Ecommerce PPC Strategy: How to Drive Sales With Online Ads

In 2021, 2.14 billion people bought products online, which is 27% of the world’s population. The number of sales is equivalent 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. So now is the time to act and try a new eCommerce PPC strategy to grow your online sales.

Retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2014 to 2025
*Forecast
Source: Statista

• How do you make digital advertising perform better?
• Which advertising solutions are the best for the online sales growth?
• What media plan is essential for eCommerce?

This article describes our experience with launching international advertising campaigns for eCommerce brands using Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft Ads.

81% of consumers conduct online research before making an online purchase. Customers often switch channels, for example, use both Google Search and YouTube.

The successful brands are those that can be there when their potential customers’ are ready to buy, wherever they are.

To be there in the right place at the right time, you need to build bridges between 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 essence of an eCommerce PPC strategy — increasing profitability and 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. A comprehensive approach is important, when in addition to advertising you can also offer quality goods and provide the best service to your customers. If you mind these rules, then this strategy is for you.

It’s also important for us to work out an advertising strategy that’s scalable. So that once we get the sales and the target ROAS, we don’t have to stop there, but could further increase these figures. Multichannel strategy and the guideline `less is more` helps us every time. But first things first.

We use the proven method in the world of digital advertising of segmenting audiences by levels of the sales funnel: ToFu, MoFu, BoFu. You 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 can 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 yet
• BoFu (Bottom of the funnel): Those who have already purchased from your site
• Hot ToFu: Not familiar with your brand, but actively looking for the products you offer

These are the main audience segments, now let’s see how to build bridges to them.

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 multichannel approach to always be there when our user moves between channels.

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

• Google Smart Shopping campaign
• Google Performance Max
• Google Search
• Google Free Listings
• Microsoft Shopping Campaign
• Microsoft Free Listings
• 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
• Microsoft (Bing) Dynamic Remarketing campaigns
• Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing campaigns

Increasing loyalty or driving repeat purchases (BoFu):

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

As you can see, there are many solutions for connecting with your audience. Launching everything at once is an inefficient waste of resources and brings disappointing results because you spend a lot on advertising at once, but don’t immediately get revenue from sales to cover costs. That’s why we’ve developed a media plan where we start with less, but are 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 for the media plan:

• Before moving on to new campaigns, it’s essential to reach a steady sales volume on your current campaigns. This will allow you to make forecasts and plans for new launches with the lowest risks.
• The highest-performing campaigns get the entire budget until they meet demand (until sales stop growing within the target ROAS)
• As soon as the conversions reach their limit or the ROAS begins to exceed its target, we start moving the budget to a new campaign.
• 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 — the priorities and sequencing can change based on new insights, changes in business and goals, as well as changes in promotional products or new releases, etc.

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 conversions data, it becomes clear how effective the advertising is.
   — It’s possible to calculate the return on investment in advertising or the cost per conversion to determine whether the 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.

If your ads don’t perform well and attract few to no leads, contact us for a free eCommerce PPC Audit.

We wish you success in implementing your eCommerce PPC strategies and launching your advertising campaigns! Visit our eCommerce PPC library and find more valuable guides and our cases.

You can also get help from our agency in launching advertising campaigns. Get in touch.