AdWords – Tips for Shop Partners

A few weeks ago, we delved into the world of Search Engine Optimisation with our short 3-part newsletter excursion. We did this as we are keen on helping you improve your Google ranking, and today we’re going to introduce yet another way to improve your positioning in Google’s hit list. Next to organic ways to generate more traffic for your shop or site, Google AdWords is another way to generate traffic.

The term AdWords itself is obviously a blend of the terms averts and words. And it perfectly encapsulates what it is about: running an advertisement whenever a certain word combination is googled. These adverts are shown above, next to and under the search list resulting from the user’s search request. You decide when to run the advert. As opposed to SEO, the main advantage here is that you can run the ad immediately without having to wait and hope that somebody googles your shop.

Why use AdWords?

You want more people checking out your shop, particularly those looking for personalised T-shirts? Then go with Google AdWords! It offers you a quick and easy chance to run ads to target your peer group.

The good thing is that you only pay for those clicks that actually divert traffic to your shop or site. If folks ignore your ad when googling stuff, you don’t pay a penny. And you have full price control! Similar to things sold at auction, you determine the maximum amount per keyword. Depending on your maximum keyword offer, a few quality criteria and competition you will see ”your bid“ accepted. The higher your AdRank (calculated offer depending on maximum price per keyword and quality criteria), the better the ranking of your offer.

What’s more, AdWords offers you a lot of further options. There’s almost no limit to range: Google’s display network consists of several thousand websites with almost unlimited potential. Next to classic text ads, you can also run images and video clips.

Tips for your Partner Shop

To get your shop going with Google AdWords, we’ve put together some useful advice for you. Concentrate on the basics first to promote your designs:

• The right Keywords

It’s vital to select the right keywords when running an AdWords campaign. Being bang on topic when describing your designs is the most important thing. If you choose keywords of a very general nature, you will get more adverts published on Google. But your competition will be much stronger as well, and good placements mean higher costs. A single click for a search for “T-shirt“ or “personalised T-shirt“ may cost about a Euro or pound sterling.

Get the targeting right. If your shop is e.g. all about bowling designs, it would make sense to use terminology from this area such as “strike T-shirt“ or ”bowling Polo shirt“.

You can assess possible keywords by using the keyword planner or Google itself. Google Suggest helps you find popular search term combinations – just open a Google browser and start typing to get Google’s suggestions. Über-suggest offers an overview of related search terms in alphabetical order.

• Suitable Ads

Having chosen suitable keywords, you can concentrate on the actual ads. Similar to choosing pertinent keywords, it is also important here to choose relevant terms designed to promote your advert. If somebody looking for “bowling polo shirts“ sees an advert meeting his search, he may be tempted to click on it. Using several advertising texts in an ad bracket will motivate a user to click and discover your shop. Even if there shouldn’t be enough space to display everything you want to say, try getting your message across and activate the user with a call to action.

• The Landing Page

When somebody gets to your shop or site after searching for the terms that you have offered, he’d want to see exactly what he was looking for when arriving at your shop. So it’s important to have a landing page in place that offers the goods you were advertising. In case of our bowling T-shirt shop, you’d of course need to show the Strike T-shirt and Bowling Polo Shirt.  And if somebody is looking for a cat mug, you don’t want to scare him off with a dog apron. You catch the drift: create a page that meets your customers’ expectations, and you’ll hit the nail on the head.

• Negative Keywords

Back on the topic of keywords: you can also define those search terms that shouldn’t result in placing an ad. You could e.g. exclude words such as “free“, “used“ or ”second hand“ as they imply that the person is actually looking for something else, and in this case, probably not really willing to spend money on your products. Think about possible associations with your products that are bound to create unwanted traffic, add these to the keywords you want to exclude, and you’ll save lots of money!

• Advert extensions

Ad extensions have become really important after Google started putting the quality factor into the equation. We recommend using site links to your rankings. This also helps you raise awareness for other products like hoodies, aprons or bags that you offer to feature your designs. You never know what people are tempted to buy! You can also provide additional information on different topics that your shop has on offer: maybe you have table-tennis designs or I ♥ Football T-shirts. Site links also serve to let your shop appear bigger, which usually results in a bigger click rate.

That’s it for today! We hope that our Google AdWords tips will boost sales in your shop – it’s definitely worth giving it a go! And it’s always nice to get feedback or questions, we look forward to getting back to you!