Editorial Articles

Dipped your toe in the Pay Per Click Ocean but not had the results you were hoping for?

Most retailers are now ecommerce enabled but many have failed to exploit the opportunities of running Search Engine PPC campaigns. Yet, rarely has a marketing channel been so direct and instantly measurable for smaller businesses.

So why are etailers failing to exploit PPC?

Firstly, if other traffic sources (browser type-in, natural search, email etc.) aren’t monetising, then PPC traffic probably won’t either. However, if these channels are effective, it is possible that the PPC campaigns aren’t being run efficiently enough to generate the return on investment hoped for.

Many etailers consider search marketing straight-forward. Think of a keyword, write some ad copy, make a sensible bid for that keyword and link it to the home page or deep-link further into the site. Simple! But etailers that think that’s all there is to it are often the ones that find this channel ineffectual.

Running a PPC campaign requires a combination of commercial, creative and technical skills often not readily available within smaller organisations. This explains why this marketing activity is often managed between two or three departments, with no clear business owner, despite generally being one of the largest marketing investments within the company.

The cost of understanding and building a complex PPC campaign should be compared with the cost of supplying product data-feeds to marketing partners such as comparison sites, aggregators or agencies equipped to run sophisticated PPC campaigns. The traffic, or leads received from comparison partners, often provide better conversions as they are effectively qualified twice. Firstly, when the consumer goes from the search engine to the comparison site and secondly when the consumer clicks on a product link within the comparison site’s own highly categorised search results.

SHOP.COM started taking PPC seriously 6 years ago. Previously the traffic acquisition focus was on partner development, brand promotion and making a large dynamic website search engine friendly. With the introduction of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), search engines helped organisations like SHOP.COM develop their PPC tools. This gave websites, with large inventories and a strong technology base, the opportunity to manage campaigns in a more automated, scalable way.

The business rules and algorithms that underpin SHOP.COM’s proprietary search marketing applications were formulated by in-house mathematicians. Constantly testing multiple variables and fine tuning the algorithmic tools ensures campaigns run in an optimal state at all times.

Today, SHOP.COM runs multi-million keyword campaigns across all 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) to ensure all the 6 million products listed (from 500+ merchants) are seen by pre-qualified customers. The technology that enables the micro-management of this volume of keywords, ad creatives and landing-pages is cutting edge and difficult for smaller retailers to emulate or compete against without major investment.

Should etailers partner retail marketplaces and comparison engines like SHOP.COM or compete with them in search marketing? Or both?

Many factors affect this decision. A resource limit is often the biggest hurdle. Building successful PPC campaigns takes time and skill. But creating a product data feed for comparison sites and other partners isn’t as complicated as many etailers think. Usually, once the process of generating a data-feed is mastered, reproducing it is straightforward and etailers can utilise PPC skills of the bigger sites.

However, if an organisation is already running successful PPC campaigns, why should they send product lists to comparison sites, since they are getting plenty of exposure in search engines already?

No search engine allows competing adverts from the same advertiser for the same keyword. So, if an ad creative isn’t enticing enough or the bid not high enough, a customer is lost. When the content is with a comparison site, there is another opportunity to increase exposure even if limited PPC campaigns are already running. It creates a second chance to engage with that customer.

Correctly approaching SEM requires an honest assessment of the internal skills and resources. Without existing healthy conversion rates, it is unlikely PPC campaigns will offer a quick win. The search marketing industry has developed to create a somewhat invisible technological barrier to entry. Without the bandwidth to tackle these issues, an etailer could be better utilising the assets of marketplaces or comparison sites to increase exposure to valuable customers.

Author: Malcolm Tucker, Marketing Director – SHOP.COM

www.shop-com.co.uk