Ecommerce PPC Strategy: How to Drive Sales With Online Ads

In 2021, online purchases were made by 2.14 billion people, which is 27% of the world’s population. The number of purchases amounted to 4.938 billion U.S. dollars. According to the forecast by 2025 the volume of purchases will increase by 50% and reach $7.391 billion U.S. dollars.

Now is the time to act and try new strategies to grow your online sales.

Introduction

• How do you make digital advertising top performance?
• Which advertising solutions are best for online sales growth?
• What media plan is essencial for e-commerce?

This guide describes our experience of launching international advertising campaigns for e-commerce brands using channels such as Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft Ads.

The key idea of the strategy

81% of consumers conduct online research before making an online purchase. Herewith, customers move between different channels, such as using Google Search and YouTube.

The succeeded brands are those that can present in their potential customers’ moments of intent, wherever they are. 

To competently organize your presence in the right place at the right time, you need to build bridges between the two entities: The target audience with some degree of readiness to buy and The goods that the audience is interested in. These bridges are Advertising Channels.

This is the main essence of the strategy – increasing profitability revenue by finding and building optimal channels of communication between the brand merchandise and its target audience. This works for any business. You don’t have to be famous in the market to build sales. But we should mention that a comprehensive approach is important, where in addition to advertising you can also offer quality goods and provide high service to your customers. If you consider these rules, then this strategy is for you.

It was also important for us to work out an advertising strategy that would be scalable. So that once we got the sales and the target ROAS, we would not stop there, but could further increase these figures. Multichannel strategy and the guideline `less is more` helped us. But first things first.

Audience segments

We use the proven method in the world of digital advertising of dividing audiences by levels of the sales funnel: ToFu, MoFu, BoFu. Many people have probably heard of it. But we’ve added another important audience segment to this funnel – Hot ToFu, which plays a key role in an online sales growth strategy.

• ToFu (Top of the funnel): A cold audience that is not familiar with your brand and does not actively search for your products, but has interest in your topic (for example, a builder could potentially be interested in a tool kit)
• MoFu (Middle of the funnel): Users who are familiar with your brand, but have not purchased from you
• BoFu (Bottom of the funnel): Those who have already purchased from your site
• Hot ToFu: Not familiar with your brand, but actively looking for products you offer

We have listed the main segments of the audience, now let’s see how to build bridges to them.

Advertising channels and specific solutions

Depending on the customer’s position in the sales funnel, we use suitable solutions to push them to buy. We don’t limit ourselves to one channel, for example, Facebook, but take a multi-channel approach to always be there when our user moves between channels.

Attracting customers with a high intent to buy (hot ToFu):

• Google Smart Shopping campaign
• Google Performance Max
• Google Search
• Google Free Listings
• Microsoft Shopping Campaign
• Buy on Google

Attracting new customers (ToFu):

• Google Smart Shopping campaign
• Google Performance Max
• Facebook Ads
• YouTube Ads: Video Action campaign
• Google Discovery Campaign

Remarketing (MoFu):

• Google Smart Shopping campaign
• Google Performance Max
• Facebook Ads
• Google Search (RLSA)
• Google Discovery campaign
• YouTube Ads: Video Action campaign
• Microsoft Display

Increase loyalty or drive repeat purchases (BoFu):

• Google Smart Shopping campaign
• Google Performance Max
• Facebook Ads
• Google Search (RLSA)
• Google Video Action Campaign (YouTube)
• Google Discovery campaign

A media plan based on The less is more principle

As you can see, there are many solutions for connecting with your audience. Launching everything at once is an inefficient expenditure of resources and disappointing results, because you will spend a lot on advertising at once, but not immediately get revenue from sales to cover costs. That’s why we’ve developed a media plan where we start by the less, but which is capable of producing a big effect — the less is more.

STAGE 1: Launch campaigns with the highest potential profitability (months 1-3)

1. Google Smart Shopping campaign or Performance Max (hot ToFu + ToFu + MoFu + BoFu)
2. Google Free Listings (hot ToFu)
3. Google Search Brand (hot ToFu)
4. Google Search (hot ToFu)
5. Google Search DSA (hot ToFu)

STAGE 2: Launch campaigns with potential target profitability (months 2-5)

1. Facebook Ads (MoFu)
2. Facebook Ads (BoFu)
3. Facebook Ads (ToFu)
4. Microsoft Shopping campaign (hot ToFu)
5. Buy on Google (hot ToFu)
6. Microsoft Display (MoFu)

STAGE 3: Video and Media Campaigns with Potential Target Profitability (months 4-8)

1. Discovery campaign
2. YouTube Ads: Video Action campaign (start with Custom audience + MoFu, add BoFu and ToFu in stages)

Recommendations and explanations for the media plan:

• Before moving on to new campaigns, it’s important to reach a steady sales volume on your current campaigns. This will allow you to make projections and plans for new launches with the lowest risk.
• The highest performing campaigns get the entire budget until they meet demand (until sales stop growing within the target ROAS)
• As soon as conversions reach their limit or ROAS begins to exceed the target, we start allocating the budget for a new campaign, etc.
• The cascade approach can be used to allocate budgets of any size and manage local and international campaigns 
• The media plan is lively and flexible – priorities and sequencing can change based on new insights, changes in business, goals, as well as changes in promotional products or new releases, etc.

Measuring

Before you start launching advertising campaigns, you need to set up analytics. Only with correct analytics the strategy will be viable.

Analytics solves two fundamental problems:

1. Conversion tracking (e.g. purchases)
   — Based on the data obtained on conversions it becomes clear how effective the advertising is.
   — It is possible to calculate the return on investment in advertising or the cost per conversion to determine whether the money invested in advertising is profitable.
2. Advertising campaign automation based on machine learning algorithms
   — Conversion tracking allows you to set up an automatic bidding strategy. This saves time and improves campaign efficiency.
   — The algorithms take into account tens of thousands of signals and determine: when, to whom, and which ad to show, to maximize conversion.

Steps to set up analytics:

1. Set up tracking tags: Google Ads Tag, Facebook pixel, UET tag, Google Analytics Tag.
2. Set up tracking of conversions and dynamic rates such as purchase price.
3. Check functionality, and make sure all data is transferred and processed correctly.

Then the campaigns are ready for data-driven measurement and management, and the machine algorithms can efficiently learn and improve the effectiveness of the campaigns.

Success in implementing your strategies and launching your advertising campaigns!

You can also ask our agency for help in launching advertising campaigns, get in touch with us.