Advertising on Google AdWords is one of the most effective – and cost effective – ways to market your Magento eCommerce store. However, generating cost-effective sales using AdWords is a technical process. AdWords is a complex system that requires constant monitoring and tweaking of campaigns to ensure you’re employing the most effective strategy. Keeping on top of all of these details can be very tricky for a busy business owner, marketing manager, or eCommerce manager, but if you get the right strategy in place, AdWords can be an invaluable tool for driving business to your site.
Below, our friends at Rand Internet Marketing have shared their top ten tips on how to best use AdWords to market your Magento eCommerce store:
1) Plan your attack
Before starting your campaign, it is imperative to research your target market. This includes demographics, establishing who your target audience is and finding out where they’re located. Once you establish your target demographics, see what products or services this audience is searching for that relate to your company’s offerings. Another important step in this process is to research how your competition is marketing their similar products or services, using tools such as iSpionage.com and SpyFu.com.
2) Set up tracking in Magento
Login to your AdWords account and select “Website Option” to track purchases, form submissions, or other actions. Although setting up Google AdWords Conversion Tracking on your Magento site is pretty straightforward, you will still have to place the tracking snippets into the coding of your Magento site as this isn’t a built in feature on Magento. If you’re already using Google Tag Manager, you would simply add codes through this system. While there are some Magento extensions that can help, we find that it’s a better choice to manually place the codes.
3) Start creating your campaign
To create a Google AdWords campaign, you’ll first need to choose a campaign type (ie. search, display, shopping, Youtube, or remarketing) and target location. Then, select the days of the week and hours in the day that you would like your ad to run. After making these selections, you will create your Ad Groups and add keyword types.
4) Create compelling ads
Use the keywords you’ve researched within in your Ad Group for the title and body of your ads. Don’t forget to end your ad with a call to action. It’s best to write different ads to focus on different groups of keywords, keeping them highly relevant, and targeting them to relevant pages within your website, such as specific products, categories, or landing pages.
5) Manage your bids
Choose your maximum cost-per-click bid (max. CPC). The max CPC is the most you’re willing to pay per click. By managing your bids, you can control the amount of traffic your campaigns receive. We find that it’s best to manually adjust bids on an ongoing basis, rather than allowing Google’s algorithm to completely take over the process.
6) Set negative keywords and other limiters
One of the best ways to choose negative keywords for your campaigns is to review the search terms people have used before clicking on your ad. AdWords will provide this data within your account. This helps to avoid paying for irrelevant clicks, so it’s good to review actual search terms in Adwords from time to time to see if further adjustments are warranted.
7) Set up remarketing
Remarketing helps you reach users that have already visited your site by displaying ads for your company while they browse other sites within the Google Display Network, such as blogs, forums, and news websites. Here at Rand Marketing, we recommend starting your remarketing list when you begin your Google Adwords campaign. This is an inexpensive way to try to get keep your brand and offerings in front of previous visitors and to get shoppers to return to your site and complete their purchase or contact you for your services. These typically work very well for Magento store owners.
8) Integrate a live feed from Magento to Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping
The Google Merchant tool helps you upload your product listing ads so you can set up Google Shopping campaigns for Google eCommerce Search. Having a Google Merchant account is a must in order to advertise within the Google Shopping Network. We find that these ads can be some of the best ads to run with a Magento store, but you should expect to setup a data feed for Google to have access to your Magento product data. Also, to meet Google’s guidelines, some adjustments to your product data may be needed.
9) Google AdWords Call Extension
With mobile traffic increasing, using Google’s Call Extension is a no-brainer. For most businesses, phone calls have a high conversion ratio since they make it easier for users on mobile devices to quickly get the information they’re looking for.
10) YouTube Ads
YouTube ads have become an extremely effective way to gain massive views of your brand, services and/or products. With YouTube offering a variety of advertising options, it is important to choose the correct adverting option within YouTube Ads based on your budget and marketing goals. YouTube typically performs best for branding awareness, product launches, and audience engagement.
Ready for more? Watch Seth Rand dig deeper into these tips in our latest webinar!
About Seth Rand
Seth Rand is the Founder and CEO of Rand Internet Marketing, one of the largest and fastest growing website design, web development, and internet marketing firms in South Florida. Seth has been a Google Adwords Certified Partner since 2007, and recently was named a Google Partners All Star. Seth has managed over 750 search engine marketing projects, achieving over 100,000 first page organic SEO rankings, and having managed over $20 million in Google Adwords advertising spend. Seth is also a speaker and published author on the topic of internet marketing.
