The PROVEN Strategy for New eCommerce Google Ads Accounts

Okay, you're an E commerce company and you're going to start getting a Google Ads account going for the first time. What the heck do you actually do in this video? I'm going to give you the exact blueprint that I give to E commerce companies who are starting off brand new with Google Ads. What campaign types they should be utilizing, when should they be utilizing those campaign types, how to actually scale after the first few months, what products they should be advertising on. All of that will be broken out in this video step by step. So you end up making money from Google Ads, not losing money. Let's dive in. Okay. Before you even begin building out campaigns in Google Ads, you should ask yourself, is Google Ads even right for you? So there's a few things you want to go through. Number one, do you even have the budget? If you think you can just throw $100 or $200 per month at this and start cranking sales, you are better off burning that money. Do the research. So you're going to want to, at minimum get 10 clicks per day. The more click volume you get, the easier the game gets because you're going to get more data to work with, optimize, and eventually feed the machine learning that Google utilizes a lot today. If you come at it with too low of a budget, you're not going to get enough data. You're never going to get anywhere. You will fail. I've seen it a million times. So before you even start investing in Google Ads, make sure you understand that it's going to cost some money and you're going to want to generate at least 10 clicks per day. That's like bare, bare minimum. Those 10 clicks on shopping, thankfully are going to be a bit cheaper and I'll talk about that than search ads. So I'm going to show you a strategy around that. But you're going to have to do some initial research on CPCS in your industry. You can do that with the keyword planner tool. I have an entire video on how to use that tool. That will be in the description below. But first, do some research. Don't just fire up a Google Ads account and start throwing money randomly at it. Very little money, thinking you're going to generate sales. It will not work like that. Number two, does your website currently convert? If you have a terrible website, you're not converting from your other channels. And you think Google Ads is like this magic solution to your failing website. It's not. You are going to end up just burning money. So if your website is already having Issues. If your conversion rate is already extremely low from organic traffic or social traffic or whatever other channels you may have, throwing and spending money into Google Ads, sending that traffic to your failing website will not work. I've seen it happen. I don't know why people think that it's a channel issue. Maybe when you look at their website you're like, hey listen, your website's just horrendous. This does not convert. So do not think Google Ads will solve that. Work on the problem and that could be your website. Number three, is your pricing competitive? Do some competitive pricing analysis. If your products are more expensive than competitors in the space, including Amazon, then you will fail. People will do their research when shopping and if they can find the same product for cheaper in one of the Google listings, whether that's another shopping ad or whether that's an organic listing, normally they're going to yield to the cheaper option. Especially if you're a reseller of products and selling the same products. So do the analysis. If your pricing is not competitive, it doesn't matter how much you spend on ads, you will lose if you are not price competitive. Number four, and this is very, very important, you have to be willing to invest in this long term Google Ads. Maybe in the beginning of time you could throw money into it. You could start cranking sales out day one and do it profitably. Those days are over. Google Ads is very hard. There's a lot of competition. CPCs have continued to rise and it no longer is. Fire up a campaign, throw some money at it and you'll be profitable day one. Now, it's going to take some time. So I always tell anyone, doesn't matter if you're E Commerce or not, you have to be able to gut a minimum of three months of investing in this. You probably will not make profit in three months. Now, are there people who do make profit in three months on a brand new account? Absolutely. However, you have to go into it with realistic expectations. The first three months, you're building the foundation, you're generating the data and at the end of three months, what you're able to determine if you do this correctly, which I'm about to show you, is can I make this now profitable over the next three months based off the data I've been able to generate? So go into this, knowing you, you may not make money right away if you absolutely need to make money. Month one, do not start Google Ads. Buy a billboard, I don't know. But Google Ads will not make you money. Month one, it is A long game, long term play. It's an investment. This is not easy money. It used to be many, many years ago, it really actually was very easy. Today that's no longer the case. This is something you have to invest in. You're going to have to collect data, you're going to have to optimize and it's going to take some time. So can you gut three months plus of not making money from Google Ads? Okay, so you're ready to get started building out your account. But there's all these different campaign types. Where do you even begin? 80% of your revenue or conversions are more than likely going to be generated from shopping ads. It's just historically what we see within our client portfolio. I believe there's other articles and data that that also prove that it makes sense. People who are shopping and searching for products on Google, the visual appeal of a shopping ad, the price that's being shown in that ad, it makes sense that it's going to usually get the most clicks. Also, the CPCs are going to be cheaper for shopping ads versus search ads. So when you're just starting out, it makes the most sense to maximize your budget allocation to shopping ads. That's where most of the revenue is going to be generated anyways and that's where also you're going to get cheaper CPCs. Other campaign types will come later and I'm going to show you that. However, in the beginning you want to focus on shopping ads, then you don't want to just stop there. Most of you are probably going to have a lot of SKUs. Not every E commerce