7 E-commercePaid Marketing Tips That Kick AssDelcho Stanimirov / Hop Online, Nov 2016

Hi everybody, my name is Delcho, Im a ppc expert and Ill share with you some tips which I hope would be useful for your paid marketing efforts. In fact if you do these things you may very well be more advanced than most digital advertisers in making use of the Adwords/Google Analytics features. Ive audited quite a few Adwords accounts and have rarely seen all of these put to use.Some of the tips in this presentation would require a bit of extra effort on your side to implement - especially the more technical stuff, but its definitely worth it. The presentation covers three general areas - setting up event and conversion tracking, using event tracking and user behavior on your site to create audience lists for remarketing and finally I will share a few advanced AdWords features which are great for ecommerce.

Tip #1Use Google Tag ManagerForConversion/Event Tracking

Tip 1 - Use Google tag manager for conversion trackingConversion tracking is essential for every website and google analytics is usually the best choice for this. To get the best out of google analytics you should create goals to track. And the easiest way to set up these goals is through google tag manager.Goals in GA are basically the conversions you want to track on your website. There are micro conversions which are actions of your website visitors which bring them closer to the macro conversion which in the case of ecommerce is the purchase.

Define Action on PageCreate GTM TriggerGTM Tag Triggered Upon ActionTag Sends Data to GA/FB/Etc.

WebpageData AnalysisGoogle Tag Manager

GTM lets you track any action on a webpageDefine actionCreate triggerSet up tag for the triggerThe tag can send data to a third party platformExample: click on a linkSends relevant data - like number of clicks, location of click, click targetSet up event tags which can be turned into event-based goals in GA and import these as conversions in AdWords. You can track form submissions, link clicks, page views and many more.

Most common GTM Uses for digital marketersImplement GA tracking code - no need to do this in shopify.Create conversions to be impored in AdWordsFacebook pixel, Facebook events on website

Tip #2Build Audiences in Google Analytics

One of the best things about digital marketing is that you can target your marketing efforts and measure their effect much more effectively.To improve your paid marketing targeting you must create relevant audiences in Google Analytics which you can then import in AdWords. Audiences are groups of website visitors that share common characteristics. Its up to you to decide what audience characteristics are important for your marketing needs. Some common criteria to differentiate audiences are converters vs. non-converters, time since last visit, pages visited, time spent on site, etc.

Heres the GA interface for audience building. You have a great number of possibilities for audience building including demographics, technology used, behavior on site, custom conditions and so on.

Tip #3Implement User IDin Google Analytics forimproved audience building

The User ID option in GA lets you include your stores user IDs in the GA stats. It is not very hard to implement although you will probably need help from a developer. A great drawback of all analytics solutions is that they cannot track across devices or sessions too far apart in time.

Connect multiple devices, sessions, and engagement data to the same visitors.

The GA user ID option lets you connect multiple devices, sessions, and engagement data to the same visitors. This would allow you to create very personalized marketing campaigns targeting specific subsets of your users.

Build audiences from scratch and nurture them down the funnel* Marketing framework courtesy of Avinash KaushikDisplay Marketing

Search Marketing;

Display/Search Marketing

Paris showed you the STDC framework in his presentation. It is very relevant to my presentation too. If you want to be successful in your digital marketing efforts you need to have a well developed strategy which starts from informing the users about your website or store, making them aware that it exists. Then in the think stage you need to explain what the benefits you offer are and finally in the do stage you can start selling them particular products or services. Of course it is possible that users from any stage of the funnel are likely to buy, but the ones you have nurtured to the do stage are much more likely to bring you the precious macro conversion.

Since in the see stage you want to inform as broad as possible an audience about your store it is best to use the display network which is much cheaper than the search network. Do you all know what the google display and search networks are?

Once you start running your see stage campaigns it is very important that you build GA audiences of all people who clicked on your ads and visited your site. These people are already familiar with your website. You will then use this audience to target your think stage campaigns. The think stage is generally about content which would educate, excite, empathise the users so that they develop a positive bias with your brand. Of course producing great content is usually costly and time consuming, but it should pay off in the long run and you can always try to be creative with this part and produce your own content. In this stage you can create different audiences in terms of how the visitors engaged with your content - you can use metrics like time spent on site, number of pages visited, etc. which would help you segment the visitors according to the level of engagement. Another way to segment the audiences is by content subject or category.

