The BEST Google Ads Strategy for eCommerce in 2023 🤑

For success with Google Ads and your E commerce brand in 2023, you need 1, 2, 3 very important factors that are all set up correctly. And the first one of those is that you need to make sure that you've got the right product being pitched at the right price. You then also need to make sure that you've got an effective landing page that is user friendly and is something that encourages more conversions. And then finally, you need to have the correct Google Ads strategy and structure that allows you to not only see success in the short term, but so that you can continue to scale your E Commerce brand. Now for that first factor of making sure that you have the correct price and also the correct product, that's something that you do need to do offline and do some deep dive comparisons, comparing your product and your price versus other competitors or similar products on the market. And then to help you with that second issue, which is all about having the correct landing page. And there are actually five core factors that you need to have on a successful Google Ads landing page. And to help you with that, if you follow the link in the description below, after you watch this video, of course you're going to get access to a free Google Ads landing page training video which is actually conducted by a UX expert who has done over 10 and a half thousand different individual real life user tests. And in that training session where I go through an interview with him, he breaks down the five core factors that you need for success for your landing pages, especially if they're coming from Google Ads traffic. And now that brings us to the third and final important factor if you're going to see success with your ecommerce brand in 2023, and that's making sure that you've got the correct structure and the correct strategy for your Google Ads account. And I want to clarify what I said there. I said your Google Ads account, not your individual Google Ads campaigns. Because this is one of the biggest problems that I see when, when I go through and review or take on some new Google Ads clients is that I see that people don't think at the account level, they just think at the campaign level. And they, they try one campaign that doesn't work and then they try another campaign that doesn't work and then they try maybe a different type of campaign. And you can see very clearly that at no time has the business owner or the digital agency or the freelancer actually taken the time to stop and really take a global or a top level view on what you want your Google Ads account and your Google Ads campaigns to to achieve for your business. Because when you do this, when you take the time to draw out a proper structure, you can see results really, really quickly. Let me show you what I mean right now. So what you're looking at here is you're looking at an E Commerce account that we took on only 30 days ago. And the dates that I'm actually showing you is I'm showing you the last 30 days of results versus the previous three months of results. Now you may look at this straight away and go that hey look, the conversion value cost is not great. That's only at 1.88 over the last 30 days. But what you do need to notice is that that has actually gone up previously that 0.3. So we've done a lot of work to be able to increase the performance of this account. And what you can actually see is that through our restructure we got an extra $3,000 in sales. But that was from a marketing budget that was 9,000, nearly $10,000 less. And that generated an extra two sales. This is a higher price jewelry brand. And when I reviewed this account, this had the most common problem and this is what I see all the time is that this account actually had over 13 different campaigns and it was just a mix max of different performance max campaigns, different shopp campaigns, different display campaigns. And it was just a pure sign that the previous Google Ads manager didn't know what they were doing. They were just trying all different things. And they'd set some things that maximize clicks and then they'd set other campaigns with some maximize conversion and targets roas goals. They'd set other ones at Target Impression Share. They had no idea what they were doing or what they were trying to achieve. We came through and we simplified all of this. Now what we did do is that we kept two of the current campaigns running and we've just got three core campaigns. We've got a campaign which is focusing on women's products, a that's focusing on men's products. And then for the time being, we also do have a remarketing shopping campaign that we will eventually close down once we've got our new performance max campaigns which are going to be taking the heavy load. And then I do see us breaking out some further campaigns as required. But what I want to show you is that especially with Google Ads, a lot of the times less is more and people just try to overcomplicate Google Ads by having multitudes and multitudes of campaigns with no overarching strategy. But Let me just reiterate these results once again. When you have a clear strategy with this, this one we can sort in 30 days, we got an extra $3,000 in sales from close to $10,000 less in ad spend. So if you want to be able to see results like that for your own Google Ads account, which is targeting ecommerce brands, what you need to be able to do is you need to ask yourself three core questions. And then once you've answered these three core questions, that will allow you to be able to really design the correct type of campaign structure for you. Because like the example I showed you, you don't need 10 or 13 different campaigns. Sometimes you can see far better results with just a simple, straightforward campaign structure. And the first question that you need to ask yourself is, what are the different budget controls that I want to have in my account? And what I mean by that is that do you want to be able to focus different amounts of budget on different product categories or different locations? And the reason for why this is such an important question is because you always have to remember that your budget is set at the campaign level. So once you've entered in that daily budget at the campaign level, you then don't really have any control of how much Google will spend on the different ad groups or the different asset groups. So if you've got different product categories, and let's just bring to the top level, is that you have some products that are targeting men and you have other products that are targeting women, but you know that you want to be able to spend 70% of your budget on those women's clothes. In that case, you would separate your campaigns into two top level campaigns, having a woman's targeted products campaign and then another campaign targeting on men's products. And then that way what you can do is you can straightaway put 70% of your budget into the women's clothes and the remaining 30% into the men's clothes. And another reason for why you would separate out different campaigns is if you want to have different focuses for different locations. Let me give you an example for this. For another client that I do some ads for is that we target a swimwear brand in Australia. And in Australia, where I live in Queensland, it's quite unique in that you can go to the beach pretty much all year round, even in the middle of winter. The water temperature is quite comfortable. Yes, a little bit chilly, 21 degrees. Or for my Americans out there, that's around about 70 degrees Fahrenheit versus other parts of the country. Like for example in Victoria that their water temperature can get down below about 14 degrees. So that really limits it to people who are your hardcore surfers or you know, you just a really big beach fanatics. That's not the most comfortable beach day. So because of that the sales in Queensland are pretty stable all year round. Yes they do peak again in summer but there's not a massive