business does. But most e commerce businesses are going to have a lot of SKUs. You don't want to just go blast all of those SKUs and just figure out what works right. Throw spaghetti on the wall. That is not the strategy you want to deploy. Also, Google Ads is not the place to try to just go advertise products that don't already sell on your website. So what I normally recommend is take your top sellers either top selling products, top selling brands, top selling categories. However you want to analyze that data for your website, you want to start with those core top selling products. There's a few reasons why. One, you're going to get quick wins and once you start getting quick wins, you're going to start generating some cash from this. Once you start generating cash, you're going to feel better about it and it's going to make optimizing in the future your campaigns much easier. Once you start getting that volume, if you try to throw everything at it. I'll give you an example. I was doing a consultation. They have a hundred thousand skus, okay, you. And they had a 10k per month budget. So you want to spend 10k and just advertise a hundred thousand skus randomly. That would disperse that 10k budget way too thin. That's so many skus out there. Right? So we were able to bake this down to a core group of those hundred thousand skus of top sellers that were selling already on their website from organic traffic, email and whatever channels they have that are generating sales on the website now. That is where we started. And sure enough, that is what has become their already top sellers inside of Google Ads. Now there are times where products will start to do well because of ads that websites have never sold before. That is not though the play in the beginning. That will come later. You want to allocate your budget to bestsellers in the beginning, focus most of your budget on those bestsellers, start getting those wins, start getting conversion volume from those best sellers. Then you're going to have this best sellers campaign. You're also going to have what I call the everything else strategy. So in that example of the consultation I did where they had 100,000 SKUs, let's say 10,000 of those SKUs were what we labeled top sellers to begin with. We have those in a top seller shopping campaign. Then the 90,000 other products, do we just not do anything with those? Well, we could. Or what I like to do is the everything else strategy. And I put that in an everything else or catch all shopping campaign. I exclude my top sellers from them. So in this case I excluded the 10,000 other products. Then I put a very, very small bid on the those 90,000 other SKUs just lumped into the everything else. I'm going to show you a real example of this in an account. Put a very small bid on there. I don't spend a whole lot of the budget on this, but what I'm able to do now is still get exposure. I'm casting like a wide net on all my other SKUs and I can start actually generating some really cheap clicks. And sure enough I'll actually start generating some sales from there. So I'll be able to gather some data from those other skus or while I'm mainly focused on my top sellers. But come month two, month three, month four, where I really want to start expanding my exposure on those other products, at least I'll have some data on them now to work with. And I'VE probably generated some nice profitable sales in the last couple months from the everything else strategy. So let's hop into an actual account. I'm just going to show you what this would actually look like. Okay, so I'm in an actual account. This is a real account. So this isn't actually a brand new build. So I'll probably have a lot of the metrics blurred out, but this is what this would look like. So this is how the actual structure would look like. So here you see two shopping campaigns. One's called top sellers. You'll notice I have most of my budget there and then one's called everything else. Now if I go into the top sellers, I have an ad group in here called Sectional. So for this is a furniture company, sectionals are what makes up like 90% of the revenue. So this is where I want to spend my budget and attention right now if I go into this ad group, I have my standard sectionals and I have my bids in place, which I'll talk about bidding here in a second. Then you'll see I have everything else excluded. So the only thing running in this shopping campaign is my standard sectionals. Now if I hop into everything else, you're going to notice I have an ad group called everything else. I have standard sectionals excluded and then I have everything else in here running. This is all the other products that are in our feed and that what we're running. So we have like couches and ottomans and we even have deep seat sectional product offering. All of that is going to live here. You could go in and segment all of these by the product types. But just to get going, sometimes I'll just lump them into this everything else. Again, this is just going to be super small bids, very small budget. I'm just allowing these other products to get some exposure, but I'm not going to be bidding high on them. So let's talk about now bid strategies as you're getting these new campaigns going. Okay, for bidding, what I recommend normally is manual CPC or max clicks with a bid bid cap on it. How you come up with that bid is you're going to want to normally use the keyword planner tool and I have an entire video on that that will be in the description below and look for your type of terms in there. So I'm typing in sectional sofas and this is going to be search term Data. So the CPCs that are shown here are usually for like search ads. But like sectional sofas is going to cost anywhere from like 3 bucks to $1. Now if I were building search ads out and I have, you know, complete videos on that, you would hear me say, take the, the mean of these two numbers to give you a competitive bid. Here's what I do. I for shopping, especially when I don't have any shopping data yet on a brand new account, I take what is looks like the mean of that number. So here I would say like a dollar fifty or two dollars and then I take half of that. So shopping ads, and that's not a perfect formula by the way, but it's a good place to get going. So I take half that number. So in this case, I am going to start my sectional sofa bid at $1 inside of my shopping campaign based off of the numbers that I'm seeing in the keyword planner tool for sectional sofas. Okay, what do you set the everything else bid to? This will