Paid advertising is a marketing strategy most eCommerce businesses employ, even at stages where the website is receiving enough organic traffic from search and social media. PPC simply provides too many benefits for the price you pay.
That’s why all eCommerce business owners need to learn how to optimize their paid campaigns to maximize return on ad spend. Keyword research for PPC is the first thing you need to learn, as choosing the right keyword for the page you promote is arguably more crucial than optimizing for conversion afterward.
This guide will explain what PPC is in eCommerce and the basic concepts of keyword research, as well as help you build a PPC keyword strategy.
What is the PPC Keyword Strategy For eCommerce
PPC in eCommerce is pay-per-click advertising, mostly on platforms like Google. In PPC advertising on Google, you have to master a lot of things, including conversion rate optimization and the bidding strategy. But it all starts with choosing the right keywords for your paid ad campaign.
PPC keyword strategy is your approach to choosing those keywords. Depending on your campaign goals, you might want to choose keywords that have more or less traffic potential and that focus on broad or very specific product descriptions.
This strategy ensures the choice of keywords for the campaign aligns with major campaign goals. That’s why PPC keyword research for eCommerce campaigns is so important.
The Importance of Choosing the Right Keywords in PPC Campaigns
In social media campaigns, it’s the audience you want to choose carefully. In paid search campaigns, the choice of keywords that you target is probably the most crucial element. With 58.4% of online users making at least one purchase weekly, this decision can significantly impact the success of your campaign.
The choice of keywords for your campaign determines the bidding price. You have to choose whether you want to deal with keywords with large search volumes that are typically competitive and pricey to bid on or ones with lower traffic that are cheaper to compete in.
This choice also determines how broad or niche your campaign will be. Whether you want to focus on building brand recognition by appearing on as many high-traffic keywords as possible or making sales on a hyperspecific set of keywords, researching them is the first step.
PPC keyword research helps with figuring out the messaging of your paid campaign. Researching the keywords you use and the search intent behind them lets you understand who the people looking for them are and what they want to find.
This helps you create a message that will resonate with them, meet them at their stage on the purchase funnel, and ultimately improve ROAS.
Types of Keywords to Target for eCommerce PPC
There are four major types of keywords:
- Informational. These types of keywords are requests for information like “how to style shoes with the belt”. Typically, people who google these aren’t in the market for those products.
- Commercial. These keywords are used by people looking for specific product information before purchase, like “best types of shoes to buy.” They’re further down the sales funnel but might not be ready for a purchase yet.
- Navigational. These keywords are intended to find a specific website or page. Your site should rank first for keywords, including your brand unless it’s a common word.
- Transactional. These are the keywords you’ll focus on in PPC campaigns. Transactional keywords are meant to find a product and buy it, like “buy shoes online”.
You should cover all of the keyword types in search engine optimization (SEO), but in PPC, you’ll focus on the transactional ones. There are a few subtypes that you should keep in mind.
- Broad transactional keywords. Keywords like “buy shoes” that best match a category page on your website. They have the potential to bring in a lot of traffic but might be costly to bid on and may have a lower conversion rate.
- Branded keywords. These keywords narrow down the search to a brand like “buy Adidas shoes”. It’s important to work on your negative keyword list here, as some of the searches will be navigational ones trying to reach the brand website.
- Product-Specific Keywords. These keywords are narrower searches like “buy Adidas Originals Stan Smith”. They’ll probably bring in a bit less traffic, but those would be the people looking specifically for the product you carry.
- Long-tail keywords. Other than specifying the exact product a user wants to find, they might specify its attributes. An example of that would be “buy red Adidas sneakers size 8”.
- Competitor keywords. These keywords, often formatted as “alternative to brand,” are meant to attract people looking for alternatives to your competing eCommerce stores.
Conducting Effective Keyword Research for eCommerce PPC
Now, how do you find all those keywords that will become the backbone of a successful PPC campaign? You need to have a few PPC keyword research tools under your belt.
The one that you’re going to use is Google Keyword Planner. It’s Google’s free tool specifically for discovering and evaluating keywords. You might also invest in an SEO tool like Keyword Suggestion Tool by SE Ranking. It’s great for finding long-tail keywords and historical traffic trends.
To start keyword research, come up with a list of seed keywords — words you suspect people will use to find your products. Run this list through your software and find hundreds of similar keywords.
Filter the list for high-intent keywords first. Those keywords show the user is likely to convert — words like buy, discount, or free shipping. Then, gather the other types of keywords.
Specialized PPC tools can help you analyze keywords your competitors place ads on. You can identify the areas you’ve missed and capitalize on them.
After you start the campaign, monitor PPC performance data to refine the choice of keywords further. Check out Lebesgue keyword research tools for this. Lebesgue can integrate with your eCommerce campaign metrics, suggest keywords you might want to remove to improve return on investment (ROI), and make other suggestions tailored to your business.
Organizing Keywords into Campaigns and Ad Groups
After the initial research, you’ll have a long list of keywords. You’ll have to categorize them into groups. This helps create PPC campaigns that can be highly relevant to the pages you promote and increase both the Quality Score and the conversion rate.
Think of this like creating category and subcategory pages on your eCommerce website. You start with a high-level category like shoes, and all keywords related to that word are included in the group.
Then you go lower in the hierarchy to subcategories like men’s shoes, red shoes, or size 8 shoes. These keywords can be represented by a category page with a filter. At the bottom of your hierarchy are specific product names or products with adjectives like “blue size 10 loafers”.
