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Digital Horizons
Unlocking E-Commerce Gold: Proven Strategies to Drive Quality Traffic and Maximize Profits
Unlock the secrets to e-commerce success as we, Brian Hastings and James Walker, bring you the ultimate guide to driving quality traffic to your website. What if you could transform your online store into a thriving marketplace? Our latest episode of Digital Horizons promises to equip you with actionable insights and proven strategies to capture and convert valuable market share. Explore the dual power of Google’s organic and paid search strategies, and learn how to make your site more relevant through effective SEO techniques. Whether it's on-site optimization or link building, discover how to shine during peak sales periods by leveraging Google's Merchant Center for organic traffic.
As we shift gears, we tackle the art of maximizing your marketing budget across Google and Meta platforms. Feed Google's automated bidding strategies with rich conversion data and overcome lead generation hurdles, while wielding Meta as a powerful tool for brand and demand generation. Learn the nuances of broad audience targeting and creative ad strategies, including the impactful video and carousel ads, to boost engagement and conversion rates. To top it all off, we reveal tactics to increase your Average Order Value, ensuring that each visitor translates into higher revenue. Join us for a session packed with insights that promise to revolutionize your e-commerce approach and elevate your business to new heights.
The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:
James Walker - Managing Director WHD
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous
Welcome back to Digital Horizons. We're the channel for marketers, business owners and e-commerce entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:We want to know what's working now in digital marketing and into the future. I'm James Walker and this is Brian Hastings. Today, we're going to be talking about the first of the four levers for e-commerce success.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we introduced this last week in our session and this is going to be a series, so a series of four levers. We covered them off last week in a bit more detail, but did you want to do a quick recap of the four?
Speaker 2:Sure. So what we're talking about today is traffic, and when we say traffic, we're talking about quality traffic to your website. Following, next week, we're going to be doing average order value, say AOV, increasing the amount that people are spending on each time they come through to your website. Following that, we're going to be looking at conversion rates, so converting more people that are coming through to your website, and then, finally, we'll get into lifetime value. So once people do purchase, try and optimize the amount that they're going to spend over the lifetime with your brand.
Speaker 1:And the reason we're breaking it into a series of four is because we want to talk about actual tactics, things you can try to pull those levers to improve your revenue and profit 100% and by doing just pulling the lever on each of these incrementally, it's going to have a much bigger flow and effect to your overall revenue within your business. So jumping straight in.
Speaker 2:we're going to keep it short and snappy and focus on the things that we look at when we're trying to pull one of these levers, starting with quality traffic increasing the volume of people coming to your website 100% and as a performance marketing agency, I guess this is probably one of the well, it is, the key thing that we do as a service for our clients is identifying where our clients' customers are and then making sure that we have the right strategy in place to drive the traffic to their website, who are most likely to purchase.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. Let's get into a few of the high priority channels, platforms, tools we use to drive traffic. Yeah, should we start with the obvious one, the one that both of our businesses spend a lot of time working on for our clients.
Speaker 2:Going to say big Google Is that the one that we're going with. Yeah, Google.
Speaker 1:So let's start with search, and we'll split it today between organic and paid.
Speaker 2:Yes, Do you want to go into the organic stuff, because I don't really touch organic that often.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, when we're looking at search, obviously there's an immediate turnaround you can get with traffic by increasing the paid side of things, which James can touch on next.
Speaker 1:But organic is a big part of that picture.
Speaker 1:Efforts in improving your site's relevance in the eyes of Google and Bing still generates traffic as well can steal or capture market share from competitors.
Speaker 1:The whole intent of improving your organic visibility, improving your website so it appears higher in organic Google rankings, is to capture market share from your competitors on search terms that are relevant to both of you both you and your competitors.
Speaker 1:Our whole effort for our clients in organic search engine optimization is to try to identify those relevant search terms and search term categories and then build the site's relevance for those ideal search terms whether they be high volume search terms or whether they be more long tail through a combination of on-site optimization, both technically and building from quality links to increase the authority, but also the content relevance and page structure to attempt to have the sort of trifecta of elements telling Google that your page or your series of pages on your site is the most relevant response for Google's customers when searching. So I'm not going to get into all the detail about organic search, but it is a more long. Your site is the most relevant response for Google's customers when searching, so I'm not going to get into all the detail about organic search, but it is a more long-term process. You're probably not going to be able to get cracking organic search now to get traffic tomorrow.
Speaker 2:That's right, not a Black Friday strategy.
