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How do I draw attention to my shop? A lot of online merchants ask themselves this very question upon opening their onlineshop. One of the most popular answers to this question is Google AdWords.  Google AdWords offers an ideal opportunity to capture the attention of potential customers as they have just begun their online search for products. Yet AdWords campaigns are not always successful. Why is this the case?

Google AdWords provide shop operators an invaluable advantage compared to conventional advertising campaigns by addressing the concrete needs of potential customers. As a shop operator, you thus have a chance to focus very precisely on your target group and appeal to them directly.

So far, so good. In the pursuit of luring as many users as possible to their website, however, many online merchants unfortunately overlook that simple principle. “But I’d fail to attract 80 percent of potential customers if my ads are too specific,” is a beloved objection to segmented AdWords marketing, along with the sometimes arduous work it entails. Instead of addressing specific search queries with tailored ads, a lot of online merchants opt for generalised ad texts which correspond to basic keywords. In so doing, shop operators quickly lose sight of a fundamental question:

“How do I sensibly structure my advertising budget?”

AdWords is practical for users, too. Instead of being forced to rummage through a great many search results, users see relevant results at a glance. The very fact that a merchant has paid for the ad tells the user that the link will lead to relevant information. Many users therefore notice AdWords ads and click on them.

Good for you as a shop operator. But a click on your ad does not constitute a purchase. Even when you do appeal directly to potential customers, a majority of them nevertheless will buy nothing on your website. A lot of users namely open several ad links at once. If a potential customer does not find the product straightaway they are looking for, then they will immediately close that window.

And that begs the question: what is more important? A high click rate — enticing a lot of people to visit your shop — or a high conversion rate, which means that a lot of users choose to buy from you? Let us briefly examine a statistical example.

General vs. specific: what yields more?

Let us suppose that your generally worded AdWords ad is displayed 10,000 times. Of these 10,000 users, 1,000 click on your ad text to visit your shop. If each click costs 10 cents, your advertising costs amount to 100 euros. Not bad for 1,000 willing buyers, right? Let us continue to compute. The average conversion rate (the ratio of your shop’s visitors to your shop’s customers) is between three and six percent. Because your ad is general, you can present only a general product page. Your customer must therefore explore your shop — which lowers the conversion rate. Consequently, we must assume that your campaign will enjoy only limited success. Assuming a conversion rate of three percent, 1,000 visitors to your shop will result in 30 purchases. In this scenario, your advertising costs would be about 3 euros per purchase.

Let us now apply the same statistical approach to a targeted AdWords ad. Because fewer people will enter a specialised term into a search engine, your ad will appear less frequently. Let us assume that the aforementioned 80% of all users will miss your ad because of its specificity. Your ad will thus be displayed only 2,000 times instead of 10,000. As above, 10 percent of users click on your ad text; in turn, 200 potential customers visit your shop. Because your ad is displayed less often and also generates fewer clicks, your per-click AdWords costs are lower. Let us assume that each click of your ad costs only half as much: 5 cents. This would entail spending 10 euros for the 200 visitors to your shop. It is safe to assume that these visitors will purchase more on a percentage basis, for they were drawn to your shop by targeted advertising. At a conversion rate of six percent instead of just three percent, 200 visitors to your shop will result in 12 purchases.

Quadrupled sales thanks to targeted marketing

An advertising budget of 100 euros will permit you to launch nine additional targeted AdWords campaigns. Instead of 30 purchases via a general ad, the direct targeting of potential customers results in 120 purchases. In other words, you can use the same budget to quadruple sales via targeted marketing.

It ought to be clear now that you should always strive to address (potential) customers in accordance with their needs. It is worth investing the effort to create and pay for tailored ads for individual products. Carefully consider which keywords you specify for your AdWords campaigns. Vague keywords such as “laptop” result in lower conversion rates than, for example, specifying a particular model such as “Dell Latitude laptop”.