Some pages may fit more than one keyword. If you are selling blue loafers, the keyword group may include words like:
- Blue dress shoes.
- Blue slip-on classic shoes.
- Loafers.
- Blue loafers.
- Blue leather shoes.
Another aspect of PPC keyword research you should pay attention to is finding negative keywords. Those are the keywords that you don’t want to appear for an ad group because they’re not relevant. For instance, you may exclude the keyword “men’s” from a narrow ad group that focuses on women’s loafers specifically.
Make sure to include all close variants because Google doesn’t detect them automatically. In this case, you’ll have to exclude words like:
- Men.
- Men’s.
- For men.
Optimizing PPC Ads with Keywords for Maximum CTR and CR
Now, with all keywords sorted into groups, you’ll have to optimize your ads to perform well in click-through rate and conversion rates. Start with crafting a compelling ad copy. Text ads don’t have a lot of space to show a message; you mostly get to work with the title and description. The title is capped at 30 characters and the description at 90.
This means you have a very short bit of text to capture user attention. Write a lot of options for this and focus on the product the users are looking for. In many cases, simply stating what the product is would be enough to convince the user to click if it matches their expectations.
You can also include ad extensions like callouts — short descriptions of your business under the ad copy.
You can also display site links — this way, you provide more information to the user and expand your listing visually, taking up more space and being easier to spot.
Include keywords in these extensions if it seems organic to do so, and write them with click-through optimization in mind.
Lastly, make sure the page you advertise matches the keyword group you use in the ads. Include keywords on that page and double-check if the ad copy is correct about the product you sell. This will improve both the Quality Score and conversion rate.
Testing and Refining Keyword Strategies for eCommerce PPC
PPC for eCommerce sites doesn’t stop at using tools to discover and group keywords together. Before you run the ads and see performance metrics, those are just educated guesses on how relevant these keywords are.
To understand and refine your keyword list, run split tests on your keyword groups and ad copies and record the data on click-through rate and conversion rate. Try running tests to see whether a more narrow keyword group would perform better than a broad one, or try different ad copies with the same group.
Keep experimenting with your keyword groupings and ad copy, analyze the results, and stick to the options that perform best. Also, look at the keywords from the group that bring in the least profit. You should exclude them from the list.
If you’re only starting an ad campaign, spending a bit more at the beginning might be a good idea just to receive more data to analyze. Once you find the combination of keywords and ad copy that works great for you, reduce the ad spend.
Common Pitfalls in eCommerce PPC Keyword Research (and How to Avoid Them)
You should analyze the performance of your campaign and learn what works best for your industry and your business. But there are a few common mistakes you can avoid without having to spend time and money learning.
The most obvious one is overlooking long-tail keywords and focusing on high-cost, high-traffic ones. You have a chance of receiving more traffic from them. However, with broad keywords like “buy shoes,” you’ll pay a lot per click, and your conversion rates might be much lower than with longer keywords.
If you’re on a tight budget, it may be better to promote specific items with high margins and make sure the traffic that comes to your site is interested in these items.
Another major mistake is ignoring researching negative keywords and monitoring the performance data for keywords that should be added. Not having a well-curated list of negative keywords will result in your ads being shown for unrelated terms and ad spending.
Finally, don’t ignore seasonal or trend-based keywords. If you have seasonal sales, you might jump on the bandwagon and place ads using keywords like “shoes new year sale” to capitalize on the increase in demand.
Case Study: Effective eCommerce Keyword Research in Action
It’s best to learn from other people’s successes when it comes to PPC keyword research. Here are two case studies by Scandiweb that illustrate important points in PPC advertising strategy.
Next Mattress
In the case study involving Next Mattress, a manufacturer and seller of mattresses, the main strategy this agency used was scaling down to improve return on ad spend. Instead of betting on improving brand awareness through increasing traffic numbers, they introduced margin tracking.
Once they’ve figured out which products have better margins, they focused all campaign efforts on promoting them instead of running a broad campaign. The team also monitored performance and stopped underperforming campaigns.
This helped to allocate ad spending to campaigns that provide the best ROI. This helped Next Mattress improve ROAS by 30% month-over-month while cutting ad spending by 16%.
This strategy is highly relevant for rarely bought products like mattresses, but can still work for other products.
Hairy Baby
This case study is for a clothing brand with a unique brand voice that incorporates local sayings, humor, and pop culture references. The agency team decided to go with the strategy of being hyper-relevant to the end user.
They watched a few seasons of local popular series to create ad copy that would resonate with the target audience. With a bit of competitor keyword research to find missing opportunities, they have achieved an improvement of 50% in ROAS and 38% in conversion rate.
Summing Up
Paid advertising is a profitable strategy if you can optimize it for your goals and needs. The journey to optimization starts with PPC keyword research. The choice of keywords that are relevant to the pages you want to promote is crucial for running an effective ad campaign.
Do your research with keyword tools, group them, find negative keywords, and run the campaign. When the campaign is active, monitor how it performs and run experiments to figure out what formula would work best in your case.
Kateryna Boiko is a content manager with 6+ years of hands-on experience. As a part of SE Ranking’s marketing team, she works on writing and proofreading blog articles about SEO for different niches, including eCommerce.
When not working on content creation, Kateryna spends her spare time reading a book or investigating interesting marketing trends.