Speaker 1:But it is something to consider. The more you develop your organic search rankings, the cheaper your paid traffic is also going to be, because Google rewards paid traffic if your site is more relevant from an organic point of view.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, get into it. Make sure you're building your technical elements of your site, your local search if your business is local rather than just e-commerce and also all those link building efforts to try to build equity and authority in your site. But again, this should have been something you're looking at six months to a year ago and should be doing consistently.
Speaker 2:So something you can do immediately, though right On the organic side which I've found in one of my own sites that's worked extremely well is, even if you're not running Google Ads, go into your merchant center, set up a Google merchant center, connect it to your store and turn on free listings. And this isn't something that I'd done until a little while back because I was holding off for reasons for not running any Google ads for the site, but then, when I did, I set up the merchant center, I turned on free listings and then, all of a sudden, I'm getting organic traffic from the shopping network.
Speaker 2:And this is something that you could be actioning right now, because you will start to see it as long as your title tags and your merchant center set up and all your product titles are relevant to the search queries that people are searching for your products, it's going to help you rank very quickly within the search results and you'll see results out. You'll see sales coming through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not just for a paid product listing.
Speaker 2:No, not anymore. It used to be, but it's not.
Speaker 1:And it's a great way like I use it to compare prices of similar products. If you're stocking similar products to other vendors or other merchants online, you can compete with them by having your organic listing. That's a great immediate tip, especially for an e-commerce Black Friday theme.
Speaker 2:Yes, get that on. I mean, if you're not doing it, turn that on straight away. It will immediately start driving. Well, not immediately, I. I mean it's got to be crawled and everything but, it will.
Speaker 2:It will start driving traffic in the short term. So next we're going to talk about the paid side of things. So google ads driving traffic from there. I think any e-commerce store that is currently not running especially performance max to capture or any of that demand capture traffic that people are. Bottom of funnel. Pmax works like just just turn it on so simple to set up, connect your shopping feed into it. Test running a shopping feed only verse a full PMAX campaign and we've seen varied results on both, using both of these, depending on the store and what the products are. But I feel like that it's definitely worthwhile testing both options.
Speaker 2:And then your standard shopping campaigns. So set up a standard shopping campaign. You're going to get cheap traffic from this Like. We find that the cost per click typically is cheaper than what you're going to see on a search campaign. So make sure you've got your standard shopping PMAC set up. These two will compete a little bit, but still have them running side by side. You will potentially see some overlap, but you'll see better results for having them both running. And then your standard search campaign as well. So make sure you're focusing on your bottom of funnel search terms that are going to get people who are currently in market ready to buy. Stay away from using your sort of more broad top of funnel stuff, especially at this time of year, because you want to be focusing your budget initially on capturing that really high intent, high quality traffic to your store.
Speaker 1:Now, when it comes to budgets in paid search, if you are driving traffic to an e-commerce store, your budget should be set based off how much you can afford to spend on a conversion, or what your return on ad spend needs to be or what your cost of sale needs to be, rather than setting caps based off what you feel like you want to spend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you just set a cap, and obviously if you've got a finite budget and there's no more money in the bank, if you spend more than a certain cap, that's understandable. But if you're heading into the Black Friday period and you know you can afford to spend 15% to 20% of the value of the product you're selling on the advertising, use that as your cap for your campaigns and your campaign budget. Make sure you're not limiting your campaigns based off these made-up budget total caps, because you'll be leaving sales on the table. If you instead focus on a per product category, cost per sale or cost of sale or cost per acquisition, you're going to be able to allow your spend to grow when the volume is there or when the demand is there, and not just cap it on a daily budget only.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the way we approach setting our budgets and this is just based on Google's what they recommend in terms of getting in. What we've seen gets results is looking at where your average, your cost per conversion is and then sort of looking at that as you want to almost multiply that by 10. Because what you want to do is feed Google as much conversion data so that you can move away from your manual click strategy, which is typically what you'd want to start most campaigns with, flick it over to your automated bidding strategy, so that way, when you're telling Google, hey, get me as many conversions as possible, max conversion value strategies, there's enough conversion data in there.
Speaker 2:Because if your budget's too small and you're only getting one or two conversions a week, You're going to be so limited in feeding enough positive data into it to show Google who your right customers are. So you're never going to really be able to take advantage of this automated bidding strategies and Google machine learning to be able to really make sure your campaign takes off when you are ready to pump in more budget.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just a warning on performance Max we do generally find it works really, really well on e-commerce stores, but we've had limited success or varied success. When you aren't running an e-commerce store, when it's a service inquiry or a much more complex way of converting, just because it doesn't give you as much information or data about who the user is, that is converting. But when it's e-com, it's a direct transfer from Google straight through to converting. We're seeing great success with PMax in that area.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, lead gen is definitely a challenging area for PMax. Yeah, yeah, and there are some ways, different things you can trial on it, but I think that's a whole different episode to look at some strategies there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we thought we'd just state that Not everyone run out and turn on PMax this is more for e-com, so let's get over to the next one.
