9 Google Ads Ecommerce Tips For 2022

1. Measure Your Conversion Metrics with Google Analytics 

To successfully track your Google Ad Campaign performance, you need to be able to accurately measure your analytics. If your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are not linked, there may be a discrepancy between your results. Once your Ads account is linked to your analytics, you will be able to:

• Improve Google Ads remarketing tactics and performance of dynamic remarketing.
• Import metrics like page view, bounce rate, session, average engagement time, etc.
• See all your store performance data in your Ads reports.
• Import your transactions reporting and goals from your analytics account.

2. Run Experiments to Test Which Ads Work Best 

Consistently testing and tweaking your Google ads’ performance is crucial to the success of your marketing campaigns. Running experiments on your Ads Campaigns allows you to change things like Headlines, Descriptions, Paths, Ad Rotation, Bid Modifiers, and Scheduling. 

You can copy and paste your current Google Ads campaigns into the campaign experiment tester. Here, you can alter any of the above metrics and test what works best for your ads. This allows you to try out new tactics without affecting the performance of your best campaigns. It also provides you with an opportunity to improve on your underperforming ad campaigns. 

You might want to create a new campaign just to test a different strategy, but this means you risk running cannibalistic campaigns that compete with each other and do not produce the desired results. 

In our experience running experiments for our clients, running a manual CPC with enhanced CPC checked campaign and experimenting an identical one with TROAS works best. Over time, these campaigns begin to understand the functions of the algorithm and when to win the actual auction that works in the backend.

3. Organize your Google Ads Campaigns with Labels 

Using labels will you save time when running tests, checking ad performance, and optimizing your ads accordingly.

Ads labels enable eCommerce marketers to quickly assess the performance of custom categories across their entire account. By creating and using Google Ads labels, you will be able to better organize your campaigns, groups, ads, and keywords. 

As an example, let’s say you run an online shoe store that sells to both men and women. You could make a Location label for your Ad campaign. This will allow you to easily compare how well your shoes are selling in certain countries, E.g. UK – Shoe Sales, US – Shoe Sales, and Generic Shoe Sales. 

You can also categorize your products by profit margins or selling price in case you wish to have multiple shopping or search campaigns running per label. This lets you personalize your Google Ads campaigns a bit more to achieve the desired ROAS.

4. Outline a Detailed Google Ads Budget

To figure out how much you want to spend on your Google Ads Campaigns, you need to set clear goals to achieve. Ask yourself questions like how many new customers do I want to reach per month? How much am I willing to pay to acquire a customer? What is my Customer Lifetime Value? Can I handle a large influx of new customers to my E-Commerce store? What are the avg CPC, break even ROAS, and actual profitability ROAS I want to achieve?

Once you have answered these questions, you will be able to clearly step out your Google Ads Campaign Budget. You now need to decide on your Monthly Budget and your Daily Minimum spend on Ads. 

And trust us when we say this is an important step in the overall success of your Google Shopping or Search campaigns. Choose the wrong budget and you risk not showing your ads enough or winning enough auctions. Choose a budget that’s too high in the start and you risk having your shopping or search campaigns win unnecessary auctions, leading to a loss in profitability.

Your Google Ads budget will depend on Three Factors:

1. The cost per link click of your target keywords – CPC is a constantly changing metric so you need to prepare for fluctuations in your budget. 
2. The Average Lifetime Value of Your Customers – it’s important to know exactly what the total value is in order to allocate the right amount of budget.
3. Your E-Commerce Store’s Conversion Rate – the ads you run with Google are only the icing on top of a cake. Match it with a highly converting website.

5. Improve Conversion Rates by Scheduling Times and Dates to Show Ads

Scheduling specific times to run your Google Ads campaigns is one of the easiest yet overlooked aspects on the platform. This simple tip will not only improve conversion rates but will also help you minimize unnecessary Ad spend. Google’s Ad Scheduling tool allows you to set specific times and dates when you want to have your ads shown. 

If you sell seasonal items in your store, this will be a crucial step to maximizing your Google Ads performance. Let’s say you sell Thick Winter Coats in your store; you may want to pause these ads in the Summer and resume them in the cooler months when conversion rates are higher. 

Once you have been running ad campaigns for a while, you can dive deeper into your customer’s behavior and see what day of the week or time of the day they are most likely to purchase one of your products. Your goal with Google Ads Scheduling is to mainly show ads during these times. 

6. Add Negative Keywords to All of Your Ad Campaigns

To maximize the performance and minimize unnecessary spending, you need to implement a negative keyword strategy into your ad campaign. 

A Negative Keyword strategy is a great way to ensure the traffic coming to your site is targeted. You can specify any keywords or irrelevant search queries that you want to exclude your ads from being displayed on. This will help improve your Click Through Rate, minimize Ad Spending, and eliminate non-relevant clicks.

However, over at Yoru Marketing, we believe that negative keywords should only be opitmized once or twice per week. Over optimization is never a good thing with Google Ads campaigns.

7. Remove Broad Match From Your Search Ad Campaigns

Broad Match is where Google will include your ads on any misspelled search terms, related searches, or variations to your chosen keywords. By selecting broad match, you will not bring in highly targeted traffic and you are likely to waste money on irrelevant clicks. 

When setting up a Google Ads Campaign, you should instead use Exact Match or Phrase Match. This will reduce unnecessary spending and ensure you bring in more refined traffic. 

8. Opposite of What Everyone Else is Doing

A major mistake that you can make when setting up your E-Commerce Store’s Ad Campaigns is to use the first image that’s available or which you find.

This is one EASY way to end up blending into the crowd and have no differentiating factor of your own. Once you blend into the crowd with shopping ads, it’s game over. Your impressions might start to drop or if they stay the same due to your bids, the overall cost per purchase (cpp) will end up going through the roof.

This is especially true if you are unable to compete with your competitors selling the same exact thing or something similar for less. So keep things simple and follow the mantra:

“Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.”

If majority of your competitors are using white background images for their shopping ads, use a lifestyle image showcasing the product in real life. On the other hand, if everyone or majority of competitors are using lifestyle images, use a white background image.

9. Optimize Your Google Ads Campaigns for Different Devices

A major determining factor in your ad’s performance is the devices that your clicks are coming from. You want to check how your ads are currently performing on each device and then optimize your marketing strategies around these. 

Look at the cost per link click, cost per purchase, and overall ROAS as these are some of the most important indicators. Obviously, your main priority should be getting to profitability so pay attention to the ROAS. Lower device bids individually by 1% to 5% as necessary.

If the majority of your purchases are coming from desktop devices and most of your mobile searches aren’t resulting in sales, then you may want to focus more of your budget on desktop ads or test new mobile strategies to improve conversions and click-through rates.