Philip Harman Google AdWords and E-commerce go hand in hand. It is hard to find a store owner not promoting products using this robust online marketing platform or one who doesn’t wish to do so. But running an AdWords campaign isn’t merely about hiring an E-commerce AdWords agency for the task. Many store owners see thousands of dollars go waste without receiving much traction from the campaign. Here we take a look at some common mistakes that store owners as well as AdWords agencies should avoid.
- Forgetting Geography Lessons – Yes E-commerce makes it possible for you to run a store in Kenya and sell products in Malaysia. Although this may should as the farthest extension of technology, ground reality is different. If you aren’t Amazon you are most likely to sell products within certain geography or rather majority of your customers would come from particular geography. Thus geographic targeting is one of the fundamentals of running an AdWords campaign. If you fail to do so you would run ads everywhere possible in the world and would see little ROI from majority of your campaigns.
- Ignoring Ad Scheduling – E-commerce is a 24/7 business so much so that store owners often become complacent with their business. You need to understand that your store won’t see equal traffic or transactions throughout the day. Nor will all products sell equally well at all time of the day. For instance if you are running a multi-product store, clothing line can sell all around the day even during office hours while people may shop for lingerie only at night. Thus you need to deep dig into your data and generate intelligence around the behaviour of your customers to schedule your AdWords program.
- Following The Book Religiously – There are dozens of articles that would teach you the best practices of an AdWords campaign. Selecting the right keywords and targeting user searches is the base of an AdWords campaign. But sticking to the book isn’t a great idea in a competitive business environment. You need to be creative and venture out into the unknown. There are chances that you would fail but trying out something unique also gives you the opportunity to take a lead over your competition.
- Taking CPA Too Seriously – For years cost per acquisition or CPA has been one of the ways in which advertisers have judged the success of their campaign. However you shouldn’t take this as a sole metric to judge the performance of your campaign. Let’s assume you bid on two keywords – Budget Smartphone and Apple iPhone. Now you may spend equally in running both the campaigns but the revenue you would generate from each sale would be different by miles. Hence CPA isn’t the only thing you should be bothered about.
- Not Digging Deep – Often store owners as well as the advertisement agencies fail to dig deep into the numbers. They often look only at the top numbers in their campaign often missing out on clues that offer insights into emerging opportunities. Every dollar that you spend on the AdWords campaign should be accounted for when you are reviewing the performance of your campaign. This gives you better idea about the trends.
These are the few things that one needs to keep in mind while managing an AdWords campaign for an E-commerce site. Another option is to hire a white label PPC management service to handle all these issues.
