Successfully create & optimize SEA & 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

Reading time 5 min

1. do I need search engine advertising?

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) is an absolute must for online stores, regardless of the industry. Nowhere else are the sales and 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 provides you with some initial answers. A customized SEA audit to analyze and identify your optimization opportunities can also help take the performance of your online store to a new level.

2. your products

Before you click through any Google Accounts & Interfaces, we recommend that you always start with your products. As a general rule, the higher your profit margin & the higher your average basket value, the more suitable your product portfolio is for Search Engine Advertising. We often manage online stores with more than 5000 products. It is clear that these 5000 products do not only include cash cows, so just click through your product categories with open eyes. Here are a few sample questions 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 promoting a supplier that offers you a 5% profit margin?

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 store, you first set up a Google Shopping campaign. You will need a product data feed for this. All important information about your products is transferred to Google in this feed. In addition to the title, brand and product image, the "sales price" of your products is extremely important information. Google Shopping is a price search engine and what do price search engines love? Exactly, low prices. Don't get us wrong, we're not advising you to throw your entire pricing policy overboard, but a few small adjustments in one direction or another often help you to be more successful with Shopping. Good-to-know: The search engine rewards the lowest price with massive reach.

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

Quite simply, you can find the answer to this in your Google Merchant Center. Open your Merchant Center and navigate via the "Growth" tab to the "Price competitiveness" tab. Here, Google collects price data from the competition and links it to the sales prices from your product data feed. Look at the table and ask yourself the following questions when setting the filters.

• Which products are far too cheap and can I adjust the price upwards? Export these items and increase your prices in your merchandise management system.

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

• Which products are far too expensive and I will never be able to keep up in terms of price? 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, this 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

The campaign structure for both Google Shopping and search ads is a key factor for the success and profitability of your campaigns. Granular structures ensure transparency, making it easy to identify cost and revenue drivers and, if necessary, eliminate or promote them. Here is an example of a possible shopping structure. It often 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, e.g. by supplier. In a Smart Shopping campaign, the split simply provides more transparency and makes it easier to sort out unprofitable product groups and products.

5 Google search ads structure

Is your Shopping campaign running and delivering regular sales at a good cost-turnover ratio? Great, then you should start creating search ad campaigns or adding new ones now. In principle, it is advisable that the search campaigns reflect your store structure. In other words, if your main category is "men's" and the sub-category is "Nike men's t-shirts" and you are targeting users in Germany, then simply call your campaign that. So....

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

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

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

6. retargeting

Great, you are now buying sales-promoting clicks on your products via Google Shopping & the search campaigns.

Now you need to know that the average conversion rate in e-commerce is around 2.81% (source: Wordstream). In other words, if you attract 100 users to your site via Google Ads, an average of 2.81 of them will buy a product. But what about the remaining 97.19 users who didn't buy? This is where dynamic retargeting comes into play as a safety net for lost customers. With retargeting, you can present your products to your customers again within the Google Display Network.

Please note the following:

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

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

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

There are also other very high-performance providers of alternative retargeting solutions if you are not satisfied with the figures from the Google Display Network. We would be happy to audit your existing Google Display campaigns and recommend an alternative provider if necessary. Simply contact us at the sea@exwe.de email address.

7. conclusion

You have now created a good basis for success with SEA. Of course, there are still thousands of adjusting screws in SEA that you can turn, move and lock. We will be happy to do this 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, please contact us. We love to optimize GoogleAds & MicrosoftAds accounts of online stores and do nothing else all day long. You can contact us with an individual inquiry about our SEA services at the e-mail address here sea@exwe.de Cheers EXWE You can find everything else in the Performance Marketing section.