Most e-commerce brands are familiar with the acronym PPC. It’s a form of online advertising that stands for pay-per-click. It can be an extremely effective method of digital advertising when done right.

The idea of setting up and running a PPC campaign in-house is intimidating to a lot of brands. There are a wide variety of campaigns you can set up, several different ad types, and countless strategies and optimization tactics you can implement. That’s why we’ve put together this guide so that you can feel more confident in getting started with PPC campaigns for your e-commerce brand.

What is E-commerce PPC Marketing?

E-commerce PPC marketing involves setting up and running pay-per-click campaigns to increase traffic, revenue, and profits for your e-commerce brand.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to running PPC campaigns for e-commerce brands. There are a variety of channels, ad types, strategies, and tactics available, and it’s important to implement whatever makes the most sense for your brand.

For example, running e-commerce PPC campaigns will look much different for a new e-commerce store, than for an established brand that’s been around for 10 years. Identifying your goals and understanding the benefits of a solid PPC strategy is an important first step.

Benefits of PPC Campaigns for E-commerce Stores

1. Brand Awareness

When you’re trying to build a long-lasting brand, using marketing strategies to build brand awareness is so important. This is one of many benefits for e-commerce brands running PPC campaigns. Depending on your budget, your ads are likely going to be shown to a large number of people. That means more people are learning about your brand and what you offer. Plus, the more you optimize your ads to show your products to the right audience, the more relevant your exposure and brand awareness will be.

2. Quick Results

PPC campaigns can start bringing in sales for your brand very quickly. As soon as you put together the ad campaign and hit publish, your ad will start reaching your audience and you could start getting sales any minute. That’s not to say your campaigns will be perfect from the start. You want to manage and optimize your ads for maximum profitability. The longer your ads run, the more data you can gather and use to optimize your ads further.

3. Long-Term Results

The benefits of PPC advertising extend far beyond getting quick results. Let’s talk about two things that have a massive impact on your long-term results: Compound brand awareness and ad optimization.

The longer your PPC campaigns run, the more brand awareness you’ll build. Over time, this creates a compounding effect as more people learn about your brand. Secondly, you should also optimize your ads based on the data you collect from your campaigns. Ad optimization techniques include refining ad copy, creative assets, and bidding strategy. Continuous optimization contributes significantly toward the long-term success of your ads.

4. Increase Revenue

One of the main benefits of introducing e-commerce PPC advertising to your overall marketing strategy is the resulting increase in revenue. PPC campaigns increase your reach and drive more website traffic, which in turn, generates additional revenue. The goal then transitions to ensuring the revenue is as profitable as possible.

5. Increase Customer LTV (Lifetime Value)

Properly optimized e-commerce PPC campaigns will help you improve your customer lifetime value. Determining what customers to target, products to advertise, and ads to run will impact your Customer LTV. For example, advertising higher-margin products can help increase Customer LTV.

14 PPC Strategies All E-commerce Stores Should Use

Now that you know the benefits, let’s dive into e-commerce PPC strategies you should start implementing today for your brand.

1. Use Long-Tail Keywords

Throw away your strategy of targeting the broadest keywords with the highest search volume. The goal is to bring in the most relevant traffic possible.

Using long-tail keywords is always going to bring in higher-quality and higher-converting traffic. For example, if you have a clothing brand, you might be targeting these broad keywords:

Clothing
Clothing for women
Clothing for men

These keywords are too broad. You don’t know the intent behind the search or understand what exactly the potential customer is looking for. Here are several examples of longer-tail keywords you could target instead:

Summer clothing for women
Cotton clothing for men

These keywords are much more specific, and if you have exactly what the potential customer is looking for, your conversion rate will be much higher.

2. Grab Attention

Make sure your ad copy and images grab attention. This crucial factor can significantly impact the success of a PPC campaign. Understanding your target audience is important here. What things would get them excited and pique their interest? Those are the things you should be emphasizing with your ad copy.

3. Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions

Before running ads, ensure the landing page you’re driving website visitors to is conversion-ready – this is essential, even beyond ad creation. Make the buying process incredibly easy, and make sure your product descriptions are clear and interesting. In today’s world where attention spans are short, the margin of error is small. An extra second of load time, or even an ounce of confusion, can cause website visitors to leave your page.

4. Use Mobile Friendly Landing Pages

About 76% of US adults use their mobile device for online shopping. That’s a significant statistic to understand. It shows just how important it is to ensure your landing page is mobile-friendly. If it's not, you're missing a big chunk of sales you could otherwise be making.

5. Set a Realistic Budget

You don’t need a massive budget to start running PPC campaigns, but you need to be realistic about setting a budget and what type of results to expect. For example, if you have $100 to put into a PPC campaign, you’re not going to give the ads enough time to collect data and understand what to adjust or optimize before your budget runs out. Have a reasonable budget set aside, and make sure you’re comfortable with the idea that there will be some testing involved to get results.

6. Add Negative Keywords

A negative keyword in a PPC campaign tells the platform which keywords are irrelevant, allowing you to prevent your ads from showing to people who aren’t interested in your product.

You might do this if certain keywords are similar to your product, but you know that the intent of the person searching that keyword doesn’t align with the products you have. As an example, let’s say you sell high-end watches.

Here are a few examples of keywords you may want to target:

Luxury watches
High-end watches

Here are some negative keywords you may want to use:

Cheap watches
Watch repair

Even though those keywords are related to watches, you know that the people performing those searches fall outside your target market.