depend on your industry, but for sectional sofas, you know, I noticed bids were within that like three to two dollars range to be competitive. And again for me to start off my sectional sofas campaign, I'm doing a $1 bid on there. Normally I am going to take like half that or even further. So in this case I'm actually going to give it a 20 cent bid. Now this actually might be too much or too little. I, I will find out. There's. This is not some perfect formula that I'm giving you. What you're going to want to do though is make sure as time goes so each day you're going to want to check your account and this everything else campaign, like right now, I have it set to a $10 budget. I would expect to hopefully spend close to $10 per day. Now I still want to get 10 clicks per day out of here if possible. That might not always happen, especially if you're trying to pull off this low bid strategy I'm teaching you. But I do want click action here. So if I, if I look at this over the next few days and I start only seeing like a, you know, very little impressions and zero clicks, that means I'm not bidding high enough even for the low click strategy. Now I'm going to show you a metric that I look at. Once you get going, once your campaign start running, you get impressions and clicks. I'm going to show you what you should be looking at then to actually monitor whether or not your bid is competitive or not. Okay. So once your campaign is getting data, you're starting to get clicks and impressions, you are going to be able to eventually get this benchmark max cpc. This will tell you whether or not you are over bidding or under bidding. So this gives you a kind of a competitive price CPC that's in your market for your products. So in this case in a real account here it's a $21. So if I started off my campaign, let's say at 50 cents and then after a while I start noticing the benchmark CPC is like A$20, then I am going to want to start raising my bid up to be actually competitive, especially for those top sellers. Now for the everything else, I don't really want to be anywhere near this max CPC bid. I want that to be really low because that is not my focus right now. My focus is the top sellers. So there I'm still basically testing what is the minimum bid I can put and still generate click volume on those products and still generate search impressions and get some data there. So that is like a bit of an art to it. You just play around with the bids. So I may start at 20 cents, it may not do anything for me. Then I may up it to 25, give it a day or two. That doesn't do anything up at 2:30. So I'm just playing around with that everything else campaign because that's not my main focus. But I still want to get data there. But your main top seller campaign, you want to keep an eye out on that benchmark max CPC to make sure you're bidding competitively. Okay, so you have your top sellers campaign, you have your everything else campaign. Now what? Now you're in the stage of data collection. So there you're going to be running your campaigns, you're going to be getting clicks and impressions and hopefully start generating conversions. Your goal over time. Now this is going to be dependent on your budget. So if you're a big spender, you're going to move quicker than if you're a low spender in regards to the data collection period. So the goal though is to get to 30 plus conversions out of that shopping campaign, that top seller shopping campaign. Then Once you're at 30 plus conversions consistently within a 30 day period, you can now move to either target roas bidding and start tapping into smart bidding to see if that will amplify your performance. Or you can actually start testing if you're confident moving your top sellers to a performance max campaign. Now I don't want to make this a two hour long video, so I have a video on bid strategies. I go about each bid strategy. I explain when to use it and how to use it. So that video will be in the description below. I also have a complete performance Max course free. It's like two and a half hours long. I even give you a complete breakdown for brand new performance Max campaigns. The correct structure and how to build those campaigns out. That video will be in the description below as well. But if you're getting 30 plus conversions in a 30 day period consistently now out of your top seller shopping campaign, you are now at the stage you can either tap into T row as bidding and continue to run standard shopping or you're actually at a spot you could move to testing a performance Max campaign. Normally I would recommend doing a feed only performance Max campaign in the beginning. I go into detail about that in the performance max course. All of that's there. Then you're probably bringing in some great sales. Especially if you're at that point of generating the 30 plus conversions. You're testing troas bidding or you're testing performance Max campaigns on those top sellers. You're now at a point where you can start investing more into your mid and low products. So that would mid to low would be those products that are in that everything else campaign you've been letting it run. You haven't been investing an insane amount into it yet. But now is the time to start expanding your spend on the everything else campaign. Normally what I do there is I start building out product ad groups like real splits. If I'm running to everything else and then I start bidding up my bids, it's no longer a very small bid. I'm actually going after now real spend to try to get real volume so it's no longer this low volume play. I'm really I'm going after and investing in the data just like I did for my top sellers. But now I'm doing it across the rest of my product feed. Over time products will rise. You'll start to find products, brands or categories that are going to start doing well. Then you start maximizing those. By the way, this is now an optimization stage, optimization for shopping campaigns. I have a complete video on that that will be in the description below. Again, I don't want to make this a two hour long video, but that is the progress, that's the evolution of your account. And now you're going to be investing in those other SKUs. You don't just let them live forever. And that everything else strategy, that is a beginning strategy when you're just starting out. Here's a beautiful little flowchart I did for you that shows this. So you're going to focus spend on shopping. You're going to prioritize your best sellers bestsellers. Start converting 30 plus per month. You're