Speaker 2:What are we going to go on? Meta next, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think we talk Meta. Next Meta is when I think of marketing budgets, especially for performance campaigns. Meta is the next highest priority, after Google search. That said, sometimes Meta is top priority. If no one is searching for what your product is, if you've got to introduce the product to your audiences, if it's a need that people don't know they have, if it's a product category or a product type that no one knows exists, you first got to introduce it to them. And Meta is a great double whammy objective of brand and demand generation and also performance, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yep, definitely, and I mean your cost per clicks on Meta isn't too crazy either at this point, depending on sort of how niche your audience is that you're targeting. But we're finding a lot more with using ASC campaigns and Advantage Plus. You can go quite broad, and so that means that Meta will find the right audiences for you and your cost per clicks are quite cheap. But again, it's a very strong traffic source. When you're looking at ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website, using Meta's targeted demographic targeting and interest targeting all the different things that they have can help you get really good quality traffic to your website at a pretty low cost.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that first point you made is really important. Sometimes as marketers it can be counterintuitive to go more broad, but the traffic is offered at such a lower price that it makes sense to let Facebook and Instagram or let Meta find your audience at that lower price, rather than getting hyper-targeted from the beginning and paying a higher price for a lower audience reach. Yeah, we just find testing and learning from that. If we are getting a lower quality of traffic, you can obviously add those more tailored or targeted audiences later. But don't be shy about being more broad in your reach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, and I mean you let your creative hook your customers in right. So the people who are going to be clicking are the ones. Ideally, if you've got your creative is talking to the right people that you want to attract, that's going to come to your website and purchase. That's what's going to help you generate good quality traffic as well, making sure that your ads are speaking to the right people, to the right audience.
Speaker 1:Two tips I would just add. If you're using Meta, if you're going to use the channel, use video. It's going to get a much higher click-through rate than any other ad type.
Speaker 2:We just launched a campaign with just video and we've seen our CPCs and it's probably because of the time of year, like there's a lot of stuff going on that's inflating the cost with especially campaigns in the US, with the election going on and getting close to Black Friday, everyone's starting to ramp up their spend. But we launched a campaign. It was a conversion campaign, not a video view campaign, and our CPCs are higher than what we're seeing from using carousels and image campaigns.
Speaker 1:We use video to great success. We're always paired with a carousel ad to the same audience.
Speaker 1:So I kind of see it as those who have seen the video ad who then see the carousel ad. The carousel ad gets all that performance, but the video ad did the heavy lifting. So yeah, when I say, use video, go into the platform with video but test your other platforms but don't just run static image only. I think is where my takeaway is from that we get great success in that video reach campaigns, but we do see really good results in the conversion campaigns. But, yeah, we always have a carousel ad running with it and it's generally to clarify the offer and the reason for clicking through is on the carousel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that when you're thinking about the video view campaigns like at the moment, when we're talking about traffic, driving traffic to your website the video view campaigns are probably not going to drive as much traffic as the other types of campaigns will even your conversion focused campaigns but they are really, really important in building your audiences and increasing your overall conversions. So, whilst it's not going to be a traffic generator, it is really important to have there because that's what's going to have help when we talk about your conversion rate. This is where you're going to see a lot of positive performance from that TikTok. Yeah, fucking love TikTok.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great Even for organic views at the moment. It's really quite giving in terms of how much impression it's getting.
Speaker 2:So excited. Tiktok we just launched a campaign. We're ramping up early for Black Friday for a client and we've been running it on Meta and then we've just launched it on TikTok. We haven't even got the sale assets in there and we're already seeing a really positive return on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah right.
Speaker 2:The CPMs are so much lower and so your traffic is so much cheaper. So you're getting so much cheaper traffic. We're getting good quality traffic.
Speaker 1:We're getting good rowers And're running. Okay, that's good to hear. Our experience and it was as we develop the budget splits between meta and TikTok. We generally see great CPMs, great visibility for the budget, but the click-through rate to the site wasn't as high as the meta activity. But that's industry specific. It could be ad and creative specific. Industry specific. It could be art and creative specific. Um, so it is good to see that you're seeing that shift into it outperforming. Yeah, in some instances.
Speaker 2:I think the the balance, because the, as you're saying, the, the cpms are really low, ctrs are a bit lower, but it's still the cpms are that much lower that your cost per click is so much cheaper. So we're seeing, sort of say, a three to four dollar click on meta. We're seeing a dollar click on tiktok, so it. So we're seeing sort of say a $3 to $4 click on Meta. We're seeing a dollar click on TikTok. So it means we're still getting three times, three, four times the amount of traffic for our budget. And then our conversion rates are still sort of probably not as high as they were on Meta, but because of that lower cost per click we're just getting-.
