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The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
Deep Dive: Successful E-Commerce Campaign Strategy (Episode 471)
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Joey Buidtner
Foreign welcome to the Paid Search podcast. My name is Joey Buidtner and this is another guest host edition of the show. In today's episode, I am going to be walking you through one of my accounts. We're going to do a deep dive on a particularly interesting account that is a blend of E commerce and brick and mortar store foot traffic. So this kind of account requires a number of different strategies. So I thought it would be an interesting one to feature on the show. We're going to go through. Well first we're going to go through the steps, state of the account, when I got it, and how I approached this restructure that it desperately needed. We're also going to talk about my conversion action setup as well as structure, bidding strategies and a few out of the box kind of interesting approaches I took to get the client. It's the specific goal they were requesting. So before we get into all of that though, I want to mention our podcast sponsor and that is Optio. So Opteo is a PPC management software that allows you to read between the lines of your account and it's particularly interesting in how it it brings up pieces of data that you might have missed for you to then take action on. So it will show you potentially some problematic search terms that you might need to negative or segment. It will bring up specific audiences or specific high or low performing demographics or segmentations that you might want to again, segment, bid or exclude. And what's specifically helpful about Opteo is it's not one of those AI softwares that promises to do everything for you. It simply brings things to your attention that you might have missed so you can take action. So all listeners of this podcast also get a free 28 day trial of Optio. So all you got to do is visit optio.com that's opteo.com PSP hop into the chat window and mention that you're a listener of the show and that you'd like the 28 day free trial. So that's opteo.com PSP so this account I have, it is, like I said, an E commerce brick and mortar business that sells household appliances. They sell everything from extremely expensive, you know, $20,000 units to your run of the mill washer and dryer. And I guess I'd like to start with the state that I got the account because this is a a situation that I'm sure a lot of managers are put in. They inherit an account that is a keyword search term mess. It's probably the thing that I see most in not only accounts that I, that I inherit, but ones that I do audits on is overuse of broad match keywords through like and also segmented and separated into multiple campaigns. And in the end what the result is are search terms that are just all over the place. You have more or less the same search terms from one campaign to the other. And the particularly difficult position that we can be put in is when the account is working right. This account, when I got it, was still a very profitable account. It's not to say that these search terms were bad, they were just all over the place. And it's important that we build a structure that can allow us to more or less leverage different points in the searcher's journey or their funnel. Right. We want to be able to see the performance of low funnel searches. That's searches that have higher purchasing intent, they're usually more profitable versus searches that are higher in the funnel that have lower purchasing intent. They're still valuable searches, but we typically want to bid less for them or have less budget allocated to them. But when you have all these search terms firing in various campaigns and you know, without the ability to pull or push levers on either of them, the account becomes unoptimizable. And that's the big thing. So my approach right out of the gate is I do a pretty thorough search term analysis, not a keyword analysis, because again, the keywords are going to be really misleading. You might have a keyword that says one thing, but when you look at the search terms, it's firing for all kinds of things. So I do a search term analysis, okay? And I identify buckets of the search terms that are associated to different levels of the funnel. What is a high funnel search term, what is a mid funnel search term, what is a low funnel search term, and how much am I spending on either parts of this funnel and how profitable are either parts of this funnel? And my best friend in all of this is chatgpt. I will typically, after I do just some visual analysis, you know, just reading through them, doing what I can, just manually and visually, I will export all of the search terms that have at least one click. Don't do zero click search terms because that'll just kind of skew your data. 1 click Search terms over a large portion of time, put it in the ChatGPT and use it to identify these points of the funnel. Now, I won't get too into the prompts I use and how I communicate with ChatGPT just because we've spoken about that on a Previous episode. But I am going to talk about the result. And the result in this account was I identified essentially four parts of the funnel. Okay. What I consider to be high funnel as in lower purchase intent but still valuable is store type locational searches. So people looking for appliance store near me or appliance store with a geo on it. That's what I considered the highest point in the funnel. The least purchasing intent, but still the entry point into somebody finding about this company. Then next point in the funnel was appliance types, people looking for a type of appliance meaning refrigerator, washer and dryer, people looking to buy stoves. Right. No brands mentioned yet, just the appliance type. Then beyond that was brand searches. Now people are, they know they want a specific washing machine. Now they're looking for the brand of that washing machine. Now we're getting closer to higher purchase intent. And finally, the