Contextual advertising for an online store

Website promotion and attracting visitors is one of the most important issues for online stores. Contextual advertising for an online store must be used effectively, as it can become the main supplier of customers.

But at the same time, you need to understand that if advertising for an online platform is set up incorrectly, it can not only not bring returns, but also work in the red. Therefore, it is better to entrust the campaign setting to specialists.

What are the features of setting up contextual advertising for an online store?

Compared to regular advertising for a service site or landing page, setting up contextual advertising for an online store has its own distinctive features, which makes it more difficult for an unprepared user:

1. Ads are customized based on numerous requests. If for a corporate website or services we set up a limited number of CS for 5-10 different pages, then this is clearly not enough for a store. The contextologist works on both landing pages and categories of the store and filters, and sometimes even pages of individual products. So, within any category, there are many subgroups. For example, if you are selling outerwear, in addition to the standard division into “male” and “female” and adding the selling words “buy”, “price” and clarifying the geographical location: “in Kyiv”, “in Ukraine”, you must also take into account :

• Product color (“blue”, “red”);
• Seasonality (“winter”, “summer”);
• Manufacturer (“The North Face”, “Remington”).

Selected queries should satisfy the user’s intent as much as possible and display the assortment of the store. As a result, a contextual campaign for E-Commerce can contain thousands of requests that lead to many pages of the site;

2. We focus on sales. The growth in the number of orders is the goal of contextual advertising. It’s hard enough to get a site visitor to make a purchase as a result. Behavioral factors play the main role (how convenient is the site, does the landing page meet the consumer’s request, are the company’s contact details and the price of the product in a prominent place, etc.). Therefore, when setting up advertising on a trading platform, it is important to work with usability and analytics to constantly increase conversion;
3. Increased setup complexity. Working with such advertising requires much more time from a specialist than with a regular one (after all, you need to create much more ads, choose a more impressive semantic core, etc.). The campaign budget can be spent much faster if the campaign size is large, so you need to constantly monitor the performance of all ad groups. It is also very important to analyze the results and quickly make changes, and this is another difficulty – you need to constantly monitor a large amount of data.

Instructions for setting up advertising for online stores on different CMS

Although the general principle of setting up contextual advertising for online stores on different CMSs is approximately the same, there are still some nuances that may differ depending on the specific platform. Our Google logistician, Yana Lyashenko, sorted them out in detail.

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What Google Ads tools do we use for stores?

In our work, we try to use all possible Google Adwords tools for online stores:

Advantages of contextual advertising of online stores

Advantages of contextual advertising of online stores over other varieties:

• Effective budget spending – money is spent on showing ads only for products that are in stock;
• Saving time. Instead of creating thousands of ads for each product, you save time with contextual advertising;
• Ads are generated by the system according to certain parameters, which is convenient when there are similar products;
• Automatically update information. Changes in prices and the appearance of promotions are automatically reflected in the advertisement. When the product ends, the campaign is disabled;
• The impression can be tied, for example, to the working hours of the Call Center. You can set this up to the hour;
• The system manages rates. If they are high, you will receive a notification that the budget is about to end.

Hyro scooters, segways

Mini Segway, Esway

Before: Number of leads: 10 Lead cost: 700

After: Number of leads: 75 Lead cost: 273

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Fireplaces & Stoves

Fireplace Accessories

Before: Number of leads: 5 Lead cost: 728

After: Number of leads: 140 Lead cost: 390

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Stationery

Online stationery store

Before: Number of leads: 36 Lead cost: 211

After: Number of leads: 197 Lead Cost: 99

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All cases >>>

What mistakes are usually made when setting up E-Commerce ads?

Often, when an inexperienced user sets up ads for a store, this can be done with errors, which will lead to a drain on the budget and losses for the business owner. Here are the most common ones:

1. Not configured web-analytics. All user actions on the site must be tracked and analyzed in order to receive ever cheaper requests and increase conversions;
2. Search and display ads are set up in the same campaign. They must be separated, as they will have different CTR, CPC and other indicators;
3. Irrelevant landing page. When a client is looking for a product with certain characteristics, and when the transition opens the main page, it is highly likely that he will return to the search results and will not search for it on the site on his own;
4. Impressions for non-targeted keywords. Be sure to set up negative keywords for ads (to limit inappropriate impressions), otherwise they will attract a non-target audience to the site, or there will be a very low conversion;
5. The ads are written without mentioning the benefits to the buyer. The experience of the seller is not as important to the client as the benefits defined for him (free shipping, discount, etc.);
6. No extensions configured. Google Ads provides the ability to expand the ad (add company address, phone number, quick links to certain sections on the site). This increases the attractiveness of the ad and reduces the cost of the transition;
7. Desktop-only ads. As you know, now on some topics, more than half of the traffic comes from smartphones. Therefore, it is important to set up a separate campaign with mobile versions of advertising;
8. Not enabled Retargeting. This is necessary in order for past visitors to the site to return to the page and take the targeted action. It is very often difficult for a beginner to cope with this task, therefore we recommend contacting a pro for this.

Contextual advertising for E-Commerce should always be used effectively, therefore, to set it up, contact a specialist or order a contextual advertising audit – this is will help you spend money efficiently and avoid mistakes that can cost your business dearly.

Popular Questions

• ‍✅ What are the features of contextual advertising for online stores?
  Unlike sites with services, eCommerce has a much larger semantic core and ads are configured for a much larger number of landing pages, which means a lot more work for a PPC specialist.
• ‍✅ Does Google have advertising tools specifically for online stores?
  Google has a special ad format for online stores – shopping ads which is even more effective than regular search ads. Such advertising is a product card with a price and a photo right in the search engine results. For eCommerce, dynamic remarketing works well, which shows the user products that he viewed but did not buy, on Google partner sites.
• ‍✅ From what depends on the cost of an advertising campaign for an online store?
  Price for work depends on the number of custom instruments and traffic costs. To find out the approximate cost of traffic, you need to collect a semantic core (as a rule, it is much larger for online stores than for service sites) and estimate the estimated frequency and cost per click (in Google Keyword Planner).
• ✅ Which product categories is it better to configure at the first stage?
  For online stores, don’t try to cover all the semantics right away. At first, it is more efficient to focus on the most marginal product groups that bring the maximum income. Also pay attention to products that are requested more often – they can get more traffic, albeit with a lower profitability. Sell related products with them to increase your profits.