, if you’re curious about what else you can do to analyze and track your AdWords campaign, you can check out Google’s own guide which goes into great detail on how everything works and how you can effectively track and use the product to your advantage.

Take care and Happy Ad Hunting!

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