low, the, the lowest part in the funnel with the most purchase intent was specific model searches. Okay. And it's important to, to identify again how much you're spending on each part of these funnels. And the profitability. You might notice you're spending way too much on high funnel because that's where the volume is, but the profitability might not be there. The next step is for us to put together a structure that allows us to see these search terms as specific campaign types for us to leverage. We want to push more low funnel and maybe pull back on high funnel. So with that in mind, I want to talk about the more or less the end result structure that I got from that analysis and rebuilding. So to start with shopping, right? Shopping is where you see the majority of these low funnel search terms and performance people looking for specific brands or specific models. They have a well optimized product feed which allows us to get those types of searches. And it's particularly good for product specific searches because users go to the specific product page. Now, I won't get into product feed management, we already did a full episode on that. But I will talk a little bit about how I segmented these, these campaigns because we did have two shopping campaigns and that is because this client had a particular situation where they have a collection of products that spans between all of their different product types that have a much higher profit margin than their other products. So this gave reason to segment a high profit margin campaign and a low profit margin campaign or more or less everything else. Now these two campaigns are segmented by means of a custom label. I've also spoken about custom labels before in a previous episode but by having a custom label on each of these products that are higher profit margin, we can segment them out into their own campaign. So this campaign will still have the structure, the general structure of the other campaign where we will have an ad group for each product type. So you'll have an AD Group 4 Refrigerators, an AD Group for washer and dryer, and so on and so forth. But the products within each of those ad groups are only the custom label products. And in the everything else campaign it's the same structure minus those custom label products. And the reason we split these up is to spend with profitability in mind. And our, our bidding is different for these higher profit margin products. We are okay spending more on a higher profit margin product than a lower profit margin product. And if they were in the same campaign, especially because the products are would be intermingled with the other products, we'd have no way of truly controlling that. So having them separated simply allows you to spend as much as you possibly can on those higher profit margin products with the profit margin in mind. Right. So that segmentation was an important one. So now it's time to talk about search. And search is particularly interesting because this is where we're going to approach various points of that funnel strategically. And the first thing that I want to start with is how to use search for that low funnel. And this is where I see the most issues in accounts. What I want to discourage everybody from trying to do is trying to use standard search like shopping in the sense where we don't want to try to target specific keywords for specific models to go to a specific product page. And that's for two reasons. One, the structure would be insanely difficult to manage, right? You would need an ad group for every product. But primarily keywords just don't have that level of control anymore. You could have that product level exact match keyword. And I promise you the search terms, if you get any, are not going to be for what the keyword is. And then you'll be sending somebody potentially to the wrong product page. So I discourage using search at a granular product low funnel level. But this is where I like to use DSA dynamic search ads. Dynamic search ads can be a really good partner with shopping because it can actually give you that granular search term to product page experience without an over bloated structure. So I had done an episode before on dsa, so I'm not going to go too into the weeds of how to build it. But I'll tell you what I did for this account. So as we spoke about, I had shopping campaigns as my prime low funnel. Then this is still a low funnel campaign. I've got my DSA campaigns where I am using dynamic ad targets for specific brand names and specific product types. And the results that you will get are a mixture of low and medium funnel, which is fantastic because sometimes if somebody is searching for a specific model, you will be able to, the system will send them to that product page for that specific model. But if somebody searches the brand or the category of a product, the system will send them to a collection page. Now, it's not to say that this works right out of the gate every time you need to do your work to check your search terms and landing pages. And that's the beauty of dsa. It gives you that transparency. You can see even at every dynamic ad target level, the search term it generated and the page the person was brought to. So you can verify its accuracy. You can verify its accuracy in that user journey. I find this extremely helpful. Now again, shopping is still the bread and butter of low funnel. But if you have some extra budget to experiment a little bit, DSA can truly do a good job of that middle of the funnel. And there are some criteria for this. So you need to have good product pages with a lot of good information. Because again, like Shopping Matches does its optimization through the product feed, right? And in your product feed you put, you know, all the stuff that you want to show up for in your titles and your descriptions. And DSA uses the product page. So if you have a product page with like a title and an image, it ain't going to work. But for this client, they have really robust information on their product page and particularly they have in their