Paid Adverts On Google. Are They For You?
Every second, there are millions of searches performed on Google, and the majority of search results pages include Google ads. Paid for by businesses, Google ads can be an extremely effective way of driving relevant, qualified traffic to your website exactly when people are searching for the types of products or services your business offers.
In this article, you’ll learn what Google ads are, how Google ads work, and why you should run Google adverts for your shop.
In the image above you will see the first few results display sponsored adverts. There are more below the 'natural' or organic search results. Organic results are purely down to the website's popularity along with its SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. We've touched on that before, but as an ongoing project for your shop, we are bound to cover it again!
The adverts are served based on the keywords that the business has placed within those ads while constructing them.
The thing to understand here is that you can do the wild guessing game with keywords, which will lose you money or you can use the growing number of keyword research tools including Google's offering built into its AdWords service.
The way that you plan your keywords goes hand in hand with your overall SEO strategy. These keywords must be in place for your page titles, descriptive text against products, in blog posts and definitely on your home page or any subsequent landing pages. Particularly collection pages in Shopify.
It's worth noting that you can reverse engineer the keywords that you specify on your shop pages by using the keyword tool. One of its priorities aside from creating your advert is to find keywords that are competitive on the web. These are the ones you want to focus on for your ad. Don't ignore less competitive keywords though because you may well find that some of them are pretty cheap to bid on (more if this later) and can provide relevant traffic.
During the ageing process of the web, these are pretty hard to find though as they have probably been snatched up, but they may still cost less as an investment and provide a decent return on sales.
It's a Bidding Thing
When you have identified your keywords, entered your landing page and your product category, hit the 'Get Ideas' button and Adwords will generate a list of popular keywords. You can filter these by 'most competitive' or 'average bid' and start to get an idea of how much you will be charged per click (Pay Per Click or PPC).
Keep adding keywords and remember that you want to match these keywords on your home page, collection page, blog post or product page, until you think you have what you need.
Adwords will then take you through a few screens and yes, it will ask for your credit card details, until you reach the form that asks you how much you want to set up as a budget for the advert. Deciding what to do here may have you scratching your head because you know that some companies can afford vast amounts of money to throw into an ad campaign, and you are on a shoestring budget. It's frustrating, but as they say, "you have to be in it to win it". Our recommendation would be to monitor traffic provided by your adverts and begin to build profiles based on traffic against keyword against sales conversion. Begin to pare down to keywords that work for you and remove the rest. The trick is to have as many adverts running as you can with small budgets using keywords that work for you.
It's easy to get swallowed by the process which is why so many agencies offer to do this for you at a price. Our advice would be to understand the principles of advertising on Google before engaging anyone to do it on your behalf.
Also, please take into account the value of your products. We've seen this scenario many times, and you need to be careful. If your product has a value of say, $1,000, you can soak up a lot of money on advertising that is worth it for that one win. If your products are worth $20.00 you need an enormous amount of traffic to make your investment worthwhile. That's not to say advertising isn't for you, but you need to be circumspect. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of investing more than you get in return. Many businesses fall into this trap and just keep on going regardless in the hope that it will pay off. Again, our advice is to re-think your keyword strategy and perhaps think about only advertising the high value or high margin products while making sure that impulse purchases are within easy reach once advertising traffic hits your site.
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We hope that you enjoyed this post and that you found it informative. Please feel free to comment below.
Also, did we mention our extremely popular responsive Shopify themes? Your shop has to look good when visitors come around :)