Google has been rolling out more new advertising features than ever, but advertisers often have little understanding of how to make these features work. The year 2024 is no different. We’ve seen recent shifts in eCommerce PPC, including Google’s focus on automation and the emphasis on Performance Max campaigns (which have become particularly important over the past year). Additionally, artificial intelligence has played an ever-increasing role in optimizing Google Ads targeting and bidding.
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eCommerce Advertising:
The Complete Guide to Paid Media
Nonetheless, we generally find that advertisers use fewer than 40 percent of Google Ads features. To reap all the benefits Google has to offer and ensure your brand is reaching more customers, follow these tips on Google Ads optimization.
Basic Google Ads Optimization Tips
Reach a massive audience, increase eCommerce traffic, and drive conversions by implementing these Google Ads optimization strategies:
- Optimize keywords
- Use location targeting
- Make it easy to convert!
1. Optimize Keywords
Consider the Buyer's Journey
When selecting keywords for your ad campaigns, remember to consider the stages that customers have reached in the buyer's journey. Those still in the awareness or consideration stages are more likely to search Google for broad keywords than those in the decision stage.
Take advantage of Google's Keyword Planner tool, and use SEMrush to ensure your ads are seen by the right customers. This will help you benefit from AI-driven keyword recommendations that can enhance your results. While you may want to increase brand awareness and reach, we recommend avoiding broad-match keywords.
Instead, target consumers in the decision stage by optimizing keywords for relevance. Long-tail keywords offer endless combinations and are almost guaranteed to bring more traffic to your site.
Add Negative Keywords
Use negative keywords to avoid showing your ad to people who search for a specific word or phrase that isn’t associated with your business. Use the search terms report to get some negative keyword ideas. For example, you could exclude the keyword “free” if customers have to pay for your product or service.
Add negative broad-match, phrase-match, and exact-match keywords to your ad groups so that your ads reach the right audience. However, avoid using too many negative keywords; it may result in your ads reaching too few customers.
2. Use Location Targeting for Cost-Per-Click Optimization
Increase ROI by focusing your ad targeting on places where customers can purchase your goods. Leverage Google's location-targeting settings to determine where your ads should appear. You can choose:
- Entire countries
- Areas within a country, like cities or territories
- A certain radius around a location
- Places of interest
- Your company’s locations
- Tiered demographics
When you don't want your ads to appear in certain places, just select the locations that you want to exclude from your campaigns. If you're not sure whether location targeting will benefit your business, ask yourself if it's cost-effective and would help you gain more customers.
Google Ads has also expanded its location-targeting options, allowing you to use features like demographic tiering and in-store targeting for omnichannel campaigns. This can increase your ability to reach the right customers at precisely the right time.
3. Make It Easy to Convert!
By making it easy, we mean guiding shoppers to checkout in as few steps as possible. Provide relatively few options within your Google ad so that customers know what to click within your offer. Create dynamic landing pages that tailor content according to the queries that bring users to your site.
Keep your call-to-action (CTA) short and to the point. The purpose of a bold CTA is to guide shoppers in taking the next step on the path to purchasing. Keep the design consistent with your brand's colors while making it stand out at the same time.
Be sure your CTA directs users to a landing page that corresponds with your offer. For example, if a user searches for "computer keyboards," link your CTA to a landing page that only contains keyboards (as opposed to a page listing various electronics). Offering too many options could obstruct the shopper’s path to purchase and may even prevent them from browsing your site.
Finally, try to avoid requiring prospects to fill out numerous form fields. Put yourself in the consumer's shoes—you probably don't want to give out much of your personal information, either. Though marketers love collecting data, try limiting the number of form fields to three or four.
This level of simplicity should also extend to your payment options. Payment choices like Google Pay can expedite the checkout process.
Advanced eCommerce Google Ads Strategies
If you’re looking for additional ideas that will take your eCommerce Google Ads strategies to the next level, here are a few PPC optimization tips to get you started:
Harness Performance Max Campaigns to Improve Google Ads Results
Performance Max campaigns let you leverage automation to drive conversions. This Google Ads setup will help you optimize your ad performance through automated bidding, and it can even assist you with ad creation.
