How to grow sales on your Shopify store
Now that you’ve launched your brand new Shopify store, it’s time to start thinking about how you’re going to attract new customers and encourage them to buy.
How best to achieve this? Two words: paid media. That’s where we can help – here at 21Digital, we use Google Ads (Pay-Per-Click) strategies to gain high quality leads and raise brand awareness with effective campaigns. That means we can drive sales, increase your online visibility, and help you re-engage with previous visitors, all with the aim of increasing traffic and sales for your e-commerce site.
With that in mind, let’s have a look at some of the core PPC tactics we rely on to increase sales on your Shopify website.
Maximise Visibility for your Shopify Store with the Power of Google Ads
Google is the undisputed king of search engines – it’s what people use to search for what to do, where to go, and what to buy. That’s why a well-managed Google Ads strategy can be so invaluable – ensuring that your ad appears on Google at the very moment someone searches for your product or service.
Paid search ads are pretty much the bread and butter of any paid media strategy. Simply put – when a customer searches for a product, they’ll see your ad. There are a number of benefits that come with using paid search to advertise your Shopify store:
- Reinforce your brand’s authority through double serving – if your ads are featured in both the shopping and the search results, this is known as a double serving. This is a great way of distinguishing your brand as a leader in your sector.
- Use ad text to outline your key promotions or sales – utilise as many characters as you can to highlight anything that you want your potential customers to know about. For example ‘Next Day Delivery’ or ‘20% Sale Now On’. You get the idea.
- Dynamic search ads – in traditional search campaigns, your ads are triggered by the specific keywords that you choose to bid on. Not so with dynamic search ad campaigns (DSA). These use the content from your website to decide if your business is relevant to a specific search term. Google will then generate an ad that’s highly relevant to that particular term, and automatically sends the potential customer to the correct landing page on your website.
- Revenue based bidding strategies – Google, like a lot of search engines, has become increasingly more reliant on automation over the years. Although we would advise caution when accepting the many, many recommendations Google offers you, implementing certain automated bidding strategies can actually lead to positive results. For example, we’ve achieved some great results from using the Maximise Conversion Value bidding strategy in conjunction with setting a target return on ad spend. This basically tells Google’s AI to focus on achieving as much revenue as possible, while still working towards a ROAS (return on ad spend) that suits you.
- Ad extensions – essentially, these are extra bits of information that you want your customers to know, and one of the key advantages of using search ads to promote your Shopify site is the multitude of features it offers you to include in your adverts.
The best ad extensions to use when advertising your e-commerce store
- Sitelink extensions – handy links that transport the user to any relevant areas on your site. These could include links to similar or complimentary products, links to new products, or to any promotions you’re currently running.
- Promotion extensions – if you’ve got a 50% sale running on your store until the end of the week, promotion extensions give you the opportunity to highlight this fact in your ads. These also allow you to include key conditions like promo codes or minimum spends. Plus, you can also schedule when you want the promotion to start and finish.
- Price extensions – these are a lot like sitelink extensions in principle, except that price extensions give you links to specific products on your site. The only difference really is that that price extensions put the price of each product, front and centre for all to see.
- Image extensions – with these, you can add thumbnail images to your search ads which can help bring visibility to them. That, in turn, increases the likelihood you’ll get a click through rate.
Use Google Shopping to drive potential sales
Google Shopping allows retailers to advertise their products digitally to users who search for them. For example, say you run an online clothes store – Google Shopping allows you to display your limited-edition jeans next to other products, similar in description. This means that people searching for limited edition jeans are presented with options from multiple retailers.
Now, in times gone by, Google Shopping has been quite a challenge to use. For your ads to show, you were required to create a manual feed for all your products which was then uploaded to your Google Merchant Centre. That meant setting up an account was often a time consuming process, especially if you had a large inventory.
However, things have vastly improved since, and it’s now easier than ever to get your Shopify products on Google Ads. Since Shopify and Google officially partnered with each other, all the products available in your online Shopify store are now also automatically synced with your Google Merchant Centre.
So what’s our advice for executing an effective Shopping campaign?
Segment. The more granular your campaigns, the easier it’ll be to control your bids and budget, therefore making it easier to optimise your campaigns. We advise against putting all your products into one ‘catch-all’ shopping campaign – because you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, right?
It also might be worth looking into Google’s Smart Shopping campaigns. These use automated bidding and ad placements to display your ads to relevant audiences across Google’s search results, display network, Gmail and so on and require less management if you don’t have the time.
We’re really only just scratching the surface of the power of PPC when it comes to driving sales in your Shopify store. PPC and search marketing in general will always be an integral part of any successful online presence – after all, even the best Shopify site in the world won’t do your business much good if nobody can find it!
And if you need help with search… that’s where we come in! We’re a multi-award-winning agency here at 21Digital, specialising in lead generation and e-commerce, with a range of digital marketing services including web design, web development, SEO, Google Ads, digital consultancy, social media marketing and email marketing.
We’ve recently been helping a whole new raft of customers maximise traffic to their own Shopify sites, so if you’ve got any questions or need any advice in kickstarting your Shopify success, don’t hesitate to email us on hello@21digital.agency or give us a buzz on 01254 660 560. Let’s talk!