If you’ve been following my previous posts on this blog, you’ll see real-life examples of how my agency has scaled Ecommerce Google Ads accounts. In some cases we have even managed to help our clients gain millions of dollars in annual revenue.
In this post, I will guide you through the process that we use so that you can achieve similar results yourself.
Today, I’ll cover my favourite topic of all — how to create massive scale in your Ecommerce PPC campaign.
First, we’ll discuss the exact channel selection and the order you should approach each channel in. And then I will familiarise you with the relative risk/reward profiles of each channel.
If you are currently struggling to scale your Google Ads account, I hope that by the end of this post you will have a clearer action plan on how to do it effectively.
FIRST: Get The 80/20 Stuff Right
The most important thing to start with are the three 80/20 campaign types.
These are the channels available to you in Google Ads where for 20% of the effort, you can get 80% of the results:
Shopping Ads
Search (Text Ads)
Retargeting
In almost all cases for Ecommerce, these three channels in Google have the highest chance of generating a profitable Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) — for the least amount of time and risk.
In most cases, I would recommend setting up all three simultaneously.
However, if you have limited time and can only do one at a time, then it would be most effective to address them in the exact order as above: first, Shopping Ads, followed by Search, and lastly, Retargeting.
Why set up Shopping Ads first?
Simply because: Shopping Ads are very quick to set up.
Instead of doing your own keyword research and ad copy-writing, you can use a free app to auto-generate a product feed for you.
In just a few hours, you can set up Shopping Ads for thousands of products.
Doing the same on Search for the same amount of products would take days... or even weeks of dedicated work!
That said, if you do have thousands of products, you will have to prioritise the creation of your Search Ads campaigns. Start with the highest sellers first, before working your way down.
This is yet another reason why starting with Shopping Ads first can be a good idea. The Shopping Ads campaign will quickly set up ads for all your products.
From there on, you’ll be able to use the actual sales data garnered from Shopping to help you prioritise the list of which products to set up Search ads for first.
Gotcha! But why is Retargeting ranked third priority?
Of the three channels mentioned above, Retargeting goes in third place because it doesn’t really generate new traffic for you.
While it does help to increase the overall conversion rate of the traffic that you are already getting to your site through other channels, it doesn’t get you that new traffic in the first place.
Until you have set up Search and Shopping, you may not even have much traffic to retarget, so generally, it’s best to set up your traffic generation channels first.
Max Out The 80/20 Campaigns
OK, now these three campaign types are all set up and running. What next?
Now you want to make sure that you are absolutely maxing out on the profits you are generating for each of them.
For all campaigns, this means paying close attention to your ROAS and Impression Shares. You want to get as much Impression Share as possible, whilst keeping your ROAS well above your break-even ROAS.
If you have a ROAS that is really high,this means you’re probably missing out on a bunch of impression shares.
For example, say you are breaking even at a ROAS of 2x and your current ROAS is 6x. If you bid higher and allow your ROAS to come down to 3x, your impression shares will go through the roof.
Your clicks and conversion volumes will follow, and you will likely make more overall profit.
So, to max out all campaigns, you first want to make sure you are hitting an ideal balance point between ROAS and Impression Shares. This way, you will be truly maximising profit.
I go into more detail about this in my video about the ROAS Sweet Spot, so do check that out if you want a more in-depth breakdown on this.
In addition to finding your ROAS Sweet Spot, make sure you are targeting all the keywords that you can and should be. I call this “keyword coverage”. Ideally, you want to max out your keyword coverage.
In Shopping, this means that you want to have all the best keywords in your Product Titles. When you first generate your Product Titles, you will get some ideas about which might be the best keywords to put in there.
However, as you run your campaign, this will likely evolve and change. It might be necessary to go through a few phases of testing to figure out what combination of words in your product titles generates the most traffic for you.
Unlike Shopping Ads product titles, for Search you are not limited to 150 characters. Therefore, on Search, cover every relevant keyword that is available to you and ensure it has been added to the account and tested.
Don’t just be satisfied with doing keyword research that one time at the beginning of your campaign. Constantly reassess your keyword list for new ideas to add and test.
Port Campaigns To Bing Ads
Once you have maxed out your 80/20 campaigns on Google Ads, it’s time to port over to Bing Ads.
It’s surprising how many Ecommerce companies I speak to have had good success with Google Ads — yet have not ported campaigns over to Bing.
Depending on the country, Bing Ads gets about roughly 10% market share.
If your Search and Shopping campaigns are profitable in Google Ads, they are most likely also going to be profitable on Bing Ads, albeit at about 10% of the overall sales volume.
But, that’s an extra 10% of profit that you could have, right?
The best bit is this: Bing understands that it ranks second in the paid search market! Because of this, they’ve made it super easy to instantly port your campaigns over from Google — that extra 10% of profit is relatively simple to get!
All you have to do is use Bing’s handy Google Ads import tool to get all your campaigns set up in Bing. Once you have done that, don’t forget to tweak and adapt the keyword selection and bids, as you get more data in your Bing account.
Move On To Higher Risk/Reward Channels
Search, Shopping and Retargeting are all low risk channels because of where they fall on the AIDA marketing funnel.
Remember with AIDA we have Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action.
80/20 channels are right there at the bottom of the AIDA funnel and focus on the Decision part.
Once when you have done everything you can do on those 80/20 channels, it’s time to go higher up the funnel towards campaigns that can actually generate Awareness for you.
As these channels are higher up the funnel, they are inherently riskier.
As they are further away from the final action, the conversion rate is going to be much lower, and thus the risk of overspending is higher.
On the flip side, the Awareness channels have a much higher reward, because there are so many more people available to target!
So once you’ve set up your 80/20 channels, start testing awareness channels. Within the Google Ads suite, your main choices are:
YouTube Ads
Google Display Network (GDN) ads
Which one of those two channels do you want to select? Or should you do both?
If you have the budget to spare (ie. spending > $20K per month for 3 months in order to test is not a problem for you), and if you want to test and scale revenue as quickly as possible, go with both channels right away.
However, if you have a slightly lower budget and/or appetite for testing, then you will probably want to select the one channel that is likely to work better for you and go with that first.
YouTube Ads could be the channel for you if:
you have a product that looks great in video
you already have videos that are performing well in your Facebook Ads campaign
Novel or interesting-looking products where you can show the product actually working will often work well on YouTube, especially if you are able to craft a hero’s journey story around it.
Also, then that’s a strong sign that YouTube Ads can work for you too.
Sometimes, you can just use the exact videos that were working well for you on Facebook. In this case, just tweak the formatting to make it fit better on YouTube, and then — boom! — you’ll already have a YouTube ad for your product.
Other times, you might need to custom create videos specifically for YouTube.
Audio is much more important on YouTube than it is on Facebook, a fact you can use to your advantage. For example, if your most successful FB video ad has text across the screen explaining the product, on YouTube you can get rid of that text and use a professional voice over instead.
If your products traditionally do better with static image ads, then you may want to give Google Display Network a try first.
With GDN, your ad creative is much more limited. You’ll only be showing your audience a small image instead of an entire minute-plus video.
As such, GDN typically works better when you have a strong landing page and on-site funnel sequence. With this in place, you can maximise your chances of converting users who were only slightly curious about your product/ service to buying something — all via the strength of your website.
So there you have it — this is my broad strokes formula for scaling up your Ecommerce Google Ads account. Of course, there is much more detail and nuance to building up each individual component we’ve looked at here.
If you want to learn more about those and the exact strategies that work, subscribe to my YouTube channel. I go in-depth into topics just like this in the 3 videos I release each month on YouTube.