Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are the driving force behind sales in e-commerce. Properly managing your PPC advertising helps you grow your brand and increase your reach, brand awareness and conversions. Your brand can reap these benefits with the right paid media channels mix and PPC strategies, creating a demand generation-orientated campaign.
PPC management in e-commerce improves the value of your PPC campaigns through a full understanding of your brand’s goals and strategies. By providing the right advertising structures and timely adjustments, a PPC service can achieve your marketing goals quickly and effectively.
While your e-commerce brand will typically succeed with PPC management, not every brand is aware of the best management strategy for their conversion goals. As a PPC agency, we share proven tips to help you focus your PPC efforts to get the most return on your investment and make the right choice for boosting revenue.
Who we are: With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, manufacturing automation and health tech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
e-commerce, or electronic commerce, refers to all transactions that take place remotely through digital devices. Also called internet commerce, it includes all online transfers of goods, services, data and money required to facilitate those transactions as well. It is the key form of commerce for all online businesses.
While you could handle your e-commerce activities yourself, most companies outsource their operations to one of the numerous e-commerce platforms. These make it easy to understand the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape. For instance, Shopify Plus offers SEO, multichannel support, built-in transaction processing and other useful functionalities.
The most popular e-commerce platforms in 2022 are:
These e-commerce platforms can take any form, from simple applications to full e-commerce suites, letting you select the features and performance your brand needs. As there is a platform for every size of business and industry, the right platform for your brand can vary widely to another.
You can often use many of these platforms in conjunction with each other. For instance, you can link WooCommerce with a Shopify Plus account to use the benefits of both on all your channels.
PPC is a form of digital advertisement where a brand only pay for an ad when a user clicks on it. PPC helps B2B lead generation in the form of popup or banner graphics or text placed on related websites and services.
PPC is a form of marketing in e-commerce for promoting online stores and their products. It lets marketers promote products and services efficiently and predictably with an easy set budget. It gives you prominent spots in search results faster than SEO. It is useful for small brands and startups who need to generate quality needs and boost their revenue.
PPC management monitors and manages the development and deployment of paid ad spending and campaigns. It seeks to optimise each PPC campaign to improve its performance and return on investment. This includes keyword research and finding related industries, platforms, products or services for each ad.
Many companies who aim to succeed with PPC ads or in digital marketing as a whole, hire a professional PPC management company to better manage campaigns.
Experts in PPC management in e-commerce can provide comprehensive services to manage all your paid ad needs from start to finish. Learning how to choose the best PPC agency can determine the success of your marketing campaigns.
PPC marketing is among the most beneficial marketing methods for e-commerce. It is entirely data-driven, meaning you can test, scale and optimise your ads throughout your campaign.
The benefits of adapting paid ad solutions for your e-commerce business do not stop there. They also let you track every aspect of your advertising campaign in real-time. As such, you will know immediately if your ads are working and where you need to improve them.
Some platforms like Google Ads provide a Google quality score as a quality suggestion for your ads to help you understand their performance. A Google quality score is a metric that rates the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC landing pages.
PPC is also an excellent way to supplement your SEO efforts as it can help you increase visibility on Google pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.
Beyond that, the reasons to use PPC marketing are as varied as e-commerce itself. Some of the known benefits of PPC include:
PPC marketing is the most popular, reliable and powerful form of e-commerce advertising for good reason. This data-driven marketing strategy lets you continuously customise and test different campaigns at scale.
With the best e-commerce PPC strategy, precise text ad and high-quality landing page, such campaigns produce up to 4 times as much return potential as other forms of advertising.
These high returns already make paid search ads a powerful e-commerce tool, but it goes way beyond that. For instance, it can serve as the driving force to build brand awareness, and expand your potential market by more than 80 per cent.
Other common reasons to use PPC for e-commerce include:
Anyone considering starting e-commerce PPC campaigns should consider where and how to spend their money in order to get the most out of their ads.
However, addressing that problem might be difficult since the digital marketing environment is always changing. Yesterday's effective tactics may not work today, and so on.
To get started, we’ve compiled a list of the most effective PPC channels for e-commerce businesses. These are the platforms that give you the best chance of reaching your target market and making conversions, like search engines or social media channels.
At the top of the list for useful PPC channels is Google Ads. Previously known as AdWords, Google Ads offers a full suite of PPC options for every industry and niche.
As such, it remains the most popular, tried and true PPC channel thanks to Google’s large volume of global searches and third-party sites in their Display Network.
