Google Ads and Google Shopping solutions for small business

This is a crucial step in the advertising process as if you aren’t making profit, all of the clicks, enquiries and purchases in the world aren’t going to help you. We do a considerable amount of work upfront to calculate what a profitable bidding strategy for your business looks like.

It’s no use Google Ads driving $100,000 worth of revenue on your ecommerce platform if the cost of advertising exceeds that. Even if that $100,000 worth of revenue stems from $50,000 worth of advertising, if the overall cost to manufacture or import your products exceeds $50,000 (in order words, if your margin is less than 50%), you would also be failing to make a positive return on your investment.

These are questions you often don’t get asked by agencies willing to invest your money in an attempt to drive enquiries and revenue, without an overall idea as to whether that investment is making you a profit. We have a range of calculations we perform upfront and ongoing (when we have sufficient data in our account) which dictates how much we’re prepared to bid per to ensure your account stays in the black.

Lastly, if phone calls are important to your business, we can set-up call tracking for your website so you can monitor the volume of calls from Google Ads. We can even set a criteria whereby a phone call is only counted as a conversion if it’s over a certain length of time.

Remarketing is a tactic of delivering ads to users who have visited your website, but not completed a purchase or submitted an enquiry. It should be a part of just about every Google Ads account, as 99% of users who visit your website won’t purchase or submit an enquiry on the first visit.

Remarketing allows us to set unique bids for these users. For example, we may choose to bid more aggressively to users who spent more time on your website as they likely came closer to taking a desired action. A perfect example of this is a user who adds a product to their shopping cart but doesn’t complete the check out process.

Messaging and copy is another feature that is slightly different for remarketing than traditional campaigns. As users have already been on your website, they likely know about the products and services you offer and hence we don’t need to go into as much detail on these. This means we can deliver harder sell ads to get the users back on your website to submit an enquiry or complete a purchase.

Imagine you own a gym and a user spends five minutes on your website, views your pricing page, then leaves without signing up. Then imagine two days later that same user searches “best gyms near me” on Google. If you run a remarketing campaign, you can advertise to that user with a personalized ad. For example, you might include a 10% discount in the ad as price may have been the reason the user didn’t sign up the first time they visited your website.

If you run an ecommerce website selling products, Google Shopping can be an extremely effective sales channel. Available on our Google Ads Grizzly pricing plan, we can set-up of your Google Shopping campaign and have your products displaying on Google quicker than you can say, “free shipping”. Don’t worry, free shipping isn’t a requirement for Google Shopping.

Google Shopping ads appear on Google when users search for relevant products, and they also appear in the Shopping tab of Google. Like anything on Google Ads, there’s a methodology to appearing in the most prized position for a search term. You need a well optimized website and feed, strong imagery, and the right bidding strategy.

We generally start our clients on a Standard Shopping campaign, which gives us more control over products, ads and bidding. When a client has a sufficient amount of conversions (enquiries or purchases) built up, it’s usually time to transition them to Smart Shopping. Smart Shopping is powered by Google AI, which optimizes product ads towards conversions. Across all of the accounts we manage, we’ve found Smart Shopping to be a more effective advertising channel than Standard Shopping.

Ocean Bear Digital are experts in Google Shopping and product ads, and it’s generally the first place we recommend for ecommerce businesses.

A way we do this is through the Fogg Behavior Model (B=MAP), which dictates that for an action to occur, there must be a motivation, an ability, and a prompt. The motivation exists by way of a user searching for a product or service. The aim of our ads is to enhance this motivation with a compelling overview of your products or services; make it easy (or affordable) for the user to access your products or services (ability); and provide a strong call to action (prompt). You can see all of these in action through one of our Google Ads for Ocean Bear Digital.

We’ll also ensure your ads have all the right ad extensions. Ad extensions are additional pieces of information you can append to your Google Ads, at no cost. They won’t all show at one time, however ad extensions can include the following:

• Call extensions – If a user clicks the phone number in your ad, it will directly call your business from Google
• Callout extension – Include the key features, or “callouts” of your business, such as warranty, free shipping, free consultation or otherwise
• Price extensions – If you have an ecommerce store, or you’re able to be transparent with your service prices, such as $200 for a teeth clean, a price extension is a must

Lastly, it’s important that keywords match-up throughout the journey of a user seeing your ad and engaging with your website, as Google interprets that as a sign of relevance. The keywords in your ad should match both the term the user searched on Google; and the keywords seeded into your website.

The most important element of a profitable Google Ads account is the optimization. That’s when the real fun begins, as we can collect rich performance data at a keyword, ads and website conversion level.

We optimize accounts across over 50 data points, with some of the more important as follows:

• Removing keywords not performing by adding them to negative keyword lists
• Reviewing ad click through rate. We run several variations of ads for each product or service you offer. When it’s clear one ad isn’t performing as well as another, we pause it and launch a new ad. The idea is to always have ads competing against each other so we’re continually improving our ad performance
• Bid adjustments are where we choose to show ads more or less frequently depending upon performance. For example, if a particular keyword, such as “mobile mechanic Vancouver” is driving a lot of enquiries on your website at a profitable cost per lead, we would look to bid more aggressively on that keyword so our ad shows more. Conversely, if our advertising doesn’t perform well amongst users on tablet devices, we can choose to bid less on users searching Google on tablets.

With Ocean Bear Digital, you’ll also receive a real-time dashboard, which allows you to track the performance of your ads. We won’t hold it against you if that’s all a bit much. We can also provide monthly reports alongside commentary and proposed optimizations.