Guest post by Dennis Moons of Store Growers
When you’re just getting started with your online store, it is sometimes painful to look at the numbers. With only a handful of visitors, it is hard to see how that will ever turn into a business that makes you extra money. But other stores have obviously figured out how to make sales, so how do they do it?
A couple of Google searches will give you plenty of options: put your products on Pinterest, start a Facebook account, try to get featured the local newspaper, etc.
You can have a great time playing around with all of those. But they can also be a huge time sink. Before you know it, you’re 2 weeks further, with a great looking Facebook page, but still no sales.
So where should you start? What do you do when you’re trying to find more information?
If you’re like the 70% of all internet users on this planet, you go to Google. And those first search results usually give us all the information we need.
What about your own products? Wouldn’t it be great if you have your own store at the top of those search results?
Getting there is not straightforward. Google closely guards its algorithm that decides which order it will rank sites. One thing that is known is that it takes a serious commitment of time and money to see any progress, especially in industries with lots of competition.
Luckily there is a shortcut!
Enter Google Adwords
Google Adwords a shortcut to getting into those results, today.
With Google Adwords you select the keywords you want your ad to show up for. And only when someone clicks on your ad, you pay.
It’s gotten more expensive over the years, but Adwords remains a cornerstone for many businesses to find new customers. Because the number of people that use Google, you have the potential to reach millions of people.
The great thing about Google Adwords, or search engine advertising is that you only show your ads to people that are actually looking for information relating to your products.
Compare that to banner advertising which shows your advertisements to everyone, whether they are interested or not.
So Google Adwords is a good way to find new customers, but how do you avoid common mistakes that will cost you dearly?
Mistake 1: Trusting Google Too Much
They make a lot of money by tricking business owners. Their default options when you start new campaigns are meant to maximize their own profit, not yours.
The other mistakes will go in more detail, but if you’re running Adwords campaigns, it’s good to be skeptical of everything that Google is suggesting you should do.
Mistake 2: Not Knowing Where Your Ads Show Up
One of those default options is that Adwords will not only show your ads in the search results (the intention of most people starting out), but it will show them also on its Display Network.
This Display network is a collection of all kinds of sites and mobile apps. This can be news websites, niche blogs, game apps.
One of the saddest examples I’ve seen was a company that sells rare coins online. When I was analyzing their campaigns to find out how they could improve their results, I discovered that they had spent over $11,000 on showing their ads on a website that had a puzzle game that involved some coins.
For this business, this was a very expensive illustration of mistake 1 & 2 in this post, so make sure you avoid it.
To see on which networks your campaigns are running: select your campaign, click settings, look for the Networks section. Make sure you’ve got Search Network selected, and avoid Display or display select.
Mistake 3: Showing your ads on mobile when you shouldn’t
Another expensive default is that your ads will show to users browsing from computers or smartphones.
So if your website doesn’t work on mobile, showing ads on a smartphone is just flushing money down the drain.
If you do have a mobile or responsive site, you have to keep a close eye on the stats. Sometimes sales from mobile devices can be very expensive.
Adwords allows you to increase or decrease the price you pay per click, all the way to $0, which will exclude your ads from showing on mobile devices.
Find out how in: Settings > Devices > Bid Adj. column
Mistake 4: Not using negative keywords
It’s not easy to find the keywords that will bring in sales for your store. Usually, you start out with a set of keywords that you need to tweak over time.
Sometimes they’ll be too broad, attracting searches that aren’t really relevant for your store. Other times they’ll be too specific and there won’t be any people searching for them.
To find the keywords that you are wasting money on, you can check the Search Terms report. This report will show you the actual phrases people searched for when your ad appeared.
See the report for yourself: Keywords > Details > Search Terms > All
From that report, you can easily exclude the keywords you don’t want your ads to show for anymore.
Mistake 5: Not tracking conversions
If you’re doing any kind of marketing, you need to track the results of those efforts.
And if you’re spending money on advertising, it’s even more crucial to know what’s going on.
Every single change you can make in Adwords: add a keyword, write a new advertisement, or change the landing page can have an impact on your sales.
If you don’t know which of your efforts are producing results, it’s hard to know what you should stop doing, and what you should be doing more of.
When you link Google Adwords with Google Analytics you’re able to see the results that are coming from your efforts, this will help you to know which changes you should make.
Avoiding these 5 mistakes will help you to make more sales from Google Adwords campaigns while spending less money.
If you are struggling to get more traffic and sales to your online store, check out our free guide. It will help you get unstuck and on your way towards a profitable store.
About The Author
Dennis Moons helps to transform online stores from being an expensive hobby into one that is actually making money. So, if you’re fed up with the lack of sales in your store, head over to Store Growers(www.storegrowers.com) and turn things around today.