PPC strategies in a competitive ecommerce market

[BobGW]

Hello,

What's the top 5 things to keep in mind when doing PPC in a competitive ecommerce market? Our competitors are buying PPC leads based on gathering long term customers that only have to get bought once and then they are repeat customers with no more cost.

Thus, PPC cost is through the roof in this niche.

Anyways, what's the top 5 pieces of advice you would give and you're also welcome to reference any good or harder to find references for me to read or watch.

Thank you,

Bob

[DavidKonigsberg]

1- check what words competitors use with sites like semrush , keyword spy

2- run words that show intent to buy or buy in larger amounts- buy, wholesale, item sku, item full name, bulk, etc

3- be competitive on price and have a nice selection

4- google shopping tends to give you better cpa

5- weed out negatives and structure tight campaigns based on user intent with exact keywords if possible

6- track calls, sales, micro conv etc

7- pray

[Ray-pp]

Hi BobGW,

Wow, what a question to ask; it's fairly subjective and dependent on quite a few variables (like experience, life cycle of the campaign, ect), but that means we should get lots of answers!

Here is my Top 5 contribution (in no particular order):

Optimize Your Landing Page

I like to optimize the bottlenecks first and that means making sure that my website and landing pages are ready to receive paid search traffic.

Ask yourself these questions:

• does my website load as fast / faster than my competitors?
• Are the call to actions clear and on my landing pages?
• Is all the on-page SEO complete?

Make it Easy to Purchase & Proper Ecommerce Tracking

Make sure that your purchase funnel is simple and easy. Only capture the necessary information (save the extra for follow up emails and visits) and reduce any unnecessary steps in the checkout process.

Have thorough and accurate Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking integrated (make sure to link your Adwords account to your GA profile as well).

Develop an Efficient Adwords Account Architecture

A proper account infrastructure highly impacts the success of a campaign. Take the time to brainstorm how it's best to lay out your company's campaigns and ad groups. Many times referring to the website's navigation (sitemap) can help develop this portion.

Keyword Research & Maintenance

Once you have your campaigns and ad groups decided, you can begin to fill them with keywords (often times keywords will help you identify new ad groups or campaigns needed too). Remember to keep the keywords focused and tightly grouped.

Consistently set time aside to go through your keyword reports and matched search query reports in order to improve your keywords, add negative keywords, and identify new groups of keywords.

Research, Experiment, Promote, & Improve

Learn as much about Web Analytics as you can and how it applies to your Ecommerce strategy. Invest in the appropriate marketing tools for competitive research, SEO, and analytics. If you don't already love digging huge data, then you should get acquainted with it as quick as possible.

Make sure to continually test new ads, ad copy, banners, ect. Find the higher performing ads and ditch the ones that are costing you money.

Have campaigns ready to go for special occasions like Flash Sales, holidays, graduations, ect.

Making sure to keep a disciplined routine with your PPC campaigns will have a high impact on their success. The consistent, incremental improvement is usually what contributes the most for long-term success.

Bonus: Understand Your Customer Lifetime Value

"Our competitors are buying PPC leads based on gathering long term customers that only have to get bought once and then they are repeat customers with no more cost."

It sounds like your competitors have an understanding of the customer Lifetime Value of their customer's. In addition to Sales Revenue, as a metric for measuring success, they could be using the CLV of all the new customer's acquired.

I would highly suggest an ecommerce company compute its CLV to most accurately understand its Customer Acquisition Cost, which will enable the marketer to do a better job in the PPC market.