Speaker 2:You've got three times as many clicks for the money. Exactly, it doesn't need to be as high. And then again that's fitting into our meta remarketing campaigns. Our Google remarketing campaigns are really, really strong traffic channel. If you're not currently on TikTok, 100% jump on there. It is a massive opportunity for any e-commerce businesses or any business in general really to be advertising on there, because the competition isn't as high as it is on the other channels yet still.
Speaker 1:And if you're thinking, it's still just a platform for teenagers get rid of that idea. Yeah, get rid of that idea. Everyone's using it for hours and hours and hours.
Speaker 2:Including yourself right Yep.
Speaker 1:I deleted it last week, but I've got it back again this week. All right, let's move on. So we've talked about social channels. Obviously there's LinkedIn in the social channels as well, but we're talking about e-commerce. E-commerce traffic LinkedIn would be more for B2B and lead generation in that sense. Yeah, for sure, it's also very expensive.
Speaker 2:It's definitely not a traffic channel.
Speaker 1:So, moving on, should we talk about affiliate and sort of you know, even all the way through to influencer codes and whatnot?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I think the affiliate marketing is an area that I'm not overly familiar with.
Speaker 1:I've seen affiliate options in the Amazon network where you can request video product reviews be made by people who have bought or have your product and then, if their review video has been watched by someone prior to purchase, they get a kickback.
Speaker 1:It's only $10 to $20 or a percentage of the value of the item, but that's basically what we're talking about is affiliate programs where you make it available for others to go and market your product and get a cut. There are different networks and platforms, like Amazon has its own inbuilt affiliate platform to help generate reviews and whatnot. This is something that are generally agreements made between our clients and those direct affiliates and even, all the way down in its simplest form, creating a discount code for influencers that our clients work with directly so that when that influencer posts about the product, they get a kickback for anyone who buys using that discount code. It's traffic generation, but with a conversion focus, and it is something that you can explore, set up and then leave run, but you have to give appropriate kickbacks. You're sort of making a decision on what is the amount per sale I'm willing to offer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that to wrap this up, is that there are obviously many different channels where you can generate more traffic for your website. You just need to be strategic about how you're going to spend your marketing budget, because unless you've got an unlimited marketing budget, you're not going to be able to capture all the traffic that is relevant for your website or for your product at a given time. So, being strategic about how you're going to approach your budget, split across the different channels, but making sure that you have a good mix as well and you're thinking about Google predominantly on the shopping and PMAC side of things, if you're an e-commerce store, looking at your meta campaigns and then also making sure you've got TikTok in the mix as well Between those three channels, you're going to be able to drive a lot of high quality traffic, typically for not a very high cost either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to round out the three areas of focus we talked about, there is also your own channels, your email activity. Good offers, timely offers, will drive traffic back to the site at the right time. Sms campaigns with an offer to your existing customer base with a link to go straight back to the website. But don't discount video and display activity. It will have that double objective of visibility and demand generation. But if bought at a cheap enough rate, you can generate a lot of traffic from the right Google Display Network or Display Campaign or Video Campaign as well. It's just not going to be at the same level as CircleMeta.
Speaker 2:It's going to fuck your conversion rate. Yeah, you buy a bunch of display traffic. Your conversion rate is going to plummet, yeah.
Speaker 1:You sort of have to give it a different conversion rate goal 100%, yeah. So those people will hopefully see the site. You'll get a lot of traffic, but it wouldn't drop into the immediate high-quality level that we're talking about here today. Yeah, they're the digital channels that we wanted to focus on more, the high-performance traffic levers we can pull in an e-commerce environment. Next week we're going to be talking about Average order value.
Speaker 2:Average order value, how you can increase how much people are spending every time they come to your website, and this is a fun one because it's very actionable. It's stuff that I mean. Today we talked about traffic channels. I mean, everyone knows you can go out there and buy traffic. What we're going to be talking about on the AOV side of things is going to be very much around different tactics that we've seen that have worked an immediate impact in terms of increasing their average order.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. If we spend some money on these traffic generation channels, we want to get the most out of that money?
Speaker 2:Yes, 100%. So when you think about it, you probably want to focus on your traffic last, focus on these next things first, because once you've got all these things set up and you're going to have your increased AOV, increased conversion rate, increased LTV, you can just keep dumping more traffic into your website and that's going to generate you far more revenue than what you're currently doing.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. That's Digital Horizons for this week. We'll catch you next week.