Should you link your Google Adwords account to Analytics?
As the number of online stores rises every day, the battle for users attention became more intense. Everyone has ads placed both online and offline, so now the question is not if you should promote your online store but rather what is the most effective way to promote your online store.
If AdWords is the best way to promote your online store is easy to know because with AdWords you have access to a lot of data in real time. You can handle your AdWords account or you could go to an AdWords expert like us to manage your AdWords account. The main reason why you might want to want to go with an AdWords specialist is that the cost can differ a lot and experts know how to build your ads and continuously adjust your AdWords account settings to get you a high quality score.
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How to use AdWords – Search Network Campaigns to promote your online store
What do you need?
First you need to create an AdWords account. Be careful when you set up the time zone and the currency because you can only change the time zone once and you need to create another AdWords account if you want to change the currency.
This is how your Google ads are going to look like:
Your online ads can show up on top, on the right side and at the bottom of Google search results. As you can see, those who show up in AdWords ads are both startups and big brands. If small companies have little chance of winning the battle with very large companies in Google Search organic ranking, AdWords with their online paid ads is for everyone. All internet marketing expert know that the key to a successful promotion of an online store on Google is a combination of AdWords and SEO campaigns.
AdWords settings, data and targeting are amazing – you can choose the hours and the days when you want the ads to show up, the language and location, the frequency(how many times the ad will be seen by the same person), the daily budget that you want to spend, the bid strategy, for how long you want the campaign to be active on your AdWords account, and apply filters to all this data such as device, label etc.
To get started, you need to sign up for a Google AdWords and a Google Analytics account. You will use them both to get the best results that you can get – AdWords will be the platform to set up your campaigns and Analytics will be your tracking and reporting platform. In order to be able to set objectives and track events from AdWords, you will need to link your AdWords to your Analytics acoount which will imply doing some settings in Analytics and implementing tracking code inside the pages of the website that you want to track.
AdWords account – structure
The structure of an AdWords account is very clear and easy to navigate. An AdWords campaign contains ad groups, ads and keywords. You can easily adjust the budget at all the levels(campaign, ad groups, ads and keywords), which matters a lot when it comes to productivity. If you notice that a particular keyword delivers excellent conversion rates, then you can choose to bid higher for that keyword, so that your ad would show up on a better position.
How to use AdWords – Display Network Campaigns to promote your online store
Google says that its Display Network allows you to advertise on over 2 million websites reaching 90% of all internet users. In creating your ads, you are free to express your brands personality because the format of the ads in Google Display Network campaigns is no longer limited to text or a simple images. Your online ads can also be videos, rich media ads(includes animations and interactive elements), social ads, etc. The targeting is made by placements, topic, interest, remarketing, keywords, age, gender and parental status. The recommended way to use them is by combining them. So, for example, if you sell red shoes for women you can choose gender and keywords or any other combination that would make your AdWords campaign more successful.
Placements can also be a good option if you know that your clients usually visit particular websites, even if their topic is not necessarily similar to yours. They might enjoy reading an online magasine for women, so making that one of your placements would be a wise decision.
Remember though that targeting means filtering – if you own a small business, you should not use too many filters because they are not only increasing relevance but they also decrease your audience which could lead to your ad not showing up at all. You have the power, you just need to learn how to use it or at least know all the options so that you can tell the people who will manage your AdWords account exactly what you want. For more information, you can check out this Display Network getting started guide.
How to use AdWords – Shopping Campaigns to promote your online store
First of all, what you need to know about shopping campaigns is that they can only be used if you want your ads to show up in one of the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S, as revealed in AdWords Help Center.
How do AdWords shopping campaign work and what do you need to set them up?
You need to sign up for a free account at Google Merchant Center and link it to your AdWords account so that you have all the data available an ready for the campaign. After you set up the campaign, you can then split your products into product groups and those product groups in other products group until you get the precision that you want and bid separately for each product group. You can choose to have large product groups(e.g. category: pants) or small product groups(such as product ID). Ofcourse, the reporting won’t be less precise than your product groups. You can, for example, see how well your sales have been for black shirts or leather bags from a particular brand. And if you are not sure about your bid, you can use Bid Simulator tool which collects the performance data of your competitors ads, makes an average and delivers that anonimous data to you, so that you can adjust your bid accordingly.
How to use AdWords – Remarketing Campaigns to promote your online store
With remarketing campaigns you can display ads on all the websites included in Google Display Network, targeting only the people who visited your website. A cookie is stored on your visitors computer, indicating the page they visited.
By linking your AdWords account to your Analytics you can track objectives and set events like when someone completes a contact form and clicks on the send button or when someone buys a product. You can then add them to a perfectly tailored remarketing list that you can then target with specific ads. If you wonder how precise your remarketing list can be, the answer is very. That is because you can modify your Analytics code that you have implemented in the pages of your website and benefit from all the filtering that Analytics offers. Some examples of possible remarketing list criteria: age, gender, location, a certain amount of cash spent on the website, time spent on page, completing an objective you set etc.
Dynamic remarketing is also very flexible – the visitors of your website can see different ads based on what pages of your website they visited. So, for example, if you sell jackets and someone was close to completing a sale but stopped because they had to go, the ad with that product will show up again to that person later while he/she is browsing the web, increasing the chances to closing that sale.
Conclusion
I hope this article helped you to get a broad view on how to promote your online store your AdWords. As you can see, AdWords combined with Analytics gives you a very wide range of options, helping you to get relevant traffic, more sales and extremely detailed reporting so that you make better marketing decisions.
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