Successfully create and optimize SEA and PPC accounts

• Do I need Search Engine Advertising?
• Your product
• Your product prices
• Google Shopping Structure
• Google Search Ads Structure
• Retargeting
• Conclusion
• Professional SEA Management

1. do I need Search Engine Adverstising?

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) is an absolute must for online shops regardless of the industry. Nowhere else are the sales & scaling levers as high as in this channel. But how do I know how good my GoogleAds account is? Am I using the full potential of my product portfolio or am I falling short of my potential? This article will give you the first answers. An individually tailored SEA audit to analyze and identify your optimization opportunities can also help to bring the performance of your online shop to a new level.

2. your products

Before you click through any Google accounts & interfaces, we recommend you always start with your products. In principle, the higher your profit margin & the higher your average shopping cart value, the more suitable your product portfolio is for Search Engine Advertising. We often manage online shops with more than 5000 products. It's obvious that not only cash cows are included in these 5000 products, so just click through your product categories with open eyes. Here are a few sample questions you have to ask yourself.

• Do you really want to pay 30 cents for a click on a set of screws with a sales price of 2,00 €?

• Do you really want to spend 800,00 € a day to promote a supplier who offers you a profit margin of 5%?

Adapt these questions to your product portfolio and exclude these products via custom labels or directly within your SEA campaigns.

3. your product prices

As an online shop, you first set up a Google Shopping campaign. For this you need a product data feed. In this feed, all important information about your products is transferred to Google. An extremely important piece of information, besides the title, brand & product image, is the "selling price" of your products. Google Shopping is a price search engine and what do price search engines love? That's right, low prices. Don't misunderstand, we're not telling you to throw your entire pricing policy overboard but often a few small adjustments in one direction or another will help you be more successful in Shopping. Good-to-know: Google rewards the lowest price with massive reach.

How do I know my prices are not competitive or too cheap?

Simple, the answer is in your Google Merchant Center. Open your Merchant Center and navigate to the "Price Competitiveness" tab via the "Growth" tab. This is where Google collects competitor pricing data and links it to selling prices from your product data feed. Look at the table and ask yourself the following questions as you set your filters.

• Which products am I way too cheap on and can I adjust the price up? Export these items and increase your prices in your inventory management.

• For which products am I only slightly more expensive than my competitors and can I adjust the price slightly downwards? Export these articles and lower your prices in your merchandise management.

• For which products am I way too expensive and can never keep up with the prices? Export these items, label them and exclude them from your campaigns.

The all-important value here is the "Current difference between benchmark & price". According to Google, the value says the following:

"The Current Difference Between Benchmark & Price is the percentage difference between your current price and the current average comparison price (weighted by clicks)."

4. Google Shopping Structure

Campaign structure is a key factor in the success and profitability of your campaigns for both Google Shopping and Google Search Ads. Granular structures provide transparency whereby cost & revenue drivers can be easily identified & eliminated or promoted if necessary. Here is an example of a possible Google Shopping structure. Often it makes sense to split your campaigns according to margin levels and suppliers. In a classic Shopping campaign, this has the advantage that you can set ROAS targets at ad group level, for example, by supplier. In a Smart Shopping campaign, the split simply provides more transparency and offers the possibility to sort out unprofitable product groups and products more easily.

5. google search ads structure

Your Shopping campaign is running and delivers regular sales at a good cost-revenue ratio? Top, then you should start now to create search ads campaigns or add new ones. In principle, it is advisable that the search campaigns reflect your shop structure. For example, if your main category is "Men's" and the subcategory is "Nike Men's Tshirts" and you are targeting users in Germany, then simply name your campaign that way. So....

• Campaign name: DE > GSN > Men (GSN stands for Google Search Network)

• Ad group name: DE > GSN > Men > Nike Men Tshirts

If you are working with a small budget and are therefore not able to cover your complete product portfolio in search, then work with top seller campaigns to achieve good results. For example, look at Google Analytics to see which products are often sold via your shopping campaign or your other digital channels and push them additionally via the search campaigns.

6. retargeting

Great, you are now buying promotional clicks on your products via Google Shopping & the Google Search campaigns.

Now you need to know that the average conversion rate in e-commerce is around 2.81% ( Source: Wordstream ). Say, if you attract 100 users to your site via Google Ads, on an average 2.81 of them will also buy a product. But what about the remaining 97.19 users who did not buy? This is where dynamic retargeting comes in as a catch-all for lost customers. With retargeting, you can re-present your products to your customers within the Google Display Network.

Here's what to keep in mind:

1. separate Google Search & Shopping campaigns from account-level display campaigns.

2. in your retargeting target groups, exclude users who have not been on your site for more than 5 seconds

3. separate different cookie durations from each other in your retargeting lists

There are also other very high performing providers of alternative retargeting solutions if you are not satisfied with the numbers from the Google display network. We would be happy to audit your existing Google Display campaigns and recommend an alternative provider if necessary. Just get in touch with us at sea@exwe.de.

7. conclusion

Now you have a good basis to be successful with SEA. Of course, there are still thousands of adjusting screws in SEA that you can push, move and lock. We will gladly do that for you by-the-way ;-) Send your request to sea@exwe.de

PROFESSIONAL SEA MANAGEMENT

PS: If you need help optimizing your ROAS or scaling your sales, feel free to contact us. We love optimizing GoogleAds & MicrosoftAds accounts of online shops and do nothing else all day long. Feel free to contact us at the email address here with a custom request for our SEA services sea@exwe.de Cheers EXWE You can find everything else in the Performance Marketing section.