Mastering Google Ads: Boost Your eCommerce Success

What's up guys, Trevor here with eCommerce Paradise Podcast.

And today I'm just going to talk about ad account management, specifically Google Ads. But everything I talk about with Google Ads kind of plays over with Bing Ads. And just some ideas and thoughts. I recently spoke to one of my students and went over his ad account and had a lot of advice for him. So I just want to help the community. So first and foremost, I think there was a bunch of different things we talked about. But when I first saw his ad account, the first thing I noticed is the spend,

the overall spend on his different campaigns was a bit off. And the first thing I look for in an ad account is just proper campaign setup in the first place. So the way we do ad accounts is we have a three-tier campaign setup where it's called an inverted funnel. You have one shopping campaign that's for generic keywords. You have a separate shopping campaign that's just for branded keywords.

And then you have a separate shopping campaign just for the specific model and SKU keywords that your suppliers have for their products. And that way you can bid higher on the model and SKU keywords and the branded keywords than you do on the generic keywords. Because usually when people are shopping around for expensive products, they're shopping all different marketplaces, but they're also shopping for retail specialty stores, online specialty stores.

And they do that through the search engines, through Google Shopping and Bing Shopping. And the way they go through the process is that first they'll start with the generic keyword, usually, unless they're referred to a certain brand by a friend or something like that. But usually, let's just say they're shopping for a massage chair,

for instance. It's like they're just going to start by looking for massage chairs or maybe a different type of massage chair, like a massage chair for an old person or a massage chair for an athlete or something like that, right? And they're going to find a bunch of blog posts and e-commerce sites. And usually the sites that are at the top of the search engines for generic keywords are the ones that are spending the most on those things. And those are the ones that are with the biggest budget.

You're going to have usually big box stores and stuff like that. In my opinion, bidding high on generic keywords is not a good idea. It's only something you would do if you have a huge ad budget and tons of other sources of revenue that you can just throw money at. People usually don't convert right away through generic traffic. They convert right away through branded or model and SKU specific traffic.

So what I recommend, especially for beginners, people getting started out or even people just trying to scale, is that you keep your generic bids on your generic campaign to a minimum because those just aren't going to convert right away. What you should do is you should bid much higher on your brands and on your product and SKU campaigns. So yeah, when I was looking at his ad account, the first thing I noticed was the generic campaign is spending the most.

And then under that was brands and under that was products. So obviously it's completely reversed. And I asked him why and he said, well, yes, I've been doing things for a while. Business has been slow. And I thought, well, okay, that's probably one of the main reasons why. So I told him he needs to change his bidding. We looked at the bidding. He was bidding pretty high for a generic campaign.

I think it was like 50 cents to a dollar per click, which is really high for generic keywords in almost any niche. Obviously, if you want to rank high for those, it's not too high, but you don't want to rank high for generic keywords in the shopping ads usually, especially for products that are over $1,000, $2,000. There are some exceptions. I've had a success of products that are like $500 to $600 in that range, like $300 to $600 with generic keywords and usually during the holiday season.

So it's not always the case but for the most part you just don't want to be bidding that high my average bid on a generic campaign is somewhere between $0.15 to $0.30 so don't bid too high on your generic campaign.

On his brand's campaign he was bidding the same amount on the brand's campaign as he was on the product's campaign and he was based it off of what they call the benchmark CPC and in Google Ads you'll see benchmark CPC usually it's not going to give you data on a short time frame but if you look at a longer time frame like 30 days or 60 days or 90 days out it'll give you some data for the specific product groups and actually the specific products as well.

So that's kind of like one idea is to look at that because benchmark basically means what the rest of the competitors are bidding on that particular thing. And so it doesn't give you all the data, but it does give you some. And what you'd find is that a lot of big brands are actually bidding really high. Like the big retailers, the big box stores are also bidding really high on those branded keywords.

And it's possible that they probably just don't have the campaign structure set up to manage a separate campaign on model and SKUs. And that's my guess, because a lot of these top agencies that do these ads, they don't even set up a model SKU campaign. They just set up a generic and a branded campaign, a two-tier campaign. So they're bidding quite high on these branded keywords. And usually when someone types in a model or SKU, they're going to include the brand name in that.

