Elizabeth Marsten will be speaking on eCommerce PPC at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I am the Director of Paid Search for CommerceHub in Seattle, WA where I lead a team of paid search specialists and guide the overall best practices across our book of ecommerce clients. Before that I was at a full service digital marketing agency where I headed the service areas of PPC, SEO, social media, analytics and content. I also thought pay-per-click marketing was “paperclip” marketing when I got started back in 2006. Turns out, that’s not what it means.
2) What can a vendor do in creating a shopping feed to make it more likely to generate PPC sales?
Data quality is paramount- making sure the required attributes are being provided and updated regularly is key, but making sure that product titles, categorization/taxonomy are as specific as possible and that in stock vs. out of stock items are up to date, so that you don’t waste ad spend on clicks that can’t convert or lead searchers to the wrong product or variation of a product.
3) How can a niche vendor compete against the largest e-commerce monoliths?
Product titles- test them, get the best possible info in them and get the most important info up front. For example, you may not need the word “women’s” in the title of a dress, since it could be implied that’s what the product is, so instead that space in the title could be used for another descriptor term. Like instead of “Women’s Little Black Dress” go with “Little Black Dress – Knee Length” – you’ll need to experiment and find out what works for you, just make sure to do a split test and not change all products that the test could effect at the same time. Establish a control and experiment set of products. Another case where this makes sense to try is with brand names, technically you are submitting a brand name through the attributes in the feed, but a certain brand may carry more “weight” in the title as well.
Timing – large ecommerce monoliths have lots of budget, but if you don’t, consider an ad schedule that saves budget for later in the day or during specific hours and bidding down during super peak hours and boosting in the periods right before or after to stretch that budget out during the day.
Take control of your Google Seller Ratings potential – as a non-monolith, one thing that can lead a shopper (besides price) to choose one advertiser over another is any kind of ratings info. At the very least, get started so that any 3rd party reviews you have (like with Price Grabber, Bazaar Voice) is being counted and if you have any bad reviews, make sure to address those. A little reputation management can go a long way.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.