7. Use Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are a great way to bring relevant traffic to your site. Ad extensions are additional pieces of information – including site links, product prices, and your phone number – that appear in your ad. They give you additional opportunities to bring in potential customers. Here’s an example of what ad extensions look like for a Rent The Runway Google Search Ad:

Another benefit is that it takes up more real estate in the search results. Mobile and desktop devices have limited space to display ads. The more space your ad occupies, the more attention your ads receive.

8. Create Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing campaigns help you bring back website visitors who have expressed some form of interest or engagement in the past. This is valuable because you’ll likely be able to convert them at a much higher rate. Once you have enough data, you should set this up. You would just want to set up a separate remarketing campaign rather than targeting new users.

9. Use Lookalike Audiences

Implementing lookalike audiences can also enhance your campaign results. Once you have enough conversion data, you can create a lookalike audience. Lookalike audience in PPC advertising targeting refers to a group of users similar to your existing customers, identified to improve ad relevance and campaign performance.

Again, this is a method you would use after you have tracked conversions and have enough data. That way the platform and algorithm can identify people similar to the customers that converted.

10. Perform A/B testing

A/B testing is more advanced, but it’s important if you want to optimize your campaign to be as profitable as possible. A/B testing in PPC campaigns involves comparing two versions of an ad to see which performs better and then implementing the more successful ad.

For example, an e-commerce store selling sports shoes might create two versions of a PPC ad. Version A (the control version) could have the headline "Durable Running Shoes for Every Runner," while Version B (the variation) might say "Lightweight Sports Shoes for Peak Performance." Each ad would be shown to a similar audience, and the store would analyze metrics like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), or return on ad spend (ROAS) to determine which ad resonates more with its target audience and drives more sales. This data-driven approach helps optimize advertising efforts for better ROI.

11. Improve Conversion Rate (CVR)

Once your campaign is in a good place and bringing in relevant traffic to your website, you should figure out how to improve your conversion rate. Look at the data to see which products are converting well, and which aren’t. Then try to dissect what the difference is. For example, a few things to look at include the quality of images, the types of reviews for the product, and how quickly the page loads. Try to analyze the pages from a user’s perspective to help generate ideas on how to improve your conversion rate (CVR).

12. Optimize Product Pages

This goes hand-in-hand with improving conversion rate, but it’s important enough to have its own section. Look at all aspects of the product page to ensure it’s optimized and crystal clear for the users. Here are some things you should look at:

The product title
The product description
The images
The reviews
The product recommendations

Is there any way you can make things more clear? Can you include a FAQ section to handle potential customer objections or questions? Can you include product recommendations to help with additional discovery and or upsells? Optimizing your product pages will benefit your business when driving significant traffic to these pages.

13. Build Overall Website Trust

How can you increase trust on your website? Consider adding customer testimonials or reviews with images to bolster credibility. It's vital for visitors to trust your site with their credit card information and believe in the quality of your product.

14. Have an Expert Handle Your PPC Campaign

Having a reputable e-commerce Google Ads agency handle your PPC campaign is a good way to ensure you're setting up and managing your campaigns effectively.

Types of PPC Ads for E-commerce

Here are some of the most common e-commerce PPC ad types that you can run.

Search

Search ads will appear alongside search engine results when users search for specific keywords. They are text-based and highly effective for reaching customers who intend to make a purchase.

Display

Display ads appear on websites within an advertising network. They are typically image-based and are great for building brand awareness and remarketing to previous website visitors.

Shopping

Shopping ads showcase products directly in search engine results, displaying product images, prices, and other information related to your brand. They’re an effective method to attract people who are ready to buy.

Video

Video ads appear before, during, or after video content on platforms like YouTube. They’re powerful for bringing in potential customers through storytelling or product demonstrations.

Hiring an E-commerce PPC Agency

When hiring an e-commerce PPC agency like SabinoDB, you can expect comprehensive support in maximizing your PPC ad spend across platforms like Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram.

We are a small, family-owned, private company that has never raised outside capital. This allows us to choose our clients carefully to ensure a good fit and dedicated attention. Our data-driven approach means that all our strategies and decisions are A/B tested, if possible, allowing us to optimize results and performance based on factual insights. Lastly, our founders and management team have worked in, invested in, or owned and operated e-commerce and or marketing companies, allowing us to develop effective, customized PPC strategies that enhance sales and profit.

How We Get Results with E-commerce PPC

1. Account setup

We ensure a strong foundation with thorough keyword planning and structured account setup.

2. Strategy and Management

We align our marketing efforts with your business objectives, continuously adapting to industry trends.

3. Optimize and Scale

Our approach includes regular testing and data-driven strategy adjustments for maximum performance and ROI.

4. Custom Reporting

We offer transparent and tailored reporting to track campaign performance effectively.

About

SabinoDB is a leading e-commerce and marketing technology company committed to helping companies grow their business by making data and technology their competitive advantage. Our solutions include: Digital Advertising, E-Commerce Personalization, “Shop The Look” Outfit Recommendations, Direct Mail and Catalog Response Models, and Web Development. If you are interested in learning about how SabinoDB can help your company, please reach out directly to Ryan Hammon. Email - ryan.hammon@sabinodb.com Phone - (415) 847-8103.

PPC for E-commerce Brands: 14 Strategies You Should Implement