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Some of the things you need to know before you start advertising with Google
What is Google Ads
Google Ads is an auction system where you compete to appear in the search results, to succeed takes a few things such as the quality of your products, the images, the website and how much you are prepared to spend on getting clicks aka CPC cost per click.
When you first setup Google Ads they have no idea what you sell or what your products are and if they are desired by the customers.
This information can only be gained by spending money on ads to start getting this data for your brand. Google does provide data showing what keywords and popularity of certain items is on any given month in any country, but this is only a guide.
Some products are super competitive with loads of companies trying to sell the same or similar products and then a few products are so niche that hardly anyone knows what they are including Google.
The outcome is you need to spend a decent amount of money on ads in the first 2 months to give Google enough relevant data to be able to sell you products to the right people at the right time.
The more competitive the product such as handbags, the higher the cost per click may need to be. The higher the price then possibly the more expensive the click.
The higher the price the harder the sale as people won’t just drop a few hundred pounds on a company they have never heard of or product they haven’t researched, Would you?
For products less than £40 I would not suggest Advertising unless in a very small bid maybe 20p click but can be tested.
For £50 to £100 products this is a sweet point for good consistent sales as most people will spend this without too much concern though not all.
After running Google Ads for a month and spending I would suggest a minimum of £1000 to gain the data needed to continue and grow. From this data let say you have a store with 200 products we can use this information to determine which products Google sees as popular or have potential and then reversely which products they could not even get interest on.
From this first month of running ads we would expect to get a few sales and building over the weeks and any superstar product that shows up can be moved into its own advert and then set to push for higher number of sales.
For products that show no signs of anything we can attempt to up the bid to force Google to find us clicks/customers or we can adjust the product imagery to try and find customers that way. Sometimes the problem can be the image used or can be the product title and description or just a change of price up or down which can then get the item to get clicks.
Google can get traffic to your website from Shopping Ads which are picture ads showing your product and price and or using Search Ads where people type in a search term for a product which you would hope to show up for, this is a more difficult type of ad to get sales from but does work. It all depends on your product type and willingness to try.
For a new store I would suggest running a general Shopping Ad campaign which will show all your products unless otherwise advised and will run for at least 2 weeks to gauge the market and get some data in. I would suggest a minimum daily budget of £30 but you have an extensive product portfolio you may want to either up you daily budget or only concentrate or the most relevant products in your store, best sellers, easy to order etc.
As the data comes in having let it run for a couple of weeks we can then take a look at what is getting clicks and hopefully sales and can adjust the bidding on each product and variant to try and push for extra sales or remove items that have spent too much money with no sales. It’s basically reading the data to see what is working and what is not and pushing to scale the products that sell and removing from the auction those products that are wasting money and time.
The products that don’t sell can be either paused or then run in a new ad to try to make them work or bring them back in later months, different sale times, seasonal products. All products tend to sell to somebody so it could be a case of leaving them in the store and waiting until you have a lot of traffic and see if people buy.
Once Google Ads has been running for several weeks and we have removed the dead products and pushed the good sellers we need to remove negative keywords from the account. So if you are paying for clicks for example for a competitor website that is a waste of money then we need to add these to a negative keyword list so Google no longer allows us to show up for that search term. These lists can run into thousands of keywords after a few months and allow us to optimise your search results so that you only show up for the correct terms and don’t waste money on useless keywords that aid someone else.
With enough good sales in the bag, we can start to incorporate SMART campaigns, soon to be replace by new Performance Max campaigns which tell Google to automate the bidding and find sales at a certain cost per purchase. These can work very well depending on how much data we have given Google and how many sales we have had, more the better.
There are then several other types of ads we can run, such as a brand search where people now know your brand and search just for that, great results normally as the intent for sales here is very high.
Google will push to try and get us to sell across its entire network and this is something we don’t want to do at least yet, they will also keep trying to get us to up our budgets and change to SMART campaigns asap, all a way to make more money for Google.