So, you’ve got an AdWords campaign for your online store up and running. Good for you! If you’re anything like me, you’ll be checking in on the data frequently to see what’s happening to your hard earned marketing dollars.

Here are a few tips to help you get the best value out of your campaigns.

Bring important data together

Start off by getting as much performance information as possible.

> Connect your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts
By connecting these powerful tools, you can get a more complete picture of your online performance. Follow the steps on this Google help page to link the accounts.

> Add extra columns to your AdWords Keywords report
The ‘bid’, or price you’re willing to pay for a click, is a key element in determining your ad’s position. But it can be hard to know an appropriate amount. By adding the estimated first page and top page bid columns to your Keywords report, you can tell if your bid is enough for a good position.

On the Keywords report, click the Columns tab > Customize columns > Attributes, and add ‘Est. first page bid’ and ‘Est. top page bid’. These columns will then show in your Keywords report.

> Set up conversion tracking
Conversion tracking reveals which keywords and campaigns are bringing in business. It’s important for optimising your return on investment as it will show where your budget is likely to be more profitable.

Google have a comprehensive guide to help you set up conversion tracking.

Understand Quality Score and why it’s important

Google uses a calculation called Quality Score to help decide when and where your ads show up in search results. It’s based on the quality (relevance) of your ads, keywords and landing page (where you send the visitor when they click each ad).

Quality Score is ranked 1 to 10. The higher the Quality Score, the more likely the ad will get a higher position in the search results and a lower CPC. You should aim to get the highest Quality Score you can by tweaking and improving your ads, keywords and landing pages.

Improve your keyword performance

1. Make sure your keyword bids are competitive. The new columns ‘Est. first page bid’ and ‘Est. top page bid’ you’ve added will show the estimated cost of a good ad position. If your bid is way below the amount needed, you can adjust it.

2. Remove any underperforming keywords (leaving them in will reduce your campaign performance).

• If a keyword hasn’t triggered any ad impressions after a couple of weeks, and its Quality Score and bid are OK, think about removing it. There may not be enough people searching on that term.

• If a keyword hasn’t produced any click throughs after a month, pause or remove it.

• If a keyword is getting clicks but these are not converting, think about lowering the bid as it’s eating away at your budget. If you’re not seeing a positive return on investment (sales) after around 200 clicks, it’s time to consider removing the keyword.

• If you see a keyword that’s converting well, you could add more budget to it to get more impressions.

Repeat keyword housekeeping regularly to keep your campaigns in top shape!

3. Use keyword matching to increase ad relevance

I’ve written about the importance of relevance in the search world many times. Keyword matching is an easy way to increase relevance by ‘tagging’ your keywords for broad, phrase, exact and negative match varieties.

Broad match is the default and has no specific tags around the keyword. Broad match means your ad can be triggered if the search term contains your keywords in any order, including additional words. For example, if your keyword is gold jewellery your ad may show for the search term buy gold men’s jewellery Sydney.

Using phrase match (putting your keyword in speech marks – “xxx”) means your ad only shows if your keywords appear together in the right order in a search query. For example, your keyword “gold jewellery” only triggers your ad for a search like men’s gold jewellery, but not gold and diamond jewellery.

Exact match (putting your keyword in square brackets – [xxx]) is the most precise tagging. Using it means your ads only appear when someone searches for your exact keyword as it stands, without any other words in the search. For example, your keyword [gold jewellery] only triggers your ad for the search gold jewellery.

The other important match type for any AdWords campaign is negative match (putting a minus sign ‘–‘ in front of a keyword). This means your ad won’t show if a search term contains the negative keyword. It’s a useful way to prevent paying for irrelevant clicks.

Using keyword matching will affect number of times your ad shows for that keyword. Exact match keywords will trigger ads less times than broad match but the query is likely to be more relevant for you. If you’re getting too many irrelevant queries on your broad match keywords, you can change the match type and tighten it up.

4. Check which search terms are triggering your ads. To find out the actual search terms used by the people clicking on your ads, go to ‘Keywords > Details > SEARCH TERMS > All’. If you’re getting clicks from searches that don’t apply to your business, make them negative keywords.

