July 20, 2009
OpEd By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
A successful PPC strategy can sometimes double your online sales. What is hard to grasp at first, is the tried and true saying “you have to spend money to make money.” Rather than just spending and hoping that the money will come, our ZippyCart Op Ed team has come up with 4 tips to help increase your ROI so that your money is used wisely:
1. Focus on Cost Effective Keywords and Avoid Super Competitive Keywords
Operating an eCommerce store typically means a lower profit margin which means you want to be efficient with your PPC spending. Therefore a good approach to take is to target cheaper keywords where you do not have a lot of competition. This will allow you to gain more visitors for a lower cost and give you a better chance of having a successful PPC campaign. Avoid pricey competitive keywords as they will deplete your budget very quickly and possibly not give you the best visitors unless you can afford to constantly be in the top positions.
2. Research Your Competitors Advertising Strategy
PPC advertising involves a lot of testing and work to ensure that campaigns are popular. A great way to save you time and money is to study what your competitors are bidding on and where they are buying ads. There are a lot of great tools you can pay for online to help you figure all of this out so that you can make smart choices on your PPC strategy.
3. Constantly Test and Analyze Your Ad’s Performance
Having a great ad with a high click through rate will help give you higher ad positioning at a lower cost. You want to experiment and analyze what is working and what is not so you can only put out your best ads. It may not be the most exciting task but it is part of a smart PPC strategy.
4. Explore Keyword Variations and Match Types
You want to play with the keywords in your campaign to make sure you are covering different word orders, match types and negative keywords. Broad match keywords allow your ad to show up on similar phrases and relevant variations. Phrase match keywords allow your ad to show up on searches that match the exact phrase exclusively. Exact match keywords means that your ad shows up for that exact keyword exclusively. Negative keywords are used to prevent your ad from showing up on specific keyword searches.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