product page information and like in the titles, they'll even have like the model number. And a lot of people for appliances happen to search by model number. So a lot of times the model number will would trigger for the search term when people are searching for it. And it creates that direct correlation. It just works quite beautifully. So again, if you want to know more about DSA, we did a full episode on it in 455. But I want to say for this account, for those middle of the funnel searches, for product type and brand searches, I use dsa. And the added benefit is you'll also get low funnel. So DSA kind of covers all three, though it typically can be a little bit more volatile, which is why it's not my first choice for low funnel. It's kind of like if you have some Extra money to experiment with, use it. And again you want to leverage negative search terms. Also negative URLs. You can say don't read any of my URLs that have blog in them, don't read any of my URLs that have. That have career stuff and and obviously negative your brand name. And just do a good job of negative in these things. Once you do that, the results are can be shockingly good. So I really like DSA for that middle to low funnel. Now talking about the upper funnel, which is a lot of the searches that pertain a little bit more to the foot traffic portion of this client which are the near me and location based searches for people looking for an appliance store. This one's pretty simple. I have one campaign that are my, I call it my, my near me or geo searches and one ad group with a again a small amount of keywords just appliance store, near me appliance store, geolocation and a few variations of those and taking users just to the home page where the homepage then has all the various locations that they cover and all their value props. One thing that I didn't do that I want to mention is create a separate campaign for every location. And the reason I didn't do that is because all the locations are pretty close together. And even though they do have pages on their site for each location, what I found in their previous structure is that even if you had your geolocation of a city and you had the keywords of that city because they're all close and Google doesn't consider its borders truly hardline. Like if somebody travels through one of those locations for work every day or visits that area, they could be in a different location that you know and the ad group for the wrong location will appear. And what we don't want is sending people to a landing page of the wrong location. And again because of keyword inaccuracy, I don't segment by geolocation because the precision is just not there. So it's just one campaign for all these near me geo searches and going to a page that in the copy of the page identifies that they cover all those geos. And the really important thing for this and all the campaigns is that you have the Google my business locations associated to the campaign through your location assets. This allows you to show up for map searches and if one of those keywords is part of their map search, the closest Google my business location will show. So because of that system, again I did not feel the need or, you know, I found the. Just the performance wasn't there either, but didn't feel the need to segment by geolocation. This was a big one because the client typically segmented everything by geolocation. Now, I do want to share a little bit later on how I approached this when they launched a new geolocation, because when you launched a new one, the algorithm has a hard time including it. Sometimes we're going to talk a little bit later about a specific strategy to lean into new locations, but that's for later. So beyond my shopping, my DSA campaign, my search campaign, obviously we still have a brand campaign. I still find it's valuable to have a brand campaign. Well, simply put, in this industry, it's quite volatile. Like, their competitors are betting on their brand name, and it's very cheap to just own the top of the serp. So brand campaign, very small budget, manual bidding. And then beyond that, we have a remarketing campaign and two types. Okay. There's a dynamic remarketing, which is that type of display campaign where the products themselves are following you around the Internet. Okay. Then we have a static display campaign, which are static ads that speak your messaging. Right? These ones require a design team because you have to make ads a specific size. But I find these go a long way because they are able to get the value propositions across. Dynamic remarketing is really great for just getting the product in someone's face, but they don't do a great job of messaging your value propositions. And especially like brick and mortar businesses, they typically will build, like, a loyal customer base that's based off of the principles that the company has or the services they offer. And these things are better communicated in static or responsive display. But I do like to have them both. And especially for sales, right? Sales can be great for dynamic because you can show that percent discount on the actual. On the actual product listing. But sometimes the messaging of the words of, you know, Memorial day sale, save $350 or whatever can also hit people a different way. So I like to marry the two, dynamic and static. Okay, so moving on to bidding, I think it's important to talk about bidding. And in order for us to talk about bidding, we need to talk about how the conversions are set up in this campaign. Because we've got multiple goals, right? It's not just about selling product. It's about getting people through the door. So there is a little bit of a particular structure to how we built these conversion actions in order for us to have the right bidding strategy. For the right campaigns. So obviously when someone purchases something online, you know that that is dynamic, right? The value is imported as a conversion action. That's simple. But then beyond that, we have two other conversion actions. One they're most valuable actually is when