Improve your ad performance

Make sure your ads are as enticing as possible with these tips: 

1. Use the keyword you’re targeting in the ad headline. You can do this automatically with dynamic keyword insertion.

Dynamic keyword insertion

This nifty little piece of code will insert the keyword that triggered the ad into your ad text. It can make your ads more relevant to the search and can improve the click through rate.

You can add the code anywhere in your ad – the headline, descriptions, URLs – as many times as you want, but be careful not to overdo it. Your ad still needs to make sense or you could turn people away!

When you use dynamic keyword insertion, check that all of the keywords in your ad group make sense where you’re going to display them in the ad, and the landing page is still relevant to those variations. This is especially important in ecommerce sites where your ad may point to a very specific product page.

The code you’ll need is: {keyword:default text} 

Replace ‘default text’ with words you’d like to appear when a keyword can’t be dynamically inserted. Make sure your keywords are short enough to keep your ad within the character limits. If not, the ad’s default text will be used instead.

Try one keyword insertion ad in each ad group, and set the default text that’s relevant to the theme.

2. Use Title Case Capitalisation (Used in this Sentence) Throughout your Headline and Body Copy to Help your Ad Stand Out.

3. Use a call to action like “Find out how” or “Get in touch” in your ad copy to make it obvious what you want the reader to do next.

4. Try including a couple of key selling points like prices, discounts, product names or free shipping.

5. Add ad extensions. It doesn’t cost anything to add extra information to your ad in the form of ad extensions, and it helps you stand out. As an online store owner, product extensions can be helpful. Find out more on the Google AdWords support site.

6. Create a display URL (web page address) that’s short, simple and contains your keyword. You can make the display url that shows in your ad different to the actual page url, as long as they’re both on the same domain. For example you could make the display url for the landing page “www.mystore.com.au/collections/gold-jewellery/products/wedding-rings” into “www.mystore.com.au/wedding-rings”. Google will show up to 35 characters in the ad.

7. Create three or four different ads for each ad group to see which messages and calls to action get the best results.

When you want to make changes to an ad, create a new ad rather than edit the exiting one, as you’ll loose the old ad’s data. Just pause the ones you’re replacing.

Improve your landing page

If you’re getting clicks on your ads, but a high bounce rate on your landing page and little or no conversions, your visitors might not be seeing what they expected when they clicked through.

Make sure there’s a logical connection between the wording in your ads and the landing page. Match the messages and copy and repeat any offers you mention in the ad on the landing page. The best way to make this obvious is to use the same wording in the landing page headlines and subheadings.

I hope that helps! It may look a bit daunting, but once you’ve used AdWords a few times, it’ll become second nature. Remember that your AdWords performance will need monitoring and optimising regularly.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to get traffic to your online store is through paid ads on search engines like Google. It’s great for bringing people to your site when you first launch.

But wait, I hear you say, why pay when I can get listed in search engine results for free?

OK. Here’s a quick recap on the difference between the two types of search engine results listings.

Organic (free) listing

Appearing for free in search engine results is known as an organic listing. You can’t buy the placement – it’s made by the search engine based on its assessment of the content on your web page and its relevance to the search term. It looks at about 200 factors to help it make that decision.

Paid listing

Paying for a listing in search engine results is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

These ad listings show up in the top positions on the first page of search results, and in a column down the right hand side. They look very similar to other listings, but they’re labelled ‘ads’ or ’sponsored links’. And if you look closely, you’ll see they read a little differently. AdWords is Google’s paid advertising program.

It doesn’t cost anything for your ad to show, but you’ll be charged a small amount when your ad is clicked on. The charge varies depending on the relevance of your ad and web page to the search term, and how much you’ve offered to pay for that click.

Why would you pay?

Well, put simply, it can be hard to get in the top search results otherwise.

The algorithms that calculate the position a web page is given in the free search results are highly complex. Trying to get a high ranking can take a lot of time, effort and specialist knowledge and you’ll be competing with countless other businesses trying to do the same.

