The easy-peasy guide to ecommerce PPC

If you’re new to the digital marketing sphere, you’ll find a lot of abbreviations floating around – from SEO and CTR to PPC and ROI – it can be hard to keep up! There’s a lot of terms to get to grips with. 

Well we’re about to throw another one your way, one that your business probably needs. Ecommerce PPC is another term that’s often bandied about, but how does this fit into digital marketing, and how can it help your business?

What is ecommerce PPC?

First, you need to know what PPC is; in case you didn’t already know, it stands for pay-per-click. It basically covers forms of digital advertising that wherever an online advert gets clicked, you guessed it, it’s paid for. 

PPC sits in contrast to SEO (search engine optimisation), as it buys online ad spaces. Whereas SEO is an organic strategy that relies on fantastic website content, strong backlinks and a good technical backbone to get seen – and there’s a lot that goes into making a website with good (white hat) SEO.

So, think back to when you use a search engine and after you’ve searched a query, you often find adverts that appear at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) – there’s another abbreviation for your list! They will have ‘Ad’ in front of them, and if you’re searching to shop, you’ll often see a carousel of images of products from different online shops right at the top, again with ‘Ads’ showcased next to them. Wherever you see ‘Ad’ next to search results, PPC – or rather ecommerce PPC – is the strategy that has enabled them to appear right in front of your eyes. 

This is what it can look like on desktop for a typical commercial search term with PPC results:

As you can see, where PPC is concerned, it really does pay to be on top.

Why does my business need ecommerce PPC?

Data-driven approach

With Google Analytics, Facebook Business and Google Shopping Ads, you can monitor, optimise, scale, test and report accurately when you use ecommerce PPC. This means you can test different display ads on different platforms, a great strategy if you’re not sure where to start as you can rest assured knowing exactly where and what your marketing budget is contributing to. 

By keeping a constant eye on things, aka monitoring and analysing, you as a business or your digital marketing agency can adapt and tweak campaigns accordingly to ensure the very best results are achieved. It’s all a work in progress!

Targeted ad campaigns

What’s great about ecommerce PPC is the very specific targeting you can do for your ad placements and campaigns. You can target different ads to different audiences and customer bases as well as utilising keyword research to decide where best to place your ads. There are so many different ways to advertise, with just keywords and links on search engine results pages or with images and keywords for Google Shopping display ads. 

Facebook is a great way to get in front of new customers also. Their advertising tools give a wide range of creative display options and you can target ads so specifically that it’s quite eye-opening! If you’re a wedding business, you can target people who have recently changed their relationship status to ‘engaged’. You can target the industry they work in, their average salary and their interests. The sky’s the limit really!

Set your own budget

With ecommerce PPC, you often need to bid for space to display your ads for your chosen keywords. You get to decide how much you want to bid for, factoring in how competitive that market and keyword is. Where there is a lot of competition for selected keywords, a lot of volume and potential profit, the amount you pay per click tends to be more than keywords with lower volume. It’s why it’s so important to get your keyword research right from the get-go, to know exactly what to bid and how much for the best results.

Google Shopping

If you’re playing Family Fortunes, it’s hard to guess any other top answer other than Google for “Name a search engine.” It’s why Google shopping is one of the most popular platforms for ecommerce. You can place adverts alongside images and enticing calls to action with key search terms with high monthly volumes, ones that are helping searchers find the right products and services, and creating conversions. Oh, and Google Shopping recently became free – now affectionately known as Froogle!

Is ecommerce PPC right for me?

Put simply, if you have a service or goods to sell, then yes! Whether it’s Google or Facebook, people are turning to the internet to search for great deals, online shops and niche products or services. 

For the long game, SEO is definitely worth investing in to help get your website climbing higher in rankings organically. But in the short term, PPC is the perfect strategy for instant visibility and results.

Not sure how to get started? Have a chat with us, because we definitely know a thing or two about PPC for ecommerce.

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