Working alongside LEDSTOP, I’ve helped to increase the organic traffic, sales and overall user experience. By working alongside large LED brands such as Megaman, we’re also been able to rapidly increase our wholesale orders. Whilst these drive a smaller profit margin, it means our stock turnover is much higher and we can deliver the latest products without the need to sit on old stock.
So what did we do? Well below, I outline a few tips for running AdWords and how we did it for B2B ecommerce.
Google AdWords and ecommerce are simply made for each other, and with a good strategy, many business to business ecommerce websites successfully use AdWords as a reliable advertising platform. In other words, if you’re looking to increase your revenue, AdWords is a pretty good place to start.
With that in mind, we’re going to explain some of the ways AdWords can work for wholesalers and the best way you can drive conversions for your consumer-facing wholesale order website.
Why AdWords?
In terms of ecommerce, the main plus point of AdWords is the benefit of being able to target prospective customers who are ready to purchase your products, although generally speaking wholesale ecommerce sites using AdWords will see less results in terms of volume, with often higher cost per clicks and fewer overall conversions than you’d expect from a b2c (business to customer) site.
With Adwords, you can:
– Showcase ads to those in search of specific products or brands
– Decide on your spend per each new customer acquired
– Increase your performance and revenue with measurable results
Your customer base is also a big deciding factor on whether AdWords is really worth it for your business; for instance, if the majority of your business is local, you may find that you won’t get much out of using AdWords. However, if you have enough potential customers who will be searching for your products, it will most likely be worth it.
Driving conversions
AdWords provides a quick and effective way of purchasing targeted pay-per-click (or PPC) advertising, with ads displayed prominently beside search results on Google, along with other search and content sites on the internet. The cost and effectiveness of your campaign will really come down to your chosen keywords, a carefully planned strategy, and optimised landing pages. So, now that we’ve got the basics down, how can you drive conversions?
One way to do this is to rotate your ads in order to optimise your conversions – a simple feature you can try when you have a few conversions and want to see which keywords get you the most results. So, the next time you’re looking at the Ad Rotation options, simply set to ‘optimise for conversions’ instead of going for clicks or an even rotation.
Once your campaign is underway, you’ll notice specific ads and keywords are getting more success than others; these are known as your converting keywords and ads, and once you’ve learned what they are, you can really home in on them, create some close variations, and adjust accordingly to focus on these whilst ‘pausing’ your non-converting keywords.
Conversion Optimiser
You may also want to use Conversion Optimiser in order to optimise your current bid metrics, but it’s essential to take the time to learn exactly how it works. In Conversion Optimiser, you’ll be able to select your cost per acquisition settings from either ‘Target CPA’ or ‘Max CPA’; the latter is the most you’d want to pay per conversion, while a target is your average amount you’d want to pay. But remember, once you select a bidding type, this will then apply to all your ad groups, so you may have to do some adjusting.
Tracking conversation rates
Business to business ecommerce sites obviously work differently from standard b2c sites, and therefore tracking conversions can be a little more complicated – after all, the wholesale customer is not able to make a direct purchase after they’ve clicked through to your site, meaning the conversion path has a delay.
However, you should by no means let that stop you; building a method to track these conversions can provide you with the analytics you need, whether you choose to go the DIY route or a resource such as salesforce.com. Remember, Google Analytics is your friend and you should be tracking and paying close attention to your ads to see what works and what doesn’t.