And when the algorithms are updated (which happens a lot), you can find your page rankings change overnight.

Google AdWords gives your web page a much better chance to appear on the first page results for your chosen keywords, and you can do it really quickly.

Ready to give it a go? Here’s how to get started

Don’t be tempted to rush in to creating your ads before you’ve done steps 1 and 2. They’re crucial!

1. Get into your customers heads

Before you create your first campaign, write down everything you know about your customers. It’ll help you create better campaigns if you’re seeing your offerings from their perspective.

Who are they? What would they type into the Google search box to if they were looking for products like yours? Where do they live?

2. Draw up a list of keywords related to your business and products

Make a list of the search terms you’d expect your customers to use to find your products. These are your keywords.

Don’t be too general in your choice. A one-word term is usually expensive for a click because it’s so generic and popular, and you can end up paying for traffic that’s looking for something you may not stock.

Aim for keywords of two or three words, and include brand names, colours, and your location. A jewellery store keyword list might include high-level keywords like “gold jewellery”, as well as more specific categories like “gold and diamond wedding rings”. As a rule, the more specific the keywords, the closer the visitor is likely to be to buying as they’ve already narrowed down their choices.

Your web analytics software might give you some insights into the terms people are already using to find your web pages. This is not as easy as it was though, as the most common web analytics tool, Google Analytics, has stopped sharing that information. Grrr.

3. Set up your AdWords account

Now you’ve done your homework, head over to https://adwords.google.com and follow the instructions to set up your AdWords account.

If you’ve already got a Google account (like Gmail), you can use that email address and password to sign in. You can also create a separate account if you’d prefer to keep your business and personal activities separate.

4. Set up your first AdWords campaign

Once you’ve signed up and verified your email, you’ll be taken to the “Your first campaign” page.

It’s important to know your goal for the campaign before you start so you can tell if it’s effective. Generating sales is probably the main goal for an online store, but you can use AdWords to bring in just leads or traffic too.

Each AdWords campaign has its own settings that let you define the budget and where want your ads to appear. These settings will apply to all ads within the same campaign.

It’s very easy to set up a campaign – just fill in the fields displayed:

Your budget – this is the most you’re willing to pay per day for traffic to the ads in this campaign. You can change it at any time if you find you’re not getting the results you want.

Locations – these are the geographical places where you want your ads to display.

Networks – these are the online networks where you want your ads to show; Search Network is the default but you can also choose Display Network to have your ad show on Google partner websites too.

Keywords – This is where you list the keywords you want to use to bring traffic to your ads. This field will be pre-filled with suggestions and their approximate search volumes but you can delete the ones you don’t want and add your own. Don’t go mad here, use around 10-20 keywords per campaign to keep it manageable.

Bid – this is the most you want to pay for a click on your ad. You can set your bids for a click manually, or let AdWords do it. When you’re starting out, it may be easier to let AdWords do it for you. If you choose the manual option, enter a default bid as well. This will be the most you want to pay for a click.

Write your ad – this is where you put together your AdWords text ad. There are other types of ad you can make but this is the easiest and most popular.

• Landing page: this is the actual web page the visitor will land on when they click the ad.
• Headline: 25 character limit. The headline should be highly relevant to the search query you’re expecting for this ad.
• Line 1: 35 character limit. Mention your unique value or problem you solve here.
• Line 2: 35 characters. Continue, and add a call to action here to encourage a click.

Here’s an example of one of our Spiffy Stores text ads.

A word about: relevance

Relevance is the currency of search. It’s the most important aspect of your ads. Clear, persuasive ad text, that’s highly relevant to your keywords and the content of the page it leads to, will get better results. And as AdWords uses both quality (relevance) and bid ($) to determine your ad’s position, you can get a higher position, sometimes at a lower price, with highly relevant keywords and ads.

5. Complete your payment details

As this is your first AdWords campaign, you’ll need to fill out your payment information. Then, once your ad is approved (yes, it has to go through Google’s approval scheme), it will be active. You can ‘deactivate’ it by pausing the ad and it won’t show up in search results.