And then obviously they're going to bid. So this guy's bidding like $2 to $6 on a branded campaign. and. Brand and campaign will convert sometimes, but a lot of times it won't because somebody's still kind of in the middle of the buying journey, kind of the middle of the funnel. They're now searching around for different brands and they're looking at the different stores that offer these brands. And they haven't really settled on a particular product yet.

So they'll click the brand, they'll go to one store, they'll look at a few products, they'll click another brand, go to the store. So obviously they're not going to buy right away unless they're just, I don't know, impulse buying an expensive product, which is kind of rare, but it does happen.

But yeah so what i usually do is i bid around like 50 cents to a dollar per click starting bid on these branded campaigns and what that's going to do is not make it so i don't overspend on this branded campaign it'll get me kind of in the middle of the shopping ad somewhere so it's when someone digs through the shopping ads they click a few at the top and then i keep searching searching then they can find my store so you know you're not

paying for traffic that's sort of just like clicking clicking and keep searching you're actually paying for traffic that's already searched through a bunch of stores and now they're finding your store or seeing your deals. And it's kind of better because as someone goes through the buying process later on, they're more likely to make a decision, especially if they just like your store because it's a specialty store.

And what really helps at that point too is adding some personal flair to it, like a bit about the founder and causes you support and things that kind of touch people in an emotional way. So consider doing that as well.

But when it comes to the low hanging fruit, the orders that come in right away, you always got to bid highest on the product campaign and that's going to be targeting your models and SKU numbers. So yeah I'm talking like a buck fifty to three dollars starting bids and what you want to do after that is you want to set up adjustments, bid adjustments. There's a bunch of different things you can do it for. There's devices, there's times of day, there's locations and there's audiences.

Those are the four main things which we focus on. So starting with devices Usually I bid higher on devices, somewhere between 50% to 100% bid adjustment on a computer. Bid higher on computers, like actual desktop or laptop computers as opposed to mobile devices, because your stores are usually always going to convert better on computers.

A high-ticket product, someone's going to usually be browsing around on their cell phone during the day and then get home at night and then purchase that product, or they're going to be at work and purchase that product. It's not going to be on their phone, though. So if you look at your sales and conversion data, I can almost guarantee it's going to look like your computers convert a lot better than mobile devices. That's what I've always found.

It may or may not be different for your niche or whatever, but that's usually what I found. So I bid higher on computers than everything else. Okay, and then the locations. You can look at locations once you have location data as to the different markets that convert really good. And you can change it based on seasonality, and you can change it based on the

locations that convert better than others. I usually don't bid a whole lot higher, maybe just like 10 or 20% bid adjustments in those particular states or cities that you see a lot of orders from. And also, maybe if you see a lot of competition in particular states and cities, then you want to bid a little bit higher in those as well.

Time of day. So time of day matters a lot because if you only have a customer service agent and you're only available to answer phones nine to five, that kind of thing, whoever's answering phones is available a certain time of day. You should always be bidding the highest during that time period. And you should bid lower the times of day that you don't have someone answering

the phones. The best thing to do, obviously, in the long run is to have a VA who's answering the phones all day and then after hours have an after hours answering service. It's going to cost more money, but it is likely to get more orders for you. At least have someone answer the phone instead of going to voicemail is always better. And then they'll be able to handle overflow as well. So yeah, what I usually do is whatever your hours happen to be, that's normal.

And then after hours, maybe like the three to four hours before and after the shift, then you do a bid adjustment of negative 50% or so and then for the overnight hours so like the rest of the hours when people are sleeping I would do a negative bid adjustment of like 80% or something like that so that you really aren't showing up because whoever is looking in the middle of the night is very unlikely to convert and it's probably going to be.

Competitors living overseas and people that are just searching around so it's not people you want to actually capture in the ad so I've been doing that and then the next thing with the audiences is that you can retarget audiences within your shopping campaigns. You don't need to have a separate shopping campaign to retarget audiences.

So if you go into audiences in one shopping campaign and you go into segments, you can choose how they've interacted with your business and you can see how it's like all visitors, general visitors, people who have viewed your product pages, product viewers, abandoned carts, cart abandoners, and then there's like purchasers and product purchasers and things like that. So you want to bid according to that.

So like general visitors, usually I add like a 50% bid adjustment, product viewers, 100%, banding cards, 150%. People have purchased from you in the past 200%. Because what's going to happen is that if those people have already come to your site and are back at a search engine and searching again, they've already been introduced to your site. So you want to bid higher because it's a warmer lead.