So finally in the do stage you can target more aggressively high engagement users in the GSN who are interested in a particular product category.

Tip #4Use Display Remarketingin the Google Display Network

Remarketing is a paid digital marketing tactic where you show ads to users who have already engaged in some way with your website in the past. It has a lot of benefits. Some of the major ones are the fact that these users are already familiar with your website or brand, so they are more likely to visit it again, also the fact that these users are clearly interested in what you have to offer, because they already visited your website. Another major benefit is that you would not be paying for clicks from users who are not as likely to convert.

Examples:

Re-engage visitors with abandoned shopping carts

Showcase different product categories

Up-sell or cross-sell to existing customers

Here are some examples of display remarketing campaigns:

Tip #5Use Remarketing Listsfor Search AdsIn AdWords

In AdWords the feature that lets you remarket to past visitors in the search network is called Remarketing lists for search ads or RLSA.

RLSA Examples:

Optimized bids for existing keywords

Show a different ad to non-converters

Bid on more expensive keywords

There are two basic strategies for using remarketing lists with search ads: You can optimize bids for your existing keywords for visitors on your remarketing audiences. For example, you can increase your bid by 25% for those who previously visited your website in the last 30 days. Or, you could show a different ad to site visitors who have placed items in a shopping cart but have not purchased them. Also you can bid on keywords that you don't normally bid on just for people who have recently visited your site, or have converted on your site in the past. This can help you increase your sales. For example, you could bid on more broad and expensive keywords only for people who have previously purchased from your site.

Cost / Conv.Conv. RateCTRCPCAudience Age

Heres what RLSA can do for you compared to non-remarketing campaigns. This chart is purely illustrative and is not based on real data. Based on the recency of a visit a user is more likely to convert soon after his visit and less likely to convert as time passes by. Based on this you can create audiences, or remarketing lists in this case, based on visit recency. In the example above I have used 30 day intervals, but these can be different based on the products you are selling. Also these intervals depend on the sizes of your audiences. It would not be very effective to target a list of just a few thousand users, because then the search volume would be very small. Consider this when setting up your lists.As you can see in the chart more recent visitors are more likely to click on the ad and then convert which brings down your cost per conversion and allows you to bid for more expensive keywords.

Tip #6Use Dynamic search adsin AdWords

Dynamic search ads is one of my favourite features in AdWords. DSAs allow you to target a particular section of your website in an Ad Group and direct search traffic to it without setting up lists of keywords and ads relevant to every particular keyword. DSAs use the power of Google Bot to index your website and show ads to search queries relevant to its content.

Heres how the ad set up looks. You can target a particular section of your website, for example the shoes section. Then you only need to create an ad by only coming up with the description lines and the display url. These need to be general enough to be relevant to any product in the section you targeted. Once this is done and the ad is active if a user searches for a particular brand of shoes and you have this brand in your shoes section your ad would be eligible to show with a dynamically generated headline which would repeat the search query and be extracted from your website.DSA allow you to skip the creation of a separate ad group and ad for every type and brand of product you sell and at the same time keeps the ad copy very relevant to the search query.

DSA + RLSA

Source: WordStream

Another great thing about dynamic search ads is that they can be combined with RLSA campaigns. In this way you can remarket to past visitors with entire sections of your website. I have included here some research by WordStream, one of the biggest paid digital marketing companies in the world. They have aggregated data from a hundred adwords accounts across a period of three months and have compared the performance of regular DSA and RLSA campaigns to the performance of a combination of the two.

DSA + RLSASource: WordStream

Tip #7Use Drafts and Experimentsin AdWords

My last tip is about the drafts and experiments feature in adwords. It is always a great practice to test any new change in adwords if possible.

A

B

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In adwords you can basically test almost every campaign and ad group setting. You can compare remarketing to non-remarketing campaigns, different types of audiences and much more. You decide how long to keep running the test after which you leave the winner running and pause the worse performing campaign. Until recently the experiments feature in adwords was more limited and had to be set up inside the campaign you want to test. Recently AdWords greatly expanded our ability to test changes by introducing the Drafts and Experiments feature - it allows you to create a duplicate of the campaign you want to change and change only the settings you want to test.We digital marketers deal with data more than anything else, because the digital environment gives us the ability to track anything going on inside it. Always make use of that data, run test, look at the data again and improve. This is the endless cycle of the digital marketer.Thank you for your time. Let me know if you have any questions.