6. Keep an eye on your AdWords results

AdWords is not a set and forget exercise.

To get the most out of it and not waste money, you’ll need to keep coming back to analyse the results and make any changes that will improve your ads performance. More on how to do that later.

In the second post in this series, we’ll look into some of the ways you can optimise your ad. Stay tuned!

I know what you’re thinking… “Oh no, not another social network!” But if you want to improve your online store’s search rankings and be seen by more people, hear me out.

Whether you are a fan of social media or not, social networks and the endless chatter they support are increasingly important to the growth of your business.

Word of mouth has always been the most effective form of advertising. People tend to buy from those they like and trust and social media is a great way to build a relationship with your prospective customers.

Not only that, but Google, the king of all search engines, has recently focused on social signals in its search algorithms. This means the more people are talking about you and sharing your content, the better your search ranking is likely to be. Shares, likes, comments or +1s of your posts act like recommendations and boost SEO.

Google+ has chalked up more than 400 million users and is now one of the top six social networks in the world. It’s fast becoming recognised as the place to connect with like-minded businesses and people you may not already know (you’re not meant to connect with people you don’t already know on LinkedIn).

More importantly, Google+ is owned by the world’s most popular search engine. Let me say that once more for effect. Google+ is owned by the world’s most popular search engine. Posts, articles, pictures and links on a Google+ page are favoured in Google’s organic search results and status updates are indexed immediately, meaning they will show up in relevant searches right away.

By keeping your Google+ page up to date and interacting through it, you have more chances of being found online. Do you like the sound of that?!

If you’re keen to put your business on Google+, you’ll first need your own Google+ page. If you don’t have one already, set up an account here.

Before you create your business page, have the following to hand: a catchy tag line, a concise introduction that includes links to your website, your logo at 250 x 250 pixels in size, a hi resolution photo that represents your business and URLS of your other social media accounts.

Once you’re set up, search for people and companies to add to your ‘circles’. Look for those who would have something in common with your line of business.

Above all, post regular content, share your ideas, photos and video, and most of all, share other people’s stuff. Think wider than just your niche – build a personality for your brand and have fun!

Click here for the official step-by-step guide to setting up a business page on Google+.

Like most people setting up an online store, you probably know you should be optimising for search engines to get more qualified traffic. The trouble is, you may not know where or how to start.

Never fear! we’ve put together this two-part blog post to get you up to speed in no time.

Let’s kick off with a quick refresher on why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so important.

SEO is not paid search marketing such as Google AdWords. We will look at that in a separate post. SEO is a bunch of techniques that you can apply to your web presence to help you get into Google search results without paying for advertising. It’s commonly called ‘organic’ search.

Search engines send out ‘robots’ to find your web content and index it so they can refer to it quickly during search queries. Once your content is indexed, the search engine can then list it in the organic search results for the relevant search query. The whole process is very complex and highly automated – it relies 100% on the information the robots can find.

Therefore the ‘trick’ to good SEO is for your content to be easy for the robots to find and highly relevant to the keywords your target audience will use to search.

Luckily for you, your Spiffy Store is already brilliantly formatted and coded to be search engine friendly, but you will still need to use your keywords in the right places, create interesting content, embrace social media and build links to your site to improve your search engine ranking.

We’ve broken four basic SEO principles down into manageable techniques that you can do yourself. In this post we will cover using keywords correctly and creating quality content. Using all four elements will make a real difference to your search engine rankings, pushing your pages further up the results listing towards that coveted first page position.

Use your keywords in the right places.

If you’ve read the last blog post, you’ll know how important keywords are and how to choose the right ones for your online store. Now here’s how to put them to work on your site.

You will have different keywords for different pages of your site. For ecommerce stores, it’s usually the product name. Spiffy Stores will automatically use the product title or collection title you enter in the url and the product page’s title meta tag, but you should also repeat it 2-3 times in the page copy (especially in the first paragraph and last sentence of the page). Ideally, use variations of the keyword term to keep a natural flow for reading.

