Major elements Needed to Setup Adwords for Magento

A crucial part of setting up your AdWords account is properly connecting it with your Magento eCommerce store. Many first time Adwords users, in their haste for traffic, wind up blindly sending traffic to their stores. Without tracking a campaign, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be throwing money away. After all, the benefit of an Adwords campaign vs. old fashioned marketing (TV, Radio, Print, Billboards, etc.) is that you can track the success of every element of the campaign. A well-run campaign continues to get better over time by using real data to your advantage.

Equally importantly, many Magento website owners neglect to sync their product catalog with Magento, and only run text and banner ads (ie. search and display ads), leaving some of the most profitable campaigns out of their marketing plan. While you can always bring in an experienced team to assist with Adwords, if you are running a campaign on your own, there are some things that you should do to help get the campaign set up. Below are two major elements that are typically addressed during the build-out of an AdWords campaign for a Magento website that you’ll want to setup:

Step 1: Setup Tracking in Magento

This is crucial to be able to test and measure which keywords, ads, and other targeting parameters and generating sales, and just as importantly, which one’s aren’t. This data is invaluable in optimizing an AdWords campaign. We’ve listed some standard steps below that will work for most Magento 1.x websites:

• Login to your AdWords account, click tools> conversions> +conversion and select Website Option to track purchases, form submissions, or other actions. Fill in the fields, click save and copy code. Then you’ll have to insert your conversion code within your Magento store.
• Setting up Google AdWords Conversion Tracking on your Magento store is not hard but since it isn’t built-in within your Magento theme features, you’ll have to edit your success.phtml template file. To do this:
  • Open this file: /app/design/frontend/default/yourskinname/template/checkout/success.phtml
  • At the bottom of the file, insert this code:
    • <?php    $order_details = Mage::getModel(’sales/order’)->loadByIncrementId(Mage::getSingleton(‘checkout/session’)->getLastRealOrderId());    $adwords_saleamt = $order_details->subtotal;    ?>
  • Paste your Google Conversion at the very bottom of the page below the php code you inserted from step 2.

Step 2: Integrate a live feed from Magento to Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping

As discussed in our recent webinar, Google Shopping campaigns are often among the most effective campaigns that you can run for an eCommerce website. With Magento, you can feed your product data into Google Merchant Center, providing a steady stream of information, including price change, inventory / availability changes, and so forth – making sure that the product ads that you run are accurate and representing your brand in the best possible light.

Next, you’ll need to create a file (xml or txt) of your products structured to certain specs that Google requires. The required attributes for each product you need are:

• Product ID – a unique identifier specific to only 1 product
• Product Title – the name of the product
• Link – the url where people can find info on this product on your website (only 1 product may be displayed on each landing page)
• Price – the cost of the item
• Description – product description
• Product Condition – new, used or refurbished

And remember, Google can change their requirements, so keep an eye out for the latest specifications. There are Magento Extensions that can help generate these feeds, as well as services, like RandFeeds.

Once you have set-up your feed within Google Merchant you can start building your Google Shopping campaign within AdWords. To start, check out this great blog post on Top 10 AdWords Tips for Magento.

About the author:
Robert Rand of RandMarketing.com was educated at NYU Poly and has managed the development and marketing of hundreds of websites. Along with Rand’s award winning team, he helps clients take their businesses to the next level by employing best practices, while staying at the forefront of the eCommerce and internet marketing industries. From technical issues to traditional marketing efforts, Robert takes pride in providing our clients with services that will make a difference in their bottom lines.