So bid the highest on warm and hot leads. Like someone's purchased from you before and they're searching the internet for a product again that you have, bidding 200% extra is really worth it and being at the very top. So they're going to see your store and be like, oh yeah, I purchased from that store before. And they're going to click your ad and probably buy from you.

So that's a really good thing. So it's good to start with a base bid, especially something where computers are a bit higher than mobile traffic, and then go up from there based on warmer leads, based on places that convert better, based on times that convert better, that kind of stuff. So that's how you should build an ad account out. Now, it's a bit more complex when it comes to actually setting up these campaigns, making sure they run smoothly.

If you want to get information on that, you can sign up for my high-ticket dropshipping masterclass.

I got all the information in there at ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass. and if you're curious about all this high ticket dropshipping stuff and you just haven't gotten started with it you want to get going or you just like you started and tried but it didn't work definitely get my free course and niches list so you can get an idea of what the niches are that work and how to do niche research because usually when you get started and it doesn't work it's usually because you picked

a bad niche one that doesn't really work very well so get some advice there through my free course and niches list ecommerceparadise.com slash mini course, and then if you have a store running right now and it's profitable and your ad accounts are at a level where you want to scale. There's two things. Usually it's not working really well and you want it to get to work or it's working well but you want to scale.

So what I would recommend is if it's not working well and you want to get it to work is just take my advice here and make adjustments to your accounts and then see if that helps. And then do split testing. And then also set up retargeting ads because retargeting ads can really help people get back to your site. Retargeting display ads, retargeting search text ads, retargeting on Facebook and social media platforms. You can do retargeting on Pinterest separately.

So yeah, I would definitely set up retargeting and look at email marketing and look at your website and just see what your conversion is and look at your competitors and see what they're doing for offers. You got to get your conversion rate up to make your ROAS make sense. And also, again, I've gone over this in other podcasts, but only work with suppliers with high margins. If you're selling the product with a 30% margin, it's going to make your cost per acquisition actually makes sense.

Whereas if you're selling a product, the 10% margin, and your cost per acquisition is 20 bucks, obviously, you're losing money, right? So you got to make sure that you know your cost per acquisition, and then you know, you know, your margin is high enough to support that. So only work with suppliers that have high margins. And if you find that a supplier has products with high margins and low margins, definitely adjust the price on those low margin products to be higher.

If you're at that point where your ads are doing decent, but you want to scale, this is a very tricky subject because I've ran into these issues in the past where you scale an ad account, you start bidding higher, whatever, and you don't really get that many more sales.

So there is kind of a plateau you kind of find with ad accounts usually. The best way to scale is actually to not scale. It's just to keep things the way they are, to get more suppliers and add more products to your store that have high margins, and then to do other things like spend money and resources in other places like SEO, SEO and get organic rankings for your product pages and your brand collections and things like that. Do more social media marketing to get more user-generated content.

Do retargeting ads on YouTube with user-generated content and other types of videos. YouTube retargeting ads were great to bring people back because it builds trust.

And then also to support your shopping ad structure you can put a a performance max campaign in there to do more ads outside of regular shopping like they'll put ads like all over the web these aren't necessarily going to convert very well but it's just going to be an extra marketing touch to get people to come back to your site so it's going to be websites like youtube or ebay or whatever and they're going to show shopping ads and stuff and different

blogs and things like that and it's not going to be very targeted so you want to keep the budget low and the bids low. But it's just another great way to sort of expand your presence across the web so people get another marketing touch from you that way. And definitely look into other things like direct mail, radio advertising, anything that you can find that's cheap, media buying related, definitely look into that. There's other ad networks too.

But yeah, if you need help with either setting up your ad account or scaling an ad account or with fixing your ad account, I can help with all three. I do have an ad management service and I offer private coaching. So you can choose one of the two. Private coaching, I'll just look at your ad account and help you through it. You can get more information on that at ecommerceparadise.com slash coaching.

And with my service, I'll set up your ad account for you, or I will redo your ad account, fix your ad account, and scale it for you. You can look at more information on that at ecommerceparadise.com slash ads. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast, guys. I hope it was helpful. Definitely subscribe and send it to your friend if you think it'll help them. And I look forward to seeing you out there.