Keywords should also be used in the file name of an image on a page and its ‘alt’ tag text (the text that will display if the image doesn’t download). Again, clever Spiffy Stores will do this for your product images from the product titles you input, but you can also edit the alt tags of any product images after they’ve been uploaded.  You should also add relevant alt tags to pictures you use on other pages like your blog posts.

Meta tags of your product pages are also automatically added for you, but you can override this and add your own custom keywords and text to the title, keyword and description meta tags (the description meta tag is sometimes the snippet of text people will see on Google search results) of all of the pages on your store. You can edit the meta description of any page, product, or collection by clicking the “Edit Search Engine Data” link when editing your content. If you do write your own meta description, keep the copy under 160 characters as anything longer than this will not show up in search engine results and vital information may be lost.

And lastly, use keywords in the text of links coming into that page.

Create quality content. Lots of it. Regularly.

Google has placed much emphasis on fresh and frequent content in its search algorithms, so be prepared to keep generating new content if you want to be found online.

Make use of the blog built into your Spiffy Store and update it every week with a new article. Stuck for ideas? You could write about a new product, a popular trend, company news or respond to a frequently asked customer question. Don’t forget to add an image too, like we have done here.

Try to put out a press release about once a month. You might have hit a new sales record, launched a new product, hired some cool people or perhaps you are attending a local event. All of this can be used in a press release that you can easily distribute through online services like www.prweb.com or www.newsmaker.com.au  If you’re new to online PR, stay tuned for our upcoming blog post on how to create a professional press release, coming soon.

You could also write an information page that your customers would find useful. For example, if you sell fine china, you might like to explain how best to look after fine china.

In general, aim for your articles to be 300 – 500 words in length and remember to use your keywords when writing as we’ve described.

And whatever you do, don’t duplicate substantial amounts of copy from other places on the web – including your own site! Google will penalise you for it, and the ranking of your site will likely suffer as a result.

I think that’s a good place to pause and let you catch your breath! Our next post will look at two other techniques – social media and linking – to help drive traffic to your fabulous online store.

Related articles

• Tips for online retailers: How to choose the right keywords for your online store
• 25 Tips for improving conversion rates in your online store
• Marketing your new online store

“Keywords” are the words and phrases people type into search engines to find the content they’re looking for. As this is how most people will arrive at your online store, you need to spend time choosing the ones that will get you the most relevant traffic. Then you need to use them on your website.

You may have a good idea of the phrases people use when looking for your products or services on the Internet, but it’s important to use some proper research to back up your hunches. And anyway, you can uncover some fresh ideas.

Here’s how to get started…

Take a moment to be your own potential customer.

Begin by making a list of the words and phrases that you would use to search for your products online. If you sell notebooks, good keywords might be “buy lined notebooks online”, “designer journals”, or even “stationery gifts”. The more specific and detailed your keyword terms are, especially if they include “buy”, the closer they are to the decision to purchase, so it’s a good idea to get into the results for this type of query.

Ask around to get other people’s input. Don’t just approach it from one perspective (yours), ask friends, colleagues or current customers what they would search for to find your products. You might be surprised at some of the answers!

If you use Google Analytics, check the traffic reports for your retail site to see which keywords were used to arrive at your web pages. Due to changes in the kind of information Google will show you over the last year of two, you can only see search queries if you have an AdWords account running.

Check out your competitors’ websites to discover what keywords they are using. There are a couple of ways to do this.

In Google, type your keyword phrase in “quotes” followed by site: and the website you want to search, eg: “designer journals” site:www.thecitynotebookstore.com. You will get a list of the pages where those words appear. Interesting, huh!

You can also find keyword clues in the source code of your competitors’ store. Access the source code by right-clicking on their web page and choosing “view page source”. Don’t worry you can’t break anything like this. If you look at the top section of source code for “meta” data, you may see the keywords and description tags containing the keywords they are targeting on that page.

Once you have done all the above, you should have a good list that contains overall keywords for your online store, and ones specific to certain products and pages of your site.

