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How to Get the Most out of Your PPC budget
With a growing number of businesses beginning to believe in the benefits of ecommerce, naturally, the online marketplace is becoming ever more saturated.
To stand out, businesses need to make themselves known – and the best way to do that? That’s right, advertising, more specifically ecommerce PPC.
Online, pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of the preferred methods. But this particular advertising model is notorious for being an expensive one – although it doesn’t have to be.
As the name suggests, advertisers are charged only for the clicks their ads receive. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, where a cost is incurred upfront with no guarantee of a return, this model is a far safer bet.
Before any cost is incurred with PPC advertising, a user has shown interest in your product or service (hence their search for it) and been made aware of your brand. But in order for this to work in your favour there must be alignment between the search query, your ad and your offering – this is one of the basics of PPC.
While this prevents budget from being wasted, here’s how you can maximise your return on investment (ROI), too:
The PPC model is applicable for advertising on various online platforms. These include everything from search engines and websites to social media channels.
The first way to ensure ROI is to target your customers via the most appropriate channel. For ecommerce businesses, Google and Bing are the most popular platforms, on which ads can be created for:
For most people, the hunt for a specific product or service begins with a Google search. Whether their intention is to buy the product online or find a retailer that stocks it to visit in person, utilising the Google Ads platform allows you to capture users during the discovery stage of their purchasing decision.
Google Ads can be used to place advertisements on SERPs, on websites via the display network and the Google Shopping network, for which ads also appear on search engine results pages.
While Google isn’t the only search engine, it is the most popular with over 160 billion searches performed on it each month. Of these searches, 65% of those that have been made with a high intention to purchase, are likely to click on an ad.
Although this percentage is representative of a more general consumer group, when segmented further, 70% Millennials, who are one of the most powerful consumer demographics, prefer it when they can click to buy or view a product directly from an ad.
Various social media channels have introduced PPC advertising models and some, such as Instagram and Facebook, also offer a shopping function which is another avenue ecommerce businesses may wish to explore.
But, whatever channel you choose, so long as it is the best one to reach both new and existing customer-bases through, a greater ROI can be achieved.
Remarketing is one of the best uses for PPC advertising. It involves showing ads to users who have already visited your website or viewed your products.
The biggest benefit of this PPC approach is that it enables you to target a group of consumers who have already shown an interest in your product or service. While, typically, PPC advertising requires bidding on keywords in a hope to target these individuals, remarketing can often guarantee this.
Of course, not every single user who has viewed a product is interested in purchasing it. But a lot of the time, they are. Or rather, they are simply stuck in the consideration stage of the decision.
It’s important to remember that regardless of the sector, product or service, the purchasing process takes place through six touchpoints. These can be a mix of both online and offline interactions, but nonetheless, the more times a consumer sees your product, the closer they are to buying it.
And in this way, you can increase ROI by spending budget on targeting those consumers who are that much more likely to purchase from you.
Local PPC is only growing in prominence. So much so that now 97% of consumers looking for local products or services begin their search online.
But, while one of the beauties of ecommerce is its ability to break boundaries (quite literally) by allowing businesses no longer to be confined to a single geographic location, those that do have a service or product that can be marketed locally should do just that.
While PPC advertising platforms themselves are becoming increasingly localised, with results determined by searchers’ locations, advertisers can also specify where they wish their ads to appear through use of geographical targeting and filters.
Similarly, by enabling location filters, keeping your Google My Business listing up to date and including city or town names in their copy, ads can appear at the top of the list of map results, too.
Ultimately, local PPC advertising helps put you in front of a growing group of consumers who start their search for nearby services online. And, in this way, greater ROI is achieved through completed ad actions or store visits, for example.
A careless approach to PPC bidding is how the advertising activity becomes expensive. But by being more strategic, you can keep costs low and maximise return.
For instance, by bidding on long tail keywords, you can ensure clicks are relevant to your offering, which reduces the chances of budget being wasted by users who have made a more general search query.
Bids can also be automated, which not only reduces the admin burden for you, allowing you to make time and employee-related savings, it uses data and machine learning to minimise cost per clicks and generate greater ROI.
This may involve allocating more budget on days users are more likely to be searching for your offering and reducing it on days the opposite pattern is detected, for example.
While many of these can be implemented in-house, often businesses outsource the activity of PPC management to specialists who can guarantee their budget is spent in the most efficient way. And, with the changing landscape of PPC, it makes perfect sense to give the job to someone who is dedicated to staying ahead of the curve.
To discover more about our PPC management service, get in touch with our team today.
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Chester Yang is the Microsoft Program Manager at Diginius with a background in economics and quantitative research.
At Diginius, Chester focuses on nurturing partnerships with PPC agencies and integrating marketing and sales solutions.