somebody books a, an appointment. So this client, they offer like, they offer like a showroom tour. And people who book a showroom tour are typically very high value because they're showing extremely high purchase intent. They're typically also buying much more expensive items and they get this like personal service, right? So the close rates are really high if somebody books an appointment. Now if you've got E Commerce values, importing and lead generation, it's in the best interest for us to be using to associate values to these lead generation conversion actions and use return on ad spend bidding, or at least to observe them and use manual bidding if you're into that as well. But it's important for us to assign a value to these. And the way we do this is pretty simple. It's just we'll take the, the average order value of one of these purchases from like a showroom tour and divide it by the close rate. So on average, for every tour that we book, how many turn into a customer? Now in this case it was one in three, pretty high ratio. One in three people end up walking out the door with an appliance after one of these showrooms. And on average they're worth about $8,000. So we do 8,000 divided by three, that's 2,666. So that becomes the value that we assign to that conversion action. Then beyond that, we also have store visits. Now store visits have a much lower conversion rate. It's about 1 in 10. So the value we assign to that is 8,000 divided by 10, which is 800. Now it's important to assign these values because store visits is obviously going to get a lot more traction than a scheduled appointment, right? And sometimes even more than purchases in this case, especially because it's such a local, it's a local campaign, right? So it's important to assign these values because if we were just counting ones and zeros, just counting conversions, we could way overvalue a store visit versus a scheduled appointment. So I typically use return on ad spend, bidding for almost all the campaigns, except for remarketing and brand. And the system considers all of the values of these so they get their weight in terms of what's important. And beyond that, when I look at the funnel of our, of our campaign structure, right, We've got Low funnel which is, which is shopping and dsa. Then we've got high funnel which is the near me searches. Right. It's important for us to bid accordingly for these and the way that I that I do that as I'll use a target ROAS bidding with a bid cap which you can do in the portfolio bid settings. So each one of these campaigns will have its own portfolio bid strategy. And you, if you in the portfolio bid strategy where you know you can set your target ROAS, let's say it's 300%, you hit advanced settings and it says max CPC. So this is where a lot of these high funnel strategies, it's important to put that max CPC because that's where you'll, you'll get the proportional return on ad spend for that strategy. For that part in the funnel. I typically want to bid less for these near me geo searches versus a shopping campaign. But I don't necessarily want to go manual because I like all the data signals from return on ad spend bidding and, and I still want the system to look at my various conversion actions and consider it in weight and the system works quite well. I've done again a whole episode on return ad spend bidding and why I like to use it. So I won't go too much into that. But I did just want to mention the importance of assigning values to these more lead generation style conversion actions or the store visits and using the portfolio bidding bid cap in conjunction with that. Now you might also be asking Joy, where the heck did this like store visit conversion action come from? Unlike shopping that you. Sorry. The purchase action that you make and the schedule appointment conversion action that you make, you can't make a store visit conversion action. It's gifted to you by Google after you spend. I don't know what the threshold is. After you spend a certain amount of money and you have Google my business listings associated to your campaigns over time you will get a store visit conversion action. And it doesn't mean that you have to spend a whole lot. You just. I've seen it on campaigns that spend like $2,000 a month. I think any less than $2,000 a month you might struggle to get it, but you can always request it as well. I have seen in the past that it did help to request it. We didn't get it immediately but it kind of, you know, put Google on the radar that you want it. Mind you, that was a while ago when Google service, Google's customer service was a little bit better. Now it's, it's not as good as it used to be, but I don't think it hurts to ask for the store business. But what I wanted to say, it's not a conversion action you can create. And again, the way it works is someone clicks on your ad, then they walk into your store. Because of Google's black box of how it tracks people, they are able to attribute those store visits. So before moving on, I also did just want to mention how I allocate my budget between these campaigns. So obviously low funnel gets the majority of it. You know, those shopping campaigns, DSA campaigns, that's what gets the majority. And in most accounts that's what gets almost all the budget. But once if you have an account that's got more budget to play with, that's when we start going higher funnel. And by bidding really low on these higher funnel search terms, it becomes worthwhile to go for them. But if you have a limited budget, be careful with higher funnel just because it's usually something that is valuable if you have the added budget. Because in any low funnel strategy you reach a point of diminishing returns where you can't just spend more and get more. You need to get people through the door on a cheaper high funnel strategy and nurture them to conversion. So I did want to mention that. And that's how I approach when to go higher funnel. And in this account, we have a large enough budget to go for it. And it, you know, it proves itself in profitability when spent