Now head over to Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner for some search insights (you’ll need to sign up for an AdWords account to get into it). This is a good way to help you narrow down the right keywords for your business. Plug in your keyword ideas or your website details, and it will give you an estimate of the volume of traffic you’d get for each term and offer you alternative keyword choices.

Pick keyword phrases instead of just one keyword as there will be less competition for them and there will be more relevance to your content. The best keyword combinations are those with high traffic but low competition.

Now you’re almost finished!

Use the insights you get from your keyword research to finalise the list of keyword terms for your online business. Don’t go mad – one or two per web page is enough.

These should then be applied to your website copy, page titles, product descriptions, product tags and image file names as relevant.

My next post will look at how you apply these keywords to encourage more traffic from search results to your Spiffy Store plus a bunch of other search engine friendly tricks!

Related articles

• 25 Tips for improving conversion rates in your online store
• Marketing your new online store
• 5 vital SEO tips

Google recently announced a new e-commerce certification program called “Trusted Stores”, where stores that go through an approval process with Google will be allowed to add a “Google Trusted Store” badge to their online store.

Google intends for the trusted store badge to give consumers a boost of confidence when shopping online, and it comes with a $1,000 guarantee to cover the purchase… which should really help to increase sales in your online store when the program is up and running.

The way it works is when a visitor to your online store hovers their mouse over the trusted stores badge, a live “report card” type tooltip will pop up. Easy to understand grades like A+, A, B and C are awarded for quality of service features like customer service and fast or reliable shipping.

Right now it’s just a pilot program with a limited number of retailers, but all Spiffy Stores owners can apply to participate by filling out this form. There’s no guarantee that Google will accept your application… as it’s currently only in Beta, and you’ll need a great history of reliable shipping and great customer service for them to even consider your application.

Learn more by watching Google’s overview video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube.

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new Spiffy Stores theme!.  The Seattle Theme for Spiffy Stores includes a host of features including unlimited colour schemes, Facebook comments, wish lists, social media integration including Google +1, customisable slideshows and 9 different font options.  Read on to find out more about this theme.

Unlimited colour schemes.

Easily choose one of the 6 built-in colour schemes in the Theme editor section of your toolbox… or make your own colour scheme by choosing colours for your titles, background, menus, footer, buttons… just about everything!

9 title fonts.

You have a choice of nine different fonts for your store’s titles and/or menus.  Hopefully you’ll find one that works with the look you’re trying to get for your store.  If not, we can easily add a new font to your store for a small fee.  Our technique for achieving native font display in browsers is tried and proven, and works on most modern browsers.

Upload your own logo.

Easily upload your own logo to your store.  It’s re-sized automatically for you.

Display a slideshow on your home page.

Your store home page can display a slideshow of up to 5 images.  You can choose how many to display, upload your own images, and select the transition you want the slideshow animation to display… as well has how fast you want your slideshow to run.

Social media integration.

Facebook “like” buttons and Facebook comments, Twitter “tweet” buttons, links to your Facebook and Twitter pages, link to your newsletter service provider (such as MailChimp), and even a new customer wshlist function (currently in Beta testing)…. they’re all included, and all configurable in your Theme Editor without you having to edit a line of code.

Plus more features!

You can easily edit your colour scheme, and choose the menus to display in your store with a few clicks!  There are so many options in this theme that it’s difficult to list them without going on forever.  For more information about this theme, head over to our Knowledge base and view the Seattle theme guide.

To preview the Seattle theme, head over to the theme’s demo store at http://seattle.spiffystores.com

Here’s a quick update.

We’ve added a small improvement to our Theme support by defining a new header variable which can be used in the Theme.liquid file as part of the section.

Rather than hand-coding author, copyright, description and keywords meta tags, you can just code

[ruby]
{{ header.author }}
{{ header.copyright }}
{{ header.description }}
{{ header.keywords }}
[/ruby]

These variables will automatically generate the appropriate meta tags for your page’s content.

The advantage of these automatically generated tags is that they structure the description information in a way that makes it easy for the search engines to extract the relevant information about your product or page and this will appear as the snippet in the search results.

For details have a look at our Knowledge Base documentation

Liquid Template Variables – header