drop off in winter because people are continuing to go to the beach. So it's for that reason that we separated our campaigns and broke them into different state groups. And for the states like Queensland where we're going to be increasing spend all year round, we had them in a separate campaign once again so that we can dial down those cool estates budgets when it comes into that winter period. So when I talk about how do you want to be able to control your budgets, they're the questions that you want to be asking yourself when you structure your Google Ads accounts. You know, do you want to have some different focus on different products or do you want to have a different focus on different locations? And just a side note on this one is that there is no real right and wrong here. It really comes down to how you want to structure this. But do remember that every time you add in an extra campaign there is some different levels of work that you, you're adding to yourself because you then have to go through and optimize those campaigns. But there is no real golden rule. It really comes down to how you want to design your campaign and how you want to be able to control those budgets. And that brings us to the second important question that you need to be asking yourself for success with Google Ads for your E commerce brand and that is what are your most profitable products? Because in many cases you can get high volume products which aren't your highest profitable products but you want to market them because of the high volume, the high turnover rate and also too they can be a bit of an introductory product where that once they buy that product you've got them in the store and then you can follow on of some greater upsells and cross sells versus some of your other products which might have a really high profit margin but they've got a low search volume. And that's the perfect example of where I would separate out those different product categories into different campaigns. And the reason for that is so that I can make sure that those high profit products are getting the required level of budget that I want it to achieve. Because. Because quite often with those high volume products Google will put more focus on them because they know that they can just get those sales going for you and your business. So that's another core question that you need to be asking yourself around the different traffic volume and also those profit margin levels within your products. A really good strategy that I do recommend is breaking those out so that you can have some better budget controls around those two different levels of products. Your high volume, lower profit products versus your lower volume but high profit margin products. And then that brings us to the last question. And this is a two part question, and that is, does your brand run regular promotions? And then a follow up from that is do you also want to focus on building your own email database or app downloads? And if you've answered yes to either those questions, so you do run multiple promotions throughout the year and you also do also want to focus on building your own email database or you're increasing your app downloads for your own branded app. I would then recommend running this strategy where you've got two different categories of campaigns. Now this doesn't mean that you're running performance max and shopping or search and video. What I'm talking about here is that you're running two completely different categories of campaigns and that being always on campaigns and promotional campaigns. And to explain what I mean, let's jump into a screen share right now. So what I mean by that is this and what I've laid out for you here is what I call my advanced account structure for E commerce. And it's a map of how your total account structure should look, especially if you're a brand that has regular promotions or you're also wanting to grow your own email database. So we've got our total Google Ads account here. And then there's the two core categories of campaigns that you want to be setting up. There's your always on campaigns and your sales promotional campaigns. Now you're always on campaigns. The way to think about these are, these are your campaigns that they're going to be running this time next year. So they're always going to be running in high season or low season, in high sales seasons or low sales seasons. These are always on campaigns. And then you have another set of campaigns which are your sales or promotional campaigns. And these are campaigns which mainly run for limited periods of time. So with my always on campaigns and generally for me these could be search, shopping or performance max. And what they're looking at doing here is they're focusing on individual product category campaigns. So we've got our core product categories and then we're breaking them down into different asset groups based on sub product categories. And once again, what we're looking at, this is our baseline profitable campaigns. We're looking at building our business with these campaigns. There is also a little side note is that in these I might have some always on display or video campaigns which are just focusing on those app downloads or email subscribers. And then we've got these other campaigns which are sales or promotional campaigns. And the way that I generally do this is I generally reserve this for my display and YouTube campaigns. And what I do here is I then aggressively and by setting these up as separate campaigns, that means I can aggressively increase the budgets of these and then also decrease the budgets of these without hurting the underlying performance of my shopping or my performance max campaigns. Now when I do come into a promotional period like Black Friday or Mother's Day or Christmas, I will go through and update some of these asset groups and sometimes I'll even set up a separate asset group just to run for that particular period, say for example, the month of November for Black Friday. But I don't want to be aggressively increasing these budgets, you know, doubling the budget in a week or two because that will ruin the underlying performance. Now I will go through and increase the budgets on these always on campaigns, but I'll do it in a systematic way of only increasing it by about 20% each week so that we're not throwing these always on campaign into a new learning phase. But for these sales and promotional campaigns, I'm not as worried about them because these are going to be for shorter periods of time, say for four to six weeks where we've got a core marketing period on. And that's where I use to increase the volume which then my always on campaigns, especially my performance max campaigns will go through and continue to retarget these new audiences that we've picked up in the display and YouTube video campaigns. And this is a great way of separating your account. So you've got your always on brand building campaigns and then your sales and promotional campaigns. So thank you for joining me in today's session. If you don't know, my name is Aaron Young and I'm from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And remember, if you want to learn more about how to correctly structure and set up your landing pages for your Google Ads campaigns, remember to follow that link in the description below so that you can get access to that extended one hour teaching session. And then I also do want to let you know that for success with Google Ads, especially e Commerce in 2023. A core pillar of that is going to be performance max campaigns. And if you want to make sure that you've got your performance max campaigns set up correctly, because if they're not set up correctly, you will not be seeing success. I want you to go through and watch this teaching video and how I show you the step by step process and how to set up a performance max campaign. And the best news is is that this is using the new dashboard once again. See you next time and see you in this video right now. See ya.