Photo by Roberto Cortese on Unsplash
Shopify is the most popular E-commerce platform in the world, providing you with all the features you need to build, manage, and market your online store from a centralized location. That said, no matter how powerful Shopify is, it’s important to note that success is not a guarantee. After all, building your own Shopify store is the first step towards E-commerce success, and you now need to invest time and other resources into marketing and advertising.
For one, it’s imperative to start advertising your store and products on Google to reach a global audience. Search engine advertising is essential to E-commerce success as it will expand your brand’s reach and visibility, boost your website traffic and conversions, and will allow you to maximize your marketing ROI overall.
Today, we’re taking a look at how you can use Google ads to build a successful Shopify store in 2022 and beyond.
Weave Advertising into Your Marketing Plan
Because we want to deal in the more advanced aspects of advertising and E-commerce, we’re not going to talk about the basics like setting up your budget or naming your campaigns. Instead, we are going to talk about strategy, the broader picture, and specific tactics.
To start, let’s talk about your overall digital marketing plan and how your Google Ad campaigns fit into the strategy. It’s important to define the purpose, the goals, and the co-dependence between your ads and other marketing tactics.
To do this and invest in the right tactics without losing money (because marketing is expensive), make sure to:
- Have clear goals for each platform and marketing tactic
- Derive data from all marketing efforts to fuel your ad optimization
- Align your advertisements with your social media, content, and email marketing
- Align your tone of voice, branding, and values on all marketing channels
- Use the data from your Google Ads account to source information about your audience
Separating advertising from your marketing efforts is a good way to hinder performance on all fronts, so do this first to maximize all your efforts across customer touchpoints.
Start with Shopping Ads
Did you know that you can automatically feed your products into your Google Merchant Center account? One of the best ways to start advertising your Shopify store is to simply set up a Google Merchant Center account, and then you can start using Shopify’s Google channel to sync products and create ad campaigns.
You can do this directly from your Shopify interface, but to get a refund for invalid ad clicks, you’ll need to head straight to your Google Ads account, so note that there are limitations to this integration.
While Google is one of the best ad platforms for Ecommerce with plenty of features, you need to remember to do two things:
- Optimize the product feed
- Synchronize your deals and discounts
Make sure to optimize your product descriptions with the right keywords to allow Google’s machine learning system to automate ad generation on its platform. This will save you a ton of time and effort, allowing you to push ads on Google quickly.
The Importance of Optimized Landing Pages
You will lose money on Google Ads if all you focus on is ad optimization. For an ad campaign to generate the desired results (conversions), you have to complement it with optimized, beautiful landing pages that will inspire people to buy.
After all, without landing page optimization to guide the customer towards a positive outcome, your ads are bound to produce a negative ROI. Always remember that your ads are nothing more than another way for people to reach your product pages, landing pages, or applications, all of which require good UX design based on user-centric principles for your ads to convert.
With that in mind, if you want to use Google Ads effectively (not lose money on them), make sure that your landing pages are optimized for specific goals. While everyone else is focused on designing the perfect Google Ad, you should focus on designing a landing page that will convert.
Create Beautiful and Actionable Ad Designs
Landing page optimization is crucial, yes, but so is the optimization of the actual advertisements. Keep in mind that making an advertisement goes beyond keyword optimization and copy, and delves deep into the visual elements that will draw people in, engage them, and inspire them to take action.
To that end, you can use beautiful ad designs to power all your advertising strategies, including on different platforms like Facebook, but also with well-designed and branded banners like with Amazon sponsored products. This will help create a well-rounded advertising approach for numerous platforms that will complement your Google Ads campaign.
Boost Success with Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic search ads and Responsive search ads should be two of the primary tools in every Shopify store owner’s arsenal, as they allow you to maximize your store’s reach and visibility. Google will crawl your store and your product pages to create dynamic headlines and landing pages based on the content and how it’s optimized.
Dynamic search ads are a lifesaver for a Shopify store owner because it’s nearly impossible to manually optimize your pages and ad copy for every possible search term. So, Google will do it for you through its machine learning system, creating dynamic ads that will help you reach your ideal customers.
Over to you
The Shopify platform gives you everything you need to build a beautiful, optimized online store. That said, simply having a Shopify store doesn’t guarantee visibility or conversions, which is why you need to start investing in the right marketing tactics.
In the E-commerce world, ads play a major role in long-term growth and success. Start implementing these tips into your advertising strategy to put your store in front of the right people at the right time, and increase your conversions in 2022.