going to know you're going to analyze, adjust bids. Yes, maybe test pmax. I should also have a test image there, but I don't. And then here create the catch all campaign, the everything else strategy. Set low bids there so there's a nice little visual for you in regards to what that could look like. Now what about other campaign types? Okay, so how do you go about then implementing other campaign types if you just spent all this time on shopping? Well remember, 80% of your conversions are probably going to come from shopping ads. Search ads though still make a lot of money. But we're going to do this wisely. So what we do is when it's time to start testing search ads, we take converting search data from our shopping campaigns or converting search insight data from our performance max campaigns and we start building our search campaigns based off that data. So I'll give you a real example. Okay, so I'm inside of a performance Max campaign, but I'm in the Insights tab and there's this search term insights here. So you'll notice I'm converting on search categories for modular couch, big and tall, sectional, washable, sectional sectionals with storage. I could go on and on. There's all this data in here. I can pull different time frames. So if you're running a performance max campaign and you haven't built search out yet, you're going to use your search term insights. If you are running a shopping campaign, you're just going to look at the search query report. Standard shopping is going to give you actually more search term data than what performance max will. But this gives you converting search traffic. Now it converts for your shopping ads. It doesn't mean it's going to convert for search. But you have saved yourself a tremendous amount of money by not guessing at search ads. You are now taking converting searches that work for your shopping ads. And you're now going to be building your search campaigns based off that search term data. You have a better shot of making those search terms work because you know they work for your shopping ads. That is how you start growing search campaigns and building those out and in time hopefully turning those into money making campaigns for yourself as well. Then there's some advanced campaign types you can start expanding into that would be implementing dynamic search ads. I have an entire video on creating dynamic search ads that will be in the description below. Also consider remarketing campaigns. Just know if you build a remarketing campaign and then you have a performance max campaign that you later build out, Performance max will suck away from the remarketing campaign. Performance Max is really good at taking away from other campaigns. It wants to hog all of the good converting attribution. And so that will happen. But if you're just running standard shopping, I would definitely get a remarketing campaign going at some point. Maybe not month one, but at least month two or three. Guess what? I have an entire video on how to build out a remarketing campaign that will be in the description below as well. Okay, that's a lot to summarize. You're going to start your brand new account with two shopping campaigns. Shopping campaign number one is going to be your top sellers. Those top sellers are going to be based off of your insights from your other sales channels on your website. Shopping campaign number two is going to be the everything else strategy. So you're going to exclude your, your top sellers from the rest of your feed. You're going to run the rest of that feed at a very, very small bid and you're just going to kind of use that to mine data very cheaply and hopefully actually generate some good search term data there and maybe some conversions over the next few months as you maximize your focus and attention on the top sellers. Your goal over the next few months, again, it's going to depend on your budget is, is to get to the 30 plus conversions from that top seller campaign. Once that top seller campaign is getting 30 plus conversions within a month, you're now at the stage you can test target roas bidding or you can move to testing moving those products to a performance max campaign. Again, normally I recommend feed only in the beginning. I talk about that in the performance max course. Once you're at that stage, you can now start expanding your everything else products that lives in that everything else strategy campaign there. You can start bidding and investing money and operating that campaign as you were the top sellers in the beginning because you want, you want to start trying to figure out other products that are going to make money for you. So now you're going to start expanding and investing money there. But you're, you're probably making some really good sales now and cash flow from your top sellers. So that allows you the confidence and money to start investing in these other products. While that you're doing that, you're now going to take the search term data either in your performance max campaign or your shopping campaigns. You're going to take the converting search terms and start building your search campaigns based off of those search terms. So those are the keywords you're now going to start building your search campaigns off of. You can also at this stage start implementing dynamic search ads and consider running remarketing campaigns. Especially if you're not running performance Max campaigns at this point. If you made it this far, you are at the point of actually growing a real money making Google Ads account now. It doesn't stop here. You're in this forever optimization of your account and continuing to grow, continuing to test. I've got videos on all of that on search campaign optimization, Search Campaign builds, Shopping Campaign builds Shopping Campaign optimization, Performance Max course, Bidding, masterclass. All of that is in the description below here. You're at that stage now. You need to start learning more about advanced optimizations. But I hope if you follow this blueprint, I hope you are now at least making more money. This is again the exact blueprint that I would be utilizing if I were starting a brand new Google Ads account for an E commerce company. I hope you got tremendous value from this video. I hope some of you actually are able to use this blueprint and make some money in the early stages of your Google Ads account. If you have questions and there's a lot here, put them in the comments section below. I will do my best to answer those if I know the answer to it and I will see you on the next video.