Although AI helps run these campaigns, it’s important to closely monitor performance. Look for ways to optimize ad placement by creating assets related to a certain theme or target audience. You can also look at your Google Merchant Center feed to make sure everything is updated.
Leverage Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads can help you ensure your campaigns hit all the relevant keywords to improve Google Ads performance. Rather than worry about keyword gaps, you can use these campaigns to find new ad opportunities and bring in new groups of searchers.
These ad campaigns don’t work well for websites that frequently change their products or deals. Instead, they align best with sites that have well-optimized pages that the system can understand. This helps the system find the best opportunities to attract new users. Likewise, these campaigns perform well for businesses that have large inventories; they could help you manage marketing efforts that might otherwise prove cumbersome. Dynamic Search Ads also prove desirable if you experience seasonal fluctuations.
Adopt Google Shopping Ads Best Practices
As an eCommerce business, you’ll want to take steps to embrace Google Shopping Ads best practices, including:
- Setting up product feeds with rich data
- Ensuring Merchant Center compliance
- Using granular product segmentation in bidding
- Using high-quality product images
Tools and Features to Drive Better Google Ads Optimization and ROI
Google Ads offers various ad extensions that can increase conversion rates and improve ad quality scores, helping you with cost-per-click optimization. Use these extensions to supply your audience with more relevant information about your business before they click your ad.
To give searchers a better understanding of your business and help drive more leads, provide information like your location, phone number, and ratings.
Google has also introduced some newer extension types, including image and lead form extensions. With image extensions, using simple, clear images that benefit the core goal of your advertising can help attract more attention. Similarly, the lead form extension gives people on mobile devices the chance to send you their information on the search results page—without even visiting your landing page. This can help you increase conversions.
We also encourage business owners to look at features like customer match and remarketing lists for search ads. They can improve your ad targeting. This helps you display ads to the people most likely to engage and convert, building highly effective, well-targeted campaigns.
Testing and Analytics in Google Ads Optimization
There are always various aspects of your ads that can be tested. Take a look at your highest-performing advertisement, and compare it to the other ads. Discover what's working best, and apply those strategies to all of your ads.
Also, test landing pages to compare performance. For example, send half of your clicks to one landing page (your "control") and the other half to a different landing page to see which one performs better. If the second landing page yields better results, set it as your new "control" so that you can test other pages against it in the future.
To help you further improve your ad campaigns, we recommend taking full advantage of the capabilities offered by Google Ads Experiments to run split A/B tests on your ads. This will help you see what people respond to best so that you can optimize your efforts.
At the same time, make sure you utilize Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The transition from Universal Analytics to GA4 has introduced some enhanced reporting capabilities that can give you greater insight into campaign performance and potential areas for improvement.
Emerging Trends in Google Ads for 2024: PPC Optimization Tips
During 2024, some important trends have emerged. Businesses that want to develop strong Google Ads campaigns should pay attention to them:
AI and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence has increasingly become involved in the PPC advertising process. It can help optimize your bidding strategy, target customers, and even create images for your Google Ads campaigns.
Voice Search and Visual Ads
Customers use voice search to interact with digital environments on an increasingly frequent basis. They have also started using visual shopping ads to find products more easily. Optimizing ads for these new customer trends can maximize brand reach.
Conclusion
Reach more shoppers, improve ad performance, and increase conversions by following these tips for Google Ads optimization. At the end of the day, you want your ads to be relevant, useful, and beneficial to the user. These ideas will help you continuously optimize your ads so that you reach more people and drive conversions efficiently.
Leverage your Google Analytics eCommerce reports to gain insight into visitor behavior. Study these insights and keep testing to see how you can improve your ad performance, which will help you cut costs while attracting new buyers.
To learn more, check out our eBook, “eCommerce Advertising: The Complete Guide to Paid Media.” It offers advanced strategies that you can implement.
Here at Groove Commerce, we build Google Shopping, Search and Display eCommerce PPC campaigns to help increase website traffic while keeping the cost per click as low as possible. If you'd like to learn more about how Groove could help your eCommerce store increase ROI, please contact us today. We can provide a free site audit and develop custom PPC solutions that optimize your campaigns.
