As a complement to a well-calibrated SEO strategy, SEA campaigns (or paid search campaigns) can help you rapidly achieve the objectives you’ve set for your e-commerce site.
But just like a marketing plan, a SEA campaign needs to be properly organized beforehand, in order to achieve the best possible return on investment. Before you get started, here are a few things you need to know to put in place a well-informed, and above all personalized, SEA strategy for your e-commerce site.
Step one: identify your goals!
All paid search campaigns can serve different purposes:
- Acquire new customers, by developing your website’s notoriety and thus its audience.
- Make your communication campaigns profitable
- Introduce new products, promote a launch or an event
- Follow-up prospects and customers
- Increase your sales
- Etc…
Before taking the first steps towards creating your campaign, you need to ask yourself which objectives are relevant to your company’s digital strategy.
Keep in mind that your campaign must take into account aspects that are specific to your organization. For example:
- Which brands are your priorities?
- What are the highest-margin products in your catalog?
- What is your stock situation, and what are your supply forecasts?
- What are your planned sales events and promotions?
Step two: consider the buying journey
An important phase, the conversion tunnel (also known as the purchase or sales funnel) represents the various stages a prospect goes through before becoming a customer. This may involve consulting mailings, visiting the website, social networks, physical stores, etc., right through to purchase.
Google recently renamed this phase the “messy middle”.
The “Messy Middle” is the more or less short period between the expression of need and a customer’s purchase.
This period contains a random path of exposure to your marketing messages and those of competitors, made up of various stages of inspiration, research and comparison before the final decision is made: the purchase.
Your mission is to guide and shorten this phase. That’s how you’ll improve your ecommerce site’s conversion rate.
That’s why it’s important to know your customers, the competition and the information available on the market: your SEA strategy will be all the more effective for it. Each step of the journey must be accompanied by specific actions to achieve your objectives.
Don’t forget: optimize your e-commerce site to improve the performance of your SEA campaign.
As part of your SEA strategy, it’s essential to optimize your e-commerce site. In fact, while many companies link their ads to existing pages on their websites, the proper organization of your account will also depend on the tree structure and categories of your site.
The prerequisite for successful campaigns is clear categorization (ordered by product category, brand, etc.) and the creation of optimized landing pages to serve your campaign objectives.
In particular, they must include a unique, well-defined call-to-action (CTA) to encourage your targeted visitors to take that action (request for quote, purchase, reservation…).
Step 3: Define your performance indicators
Once you’ve defined your sales objectives and categorized your site, it’s essential to quantify them to get a concrete view of your results, and optimize the profitability of your campaign.
At the end of this stage, you’ll need to set up a series of performance indicators (KPIs) that will enable you to measure your return on investment (ROI) and the real effect of your expenditure.
Here are the main KPIs to track and analyze to determine the specific performance of the SEA strategy implemented for your e-commerce site:
- Cost-per-click (CPC): the average amount charged for a click on your ad. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of clicks by the total number of clicks.
- Quality Score: this is a score between 0 and 10, assigned to your ad by Google as part of a Google Ads campaign. It is defined according to criteria of relevance, expected click-through rate and landing page quality.
- Click-through rate (CTR): this indicator corresponds to the number of clicks obtained in relation to the number of impressions of your ad.
- Average position: this is the position at which your ad is displayed on a page in relation to other ads.
- Number of impressions: this is the frequency with which your ad is displayed. An impression is counted each time your ad is displayed on a search results page.
- Conversion rate: this percentage corresponds to the average number of conversions carried out each time an ad is interacted with.
Finally, analyze the evolution of your sales and your site’s overall audience over the long term. Because a well-executed SEA campaign generally has a global impact on your business that cannot be immediately measured on a single channel.
Step 4: Choose the right strategy for each of your objectives
Once your objectives are clear and defined, taking into account the customer journey and integrated into a relevant overall acquisition strategy, you can launch targeted actions, step by step.
1. Build brand and product awareness
The first step is to introduce your brand, products or services to potential prospects. At this stage, your mission is to generate visibility for your company.
One effective strategy is to set up a Display advertising campaign, which will initially enable you to reach a large audience. In particular, you can explore the solutions offered by Youtube Ads.
With over a billion videos viewed every day, YouTube represents a real opportunity to develop your brand image with specific targets (age range, geolocation, interests…) and promote your products.
From a wide choice of formats (True View, Discovery TrueView, Bumper, Masthead, Google Preferred…), choose the one that best suits your needs. True View, for example, displays an ad while the user is watching a video, and has the advantage of being billed only if the viewer watches at least 30 seconds of the ad.
2. Generate interest in your products
This involves convincing Internet users who already have a potential interest in the products you offer. To target them specifically and get them to visit your site, you can opt for a Search campaign via Google Ads.
This type of campaign allows you to display your ad alongside perfectly targeted Google search results, in affinity with the needs met by your products. In this way, you reach users at the precise moment they are looking for the type of products or services you offer.
3. Motivate purchases and drive traffic to your e-commerce site
When an Internet user is determined to buy a product you have in your catalog, your natural aim is to encourage them to buy it on your site.
You can then opt for a Google Shopping campaign, which will enable you to display a product listing in search results as well as in Google’s Shopping tab.
The advantage of this format is that it directly targets web surfers who are in the buying process. These people are actively researching and comparing similar products before making their choice.
Google’s results pages display products at the top of the page, when users’ queries are clearly related to a purchase: products sold on your e-commerce site are thus promoted.
4. Follow-up a potential customer or prospect
Despite the quality of the campaigns you’ve set up, it sometimes happens that web users don’t make a purchase when they first visit your site, or when they see your ad.
You can then carry out a personalized commercial relaunch using Google Ads’ remarketing tool. This allows you to boost the performance of your campaigns by re-presenting your ads to targeted web users who have interacted with one of them.
These solutions enable you not only to re-engage your audience, complete purchases or abandoned shopping baskets, but also to conclude your prospects’ conversion processes!
Do you have questions about your campaigns? Are you struggling to optimize your SEA strategy to maximize sales on your e-commerce site?
Get in touch with us! Our experts will help you build a customized strategy, fully parameterized to meet your specific objectives and evolve them over time in line with your performance.
