How to customize your marketing with Google Ads

With Google Ads, the tailored experience you can offer users isn’t true personalization (since Google is protective of user data) – but just as important to target the right people at the right time. Knowing if someone’s visited your website 5 times the last month, if they’re typically using an iPhone, what items they keep adding to your cart, or what keywords they search for – all these aspects will be just as beneficial for marketers as knowing the user’s gender, specific age, ethnicity or other demographics.

Targeting less is targeting more in Google Ads

The most common mistake when using Google Ads with the attempt to customize it for your users is that you go too broad from the start. A funeral business paying for the keyword “dead” without thinking further, could be losing all their Ads budget to teenagers searching for “Is Justin Bieber dead?”. Sending your ads too broad is partly due to Google’s own algorithms – but it all comes down to understanding how keywords and searches works (and how to use negative search terms!).

Customization and personalization for the same ecommerce goal

When you know all the nooks and crannies of Google Ads and digital marketing strategy – doing less is actually doing more! Start by target more narrow than you usually would in a Google Ads campaign. Are you getting most of your traffic from mobile devices – just target these. If 90% of your customers are women, just target women. If your main customers are 24-29 years old, then direct your campaign only to this age group – exclude everyone else! If the biggest part of your bet shows results in only three cities, don’t set your campaign for the whole country.

Don’t waste your money targeting other ages, geographic area, genders or devices just because your company may have this target groups set in your overall digital marketing strategy.

Go for more narrow keywords

Along with targeting more narrow, you should go even deeper to get that quality of personalization with customizing Google Ads. Having 2-3 keywords that correlates well with your main keyword in the ad should take place both in your title and in the description. If sneakers from Nike is what you want to campaign around, don’t just go with “sneakers”, but be specific and go with the phrase “Nike Air Max Sneakers” instead. Your target group will on one hand be very limited and specific – but the bid for this certain keyword is probably cheaper. Working with single category keywords such as “shoes” is not as common in Google Ads – only about 5% of ecommerce businesses are large enough to find profit in this.

Define the different campaigns based on the intent of the user, if he or she is a new customer or a returning one, for example. In the shoe example, your Ads will perform better by being more defined. Try adding colour, size, brand name and product category (as well as some more budget!) – to get more spot on results.

Be aware of your different margins in your Google Ads campaigns

Your margins are probably one of the most important things to take into consideration when planning your Google Ads campaigns. If you have products with a wildly different margin, say 25% vs 75% – you should not have these in the same campaign. The granularity is important here, in terms of different margins, products and categories. If you have to cut down on budget for your Ads, you don’t want to mess up the products with the larger margins.

Get to know your ‘ecommerce economics’

If you’re selling clothes, you know how people continuously order the same item in different sizes and simply return the ones that doesn’t fit – making “intentional returns”. If you’re in electronics, on the other hand – the return rate is only around 5%. Return rates and shipping rates vary from company to company, and in turn decides how much you require in return from your Google Ads. Also consider what you must pay in lost sales and orders you cannot fulfil for some reason –  if the product wasn’t in stock, for example. Whenever someone clicks one of your ads in Google – you will be charged, even though the purchase is never completed or you have to send the customer their money back.

Based on these different factors, Keywordio has developed an algorithm called Ecommerce Economics that decides your ideal return of investment from your Google Ads. You should never base your sales on the things that doesn’t come through all the way! By answering questions about your margins, return and shipping costs, as well as the cost for any lost sales, the algorithm calculates your ideal ROI on each product.

There’s a lot of parameters to understand here, but when you do – it’s possible to control your Google Ads down to your most profitable keywords. With the Ecommerce Economics tool it’s even easier!