Google is also constantly adding new options that make it easy to grow your audience. For instance, you can have your text, images and video ads present along with dynamic Google search results based on the keyword group of your choice.
According to your conversion goals and target audience, brands can have their ads placed on Google SERPs, Google Shopping, YouTube and across other Google inventories on different devices (PC, tablet and mobile).
You can set up your budget with either a cost per click (CPC) or cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) setting based on your competition and ad quality. Google Ads also provides multiple bidding strategies for you to customise your campaigns with a reasonable ad spend.
Similar to Google, Bing is another popular search engine with high traffic. It can also deliver the same conversion rates, even though it is often overlooked in the PPC space.
You can also transfer your Google Ads campaigns over to it through a simple interface, letting you get a head start on the less competitive network.
Except for the lack of video advertising, Bing Ads offers a complete selection of text and image options on sites such as MSN, Outlook.com, the Edge browser and a few Microsoft partner sites.
As an experienced PPC management agency, we recommend using Bing Ads as an additional PPC channel besides Google Ads since the latter has a bigger user base and more compatible campaign function support.
Social media is another great option for your eCommerce PPC ads, and Facebook Ads are at the top of the ladder. Facebook lets you place paid adverts everywhere across the Facebook network including their desktop and mobile news feeds, sidebar and Instagram feeds. Their targeting algorithms are also top-notch, putting your content in front of people who are most likely to convert.
Despite what some people may believe, Amazon’s e-commerce PPC advertising can be used for a variety of purposes. You can utilise it not only to promote Amazon items but also to direct your ads to your goods and sites if you set the right parameters. The end result is that you have access to the massive, powerful Amazon affiliate network based on this e-commerce-focused platform.
Having an internet presence is no longer a novelty as the world becomes increasingly digital. The digital approach for B2B is becoming popular among new and upcoming decision-makers as a significant communication method.
A PPC campaign is the quickest way to reach these new B2B buyers and convert them into quality leads. The best part is that PPC works 24/7 or in any specific time frame of your choice. Business owners are able to leave work every day knowing that they will have valuable clicks even when they are away!
However, to truly take advantage of B2B paid search campaigns, you need to adapt and work with the concept of PPC management as well. A robust B2B PPC management demand generation system involves:
The manufacturing industry is taking the B2B e-commerce landscape by storm. Much of this development comes in response to changes in B2B buyer behaviour. This is because new B2B buyers accept similar services as their B2C counterparts. This online-first mindset demands a streamlined, fully digital B2B buying process.
Traditionally, the decision-making process of B2B is longer than B2C. Brands need to spend more time and energy communicating with decision-makers of B2B companies with professional lingo.
The trend towards longer buyer journeys and multiple touchpoints in online purchasing fits the communication features of B2B, making it a great approach for B2B companies to deploy.
The consistency in the quality of material presented, such as ad copy and PPC landing pages, also plays an important role in delivering high-quality, professional images.
Thus, not offering a true B2B e-commerce experience negatively impacts your buyer-seller interaction. Luckily, more and more manufacturers are starting to invest in paid search ads.
The e-commerce customer experience should be consistent at every stage of the customer journey. Brands that take a fragmented approach to their online presence often fail to provide a seamless customer experience.
A recent study shows that the majority of customers switch brands if they have a negative experience. To prevent this from happening, it is important to provide a consistent and positive customer experience throughout the entire buyer journey.
e-commerce PPC management services help you achieve a quality customer experience by optimising your campaigns for maximum conversion potential. If managed properly, e-commerce PPC advertising set you apart from your competition by letting your brand:
One newly released campaign option of Google Ads, Performance Max, is a great solution for e-commerce brands to make sure they cover all possible communication channels and create a comprehensive paid ad campaign.
Performance Max is a campaign option that fully deploys machine learning and Google's platforms (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Map, YouTube, etc.). With one Performance Max, you can show your ads across all Google channels with the best ad combination from your assets group (text, graphics and videos) that is most likely to convert.
This type of campaign helps you create a seamless customer experience and expose your brand in a smart and effective way.
PPC management companies specialise in managing PPC campaigns for businesses. The services include keyword research, ad creation, managing bids and budgets and tracking and optimising campaigns.
PPC management is a powerful technique for driving traffic to e-commerce websites and generating immediate sales. It is an effective way to reach out to potential customers who are searching for products or services online.
A PPC agency can advise and assist you in increasing the effectiveness of your ad. They also know how to use your budget effectively by restricting waste or eliminating it altogether.
Who we are: With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.