appropriately. Less budget, higher funnel, and typically lower bids. And the performance also helps steer that, you know, you look. All this came from was seeing how our search terms were performing from this funnel. We built out the structure, let the data speak for itself and then re appropriate the budget. The client initially actually thought that the near me searches were the most valuable, said I want to focus as much money on near me because you read a blog post about the value of near Me, it's got to be good, but it's actually lower purchase intent. So those high funnel near me searches are not, there's not as much purchase intent as somebody searching for a product or a specific brand. So you want to, you know, take your assumptions out of the equation and look at the data and look at the customer journey from like a marketing perspective. So before I get into the last segment, which is kind of a interesting experimental feature that I used, I want to mention our podcast sponsor once more, and that's Optio. So again, Optio is really my right hand in identifying the things in my account that I might be missing. It also has really great notifications like it will notify me if there's an irregularity. If suddenly my impressions or my clicks like fell off or spiked, it will notify you by email and say, hey, we had an irregularity in your data based off this KPI. So it allows you to just like catch things sometimes before they become a problem. So again, if you want to get a 28 day free trial, just visit opteo.com PSP and speak to the agent in the chat window. Mention you are a listener of the podcast to get that free 28 day trial. So now moving into a specific situation where the client every year or so opens up a new location, right? And the problem is, you know, they open up a new location. We get that location in Google, my business, I add it into the campaign, I add the geo radius around the area. But because it's in one campaign and we're on return on ad spend bidding, one of the issues is the algorithm doesn't have enough data or doesn't have any data on this new geo. And when you hold it to a standard of maintaining a return on ad spend, it will just not allocate a lot of budget to that ad spend. So you kind of have two options. You can lower your target return ad spend, which I have no problem doing. I'll be honest, I don't have high return on ad spends most of the time anyways. I've spoken about that in previous episodes. Lowering your return ad spend goal can allow more money to move around for testing. But I want to share a specific experiment that I ran that actually turned out to be pretty profitable in a really weird way. So Google, I think it was like two years ago, announced this feature called value bid Adjustments. Value bid adjustments. They're interesting because they allow you to associate more value to a specific device type or location. And until this situation, I never really saw very much use for them. I always thought they were kind of weird because what it does is like you will say, okay, this specific location is worth 1.5 times more to me. And what it will do is if somebody buys a product for $100 and you say it's worth 1.5 times more, it will change the conversion value to $150. It will multiply that sale from that area if you say it to be by that time. So we'll inflate your conversion numbers. But what it did for me in this case was we launched a new location in a new area and I and I wanted the algorithm to pay more attention to it just at the beginning, right, because it wasn't, it was completely ignoring it. It wasn't getting much spent. So I applied this value rule to that geolocation to, and again I warned the client that the numbers would be inflated. But I told, told them what I was doing and I was trying to, trying to trick the algorithm to spend more attention there. And for the few conversions we got, it started to see the value, right Started to see the return on ad spend even though it's a little bit artificial, but it got the algorithm to pay more attention to that area to get, get volume of dollars spent there without segmenting it. Because again, I didn't want to segment this because I was very fearful of somebody from a different geo triggering the ad from, from what would be this campaign and then going to the wrong page being like, oh, I'm not in that geo, see you later. So instead I just kind of tricked the algorithm saying that they were worth more for a short period of time. You know, I did it for a few months, just until it picked up some steam and then I removed it. And the way that you can observe how this is working is in your assets where we have all of our Google my business locations. I just compared the before and after dates and how much spend and how much conversions we got before and after. I initiated this value bid adjustment and it was like night and day like the spend in that area literally doubled and conversions went with it. So the where you find this, it's in your goals, like the area that you go to to see your conversion actions actually so goals but instead of going to summary where your conversion actions are right under it, you'll see value rules. So you know, be careful with this one because again, it's one of those things that I didn't really think I would ever use but in this case it became really valuable and every time they launch a new location I do the same thing and it's been working for me. So don't ever be afraid to experiment a little bit. But if, you know, when you do these kinds of experimentation, just make sure you do your due diligence in verifying that things actually got the result. And not just experimenting because you want to be, you want to experiment for the sake of it. Like you need to have the verification process that what you did got you to the end goal. So I hope this was helpful. You know, feel free to send in questions if you all want to learn more about E commerce or about brick and mortar strategies. You can always write into the podcast@Pagesearchpodcastmail.com all right, see you next time, everyone.