If you’ve opened your Google Analytics page and been greeted by a plateau on your traffic or sales graphs, you know the struggle of stagnating as a business. But what can you do to get more hits, grow eCommerce sales, and generate more profit for your company? Two words: targeted advertising.
Targeted advertising involves identifying the online users that are most likely to be interested in your business. This highly effective marketing strategy is a surefire way to get your brand in front of new eyes – you just need to do it correctly. Otherwise, your marketing budget may disappear without much to show for you.
How Pay-Per-Click Advertising Works
When you search or browse online, much of your information is being stored and shared with the companies that you use. Buying something on Amazon, liking a page on Facebook, or searching something on Google are all ways that you involuntarily tell their website more about you. This information can then be used to identify the types of advertising that would apply to you – known as targeted advertising.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising involves using targeted ads on sites like Facebook and Google that utilize the collected information, only showing the user the ad if they fit within the desired demographic of the ad runner. This leads to highly converting leads – but access to the information used to target the potential customers isn’t free! With PPC advertising, you pay for every click that your advertisement receives – whether they buy or not. While the chances of them buying are much higher than a general advertisement, they are also much more expensive so it’s important to weigh the pros and cons.
How Targeted Advertising Grows Ecommerce Sales
Growth is perhaps the most important long-term metric for you to focus on as an online business owner. If your sales and traffic are not growing, you may as well be shrinking because your competition is growing – and they’re taking your market share as we speak.
Fortunately, PPC advertising is great for growth! It offers:
Increased Traffic – Almost all forms of advertising aim to increase the traffic to your website, but unlike SEO where you pay regardless of the results, with targeted ads like Facebook or Google Ads, you’re paying when someone clicks on your link. This guarantees that you’re getting a website visitor – something not many advertising methods can offer – who has instantly become a potential buyer because their personal data identified them as one.
Better Conversion Rates – Sure, getting more traffic to your website is always a plus. However, not all traffic is created equal. If you’re selling outdoor gear and a baker from the city (with no interest in camping) visits your website, what are the odds that they’re actually going to buy from you?
Targeted advertisements can almost ensure that the traffic you’re paying for have some level of interest in your business, making them a much more likely buyer than you’ll find from a purchased mailing list or search engine visitor. This allows them to convert at a higher rate, justifying the price-per-click you’re paying and helping your sales.
Making the Most of Adwords and Facebook Ads
As we mentioned earlier, PPC advertising can get expensive quickly, making it important that you make the most of your campaigns and budget to maximize your return on investment. Google Adwords and Facebook Ads can be one of the most effective ways to grow an eCommerce business – as long as you set yourself up for success from the start!
Foster Conversions with An Effective Checkout System
Before you even consider spending the money on a targeted advertisement campaign, you need to ensure that you’re not wasting all the new traffic you’re going to get with poor website practices. By implementing effective conversion rate optimization strategies like a simple checkout process, you can give yourself a better chance of converting new customers.
Abandoned carts are a major problem for online businesses, and your checkout system may be to blame. With about 3 out of 4 carts being abandoned at checkout, you need to ensure that checkout – arguably the most important aspect of your site – works for you rather than against you.
Handsome Checkout helps to make your website’s checkout fast, simple, and effective. Its fully customizable, embeddable checkout forms can be placed on any page, expediting the checkout process to leave less time for cart abandonment. You’ll even be able to increase your average order value with the order bump feature, making your PPC customers worth even more for your business.
Save PPC for Your Best Keywords
When you’re paying for each ad click, you can’t afford clicks from visitors who don’t intend to buy. While it can be appealing to put your ad money in the most searched keywords on Google Ads, you’re not only going to run into high competition, but you also risk attracting someone who is simply curious rather than someone serious who intends to buy.
To lower the chances of dead leads from your PPC advertising, consider using actionable keywords for your ads. Rather than going with something general like “camping supplies”, find a keyword that better reflects a potential buyer such as “cheap camping suppliers” or “buy camping gear online” to avoid people researching rather than intending to buy.
Stick to Your Budget
While seeing all these new potential sales coming to your site is exciting, it’s easy to get carried away with your marketing campaign on Facebook ads or Google Adwords. With bids going up to a dollar or more for some advertisements, money can go quickly before you can discover the return on investment you’re seeing.
A good strategy is to set a weekly budget at a lower bid so that you can spread out your exposure to different people over more days, allowing you to get a better idea of how things will work for you. This also prevents your monthly budget from being used up in the first few days – an incredibly common problem to have with your PPC campaign.
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