Explore Paid Advertising

When your site is looking good and you’re starting to get orders, then it’s time to pour gasoline on the fire to supercharge your sales. Many merchants want to jump into paid advertising right away, but you need to learn to walk before you run and that means you must spend time on the design and sales process of your site before you spend money on advertising. When your site is dialed in it’s time to set up paid advertising campaigns.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is easy to setup, but very complicated to fine tune to make sure you are spending your dollars effectively and efficiently. Google has many products, but the first one you want to test is a text based campaign, those are the ads you see when you do a search on Google.com. Google also offers product search ads that are tied in to your Google Merchant Center account, check out this post to create your first product data feed from your Google Merchant Center account to Google AdWords. In addition, Google also offers a remarketing campaign where you can create ads that follow your potential customers around the internet. If you’ve shopped at a large eCommerce store like Amazon or Target you have probably seen ads for products that you have browsed show up on other sites, this is how remarketing works.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook advertising can be a home run for most merchants, but you must take time to set things up correctly. You will need a vibrant company page for your product, because the ads on Facebook are most effective when you land the visitor back on your Facebook page as opposed to sending them to your store. Once the potential customer is on your Facebook page they will see images and testimonials from your previous clients and then you need to work in a way for them to purchase from Facebook or link out from your Facebook page to your store.

Bing and Yahoo

After you achieve success on Google, it’s time to port your campaigns over to Bing Ads. Bing Ads will get you distribution on Bing and Yahoo and even though there is 1/10 to 1/15 the volume on Google, your cost per conversion can still do very well. Be very careful of the content network on Bing Ads, they syndicate your ads across other platforms and that traffic doesn’t convert so I would suggest blocking that to start. Stick with just the Bing and Yahoo search traffic as we have found that to convert the best.

Goal Tracking

If you are going to spend money on paid advertising it’s imperative that you setup tracking on your site. Google Analytics is a free product from Google that will track the visitors on your site and tell you where they came from, how long they stayed and what pages they visited. You can also create a goal in Google Analytics that will tell you if a purchase was made on your store and where that person came from.