Bad adword ad

Good adword ad

4 designing tips

1. Your ad text should feature the keyword in the heading to convince customers that your shop sells precisely what they need.
2. Your ad text should entice potential customers to your shop: Promise customers something they cannot refuse!
   Poor: “The expert for laptops”
   Better: “Sale: 20% discount on all Dell notebooks” or “Free shipping of all Dell notebooks”.
3. Open the back door! Online shops are different from brick-and-mortar shops. The main entrance — your home page, in other words — is not necessarily the best choice for an ad campaign. Your customers instead prefer entering via the back door and learning right away about the items which interest them. You should therefore go to the trouble of creating different links for every ad. If a potential customer wishes to buy a Dell laptop, than a proper ad will guide them directly to the proper place in your shop so that they do not have to click their way through your entire shop. You will thus increase the conversion rate within your shop. Never forget that a customer can leave your shop at any time to visit someone else’s shop!
4. Use “speaking URLs” to promote the content of the landingpage the adwordd is pointing to. In lieu of a cryptic “database URL” such as “www.laptopshop.de/61504599.cf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61504599/Categories/”Lemote product” linking to a product, you better use a short URL as “www.laptopshop.de/dell-special_offers”. This will indisputably benefit your AdWords campaign by convincing potential customers that your shop is the perfect place to be.

The easiest way is not always the best way. If you want to sell well online, you must learn how to draw attention to your website and persuade people to buy from you. Why does self-created content helps to boost your sales figures?

A typical scenario: after considerable consideration, you’ve decided to open an online shop. You have also invested a lot of time researching available technology and have concluded that a flexible, customisable and inexpensive ePages rental shop will be ideal. An excellent choice! You learn how best to use the software, create a wonderful layout and begin entering products.

After you’ve already invested hours in your future online business, you want to save time by resorting to the standard texts which the manufacturer supplied together with product images. Stop! Step back and reflect — instead of making one of the biggest mistakes possible in this situation.

Why, you ask? Spend a few minutes researching online to determine just how many of your online competitors use the manufacturer’s product texts. You will be astonished.

To name but one example, let’s select an excerpt from Apple’s product text for its iPod touch and then google the phrase. A search for “Use the revolutionary Multi-Touch interface to flick through your music in Cover Flow” returns over 12.000 results for web pages which all use exactly the same standard text. If you use the identical product description, then you will compete against all those website operators for the attention of search engines and customers.

The pen is mightier than the sword” — in the online era, as well

Google and other search engines value originality and reward it with a higher ranking. The pivotal factor in this regard: search engines tend to recognize who first used a given text online. Such websites benefit from the originality of their texts and receive better evaluations. If you use a manufacturer’s product texts, then it’s extremely likely that somebody else did the same long ago. Google and other engines will barely notice your website — if at all. Conversely, if you compose your very own product text, then you will have the undivided attention of search engines.

Unfortunately, content theft — the unauthorised use of others’ content — is rampant online (despite the fact that it is every bit as prohibited online as it is offline). So, what happens to your ranking if one of your competitors simply copies large amounts of the product texts which you worked so hard to create for your own website? Developers at Google provided an answer some time ago at Google Blog:

“Don’t fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request (http://www.google.com/dmca.html) to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.”

Use words to sell

People finding your website is half the battle; persuading potential customers to purchase from you is the other half. How can original texts help you?

Just imagine you’re at a party. Would you rather talk with the innumerable guests who all have the same things to say and merely contribute to the background noise? Or, instead, with the one person who knows how to tell an interesting story and exudes eloquence, wit and charm? Not a difficult decision, is it?

But the presentation of products in your online shop is no different. If you lazily resort to mass-produced standard texts and standard images, then there is nothing which will distinguish you from your competitors — except price.

But you will gain a decisive sales advantage versus your competition if you can show customers that you have spent time analysing the products you sell, you know their respective advantages and disadvantages, and you can provide informed opinions about your products.

Exploit this opportunity to increase your sales.

Get ready to write

It literally pays off, by all means, to create your own product texts. Yet where and how to begin? We provide some help on getting started in our article: “Writing for the Web: 10 Rules” (http://www.epages.com/en/blog/index.php/2009/01/14/writing-for-the-web-10-rules/ )We also recommend the following books to everyone who wishes to more deeply explore this (admittedly) complex topic:

“Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works”
by Janice Redish
(amazon)

“Writing for the Web”
by Crawford Kilian
(amazon)