eCommerce Marketing - PPC / CPC
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With online retail continuing to grow rapidly, the business to consumer eCommerce market is becoming increasingly competitive, with more and more eCommerce retail outlets competing for our virtual spending power.
With recognised high street brands now joining the online revolution and throwing a lot of money at their eCommerce marketing campaigns, how can smaller eCommerce businesses market their own shops successfully?
Cost Per Click (CPC) Marketing
Also referred to as PPC (Price Per Click), this form of marketing gives eCommerce businesses the opportunity to have their web sites appear on the first few pages of leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Simply put, CPC marketing is where an eCommerce business owner creates a simple text advert (or graphical advert), features it on search engine results pages and other popular web portals, and pays a set amount each time their advert is clicked.
The person clicking the advert is taken through to the eCommerce shop directly.
The most popular CPC eCommerce marketing schemes are Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing and Miva. With over 80% of all UK searches performed on Google, Google Adwords should be your first port of call to set up your first CPC marketing campaign.
The application process is fairly simple, during which you will be asked to enter the text of your advert, choose which search words and phrases you would like your advert to appear for, and finally you will be asked to set how much you want to pay per click, and a daily maximum budget.
As you can imagine, generic keywords for popular markets are very popular with advertisers, and to have your advert appearing on the first few search results pages of Google would increase your CPC amount significantly.
Take the example of a fashion shop selling childrens designer clothing. To have an advert for that shop appearing on page one of Google for a search on 'fashion' would need a very high CPC amount. A more effective way to use CPC marketing is to only have your advert appear for more specific search phrases.
For example, having the advert appear for 'childrens fashion' or 'designer childrens clothing' would cost a lot less per click and result in more qualified traffic - that is, visitors to the shop already know what to expect in terms of the products they are looking for.
With Google Adwords, you can also create multiple marketing campaigns and use differently worded adverts linking to product-specific pages in your eCommerce shop.
This actually reduces your CPC costs because the context of your advert matches more closely the contents of your product-specific page you are linking to.
It also makes the search results far more relevant for the person using Google to search for specific products.
A word of caution. PPC / CPC fraud is sadly a fact of life when using this form of marketing. The temptation for competitors and other unscrupulous sorts to click on your advert frequently to run up the cost of your marketing campaign deliberately is something to protect yourself against.
Google do have PPC / CPC fraud prevention mechanisms in place but they are not full-proof. If you can use your own statistics package to track IP addresses of visitors, visit durations, where they have come from before getting to your eCommerce shop, you can monitor visitor activity.
If you find abuse of your marketing is taking place and you compile that evidence, you can ask Google to investigate and refund the amount you believe has been incorrectly charged through PPC / CPC fraudulent clicks.
A lot of PPC / CPC eCommerce marketing is trial and error, seeing what keywords and phrases are popular, which ones result in orders through your shop and which are proving very expensive for little return.
It can be an incredibly effective form of eCommerce marketing, especially for new online shops but also for established eCommerce businesses wishing to increase visitor numbers to their shops.