Your paid advertising success or failure does not exist in its own bubble. In order to have successful paid advertising your entire e-commerce journey has to be considered.
In this blog we are going to take you through how to locate the most common issues we see in e-commerce clients and how to solve them.
So, where to start?
Get Analytical
Best place to start is your analytics, in particular the Shopping Behaviour Report where you are able to see all site visits, product views, add to cart, initiate checkout, purchases (the whole shabang)!
This enables you to understand which products are more likely to generate a positive outcome based on initial touch points like add to cart. Crucially looking at this report also enables you to understand where the drop-off points are.
Is your add to cart rate below a reasonable benchmark? This would indicate that there is something on the product page is putting people off, is it pricing, guarantees, lack of reviews? Fixing that issue/issues will be critical to performance overall, if you can’t get people to add to cart then the likelihood of getting people to purchase is very low.
Regularly going through the purchasing process
Your agency should be regularly going through the purchasing journey to ensure that there are no blockers to performance (and that tracking is firing properly). Within this process your agency should be looking at the purchasing journey through your potential customer’s eyes, is there information missing, does there need to be more trust building etc?
So, you’ve found where the issue is? Now how to tackle it!
Merchandising your landing page
Are you organising the products advertised towards the top of the page?
If people are forced to crawl your website for the product advertised you can guarantee you’ve already lost sales. Take the work out of the buying process for your customer, organise advertised products towards the top!
Tip: Check your comments, people are quick to tell you if you haven’t mechanised the page properly, especially if it is a hot product.
Trust/Credibility
People are so much more savvy these days with spam websites and emails on the rise. You need to give your customers reassurance that it is safe to purchase from you, that their money is in good hands.
Reviews
Have a review strategy! Ensure you have a followup after each purchase asking for a review, that sounds like it came from a human being!
Tip: We work closely with TrustPilot who have incredible integration options and a really helpful team to guide you through the process.
Payment Options
With higher ticket items people want to pay in a way that they feel most protected. Like most credit cards, PayPal offers purchase protection.
Give your customers ease of payment with Apple Pay, Google Pay or Amazon Pay! Take away the additional step of running around your house trying to find your card because you’ve been paying with your phone for the past week (or is that just me)?
Social Proofing
Especially with higher ticket items you aren’t just selling that product, you are selling the business! People are more likely now to check your socials for reassurance that you are a trustworthy business.
Tip: While it’s important to have a decent amount of followers, it is more important to be regularly posting human content. If your Instagram or your Facebook page seem like they could have been updated by a robot, you are doing it wrong.
Tip: Why not share all your Instagram content directly with your Facebook page? That way you are building two platforms with one content schedule. Win win.
So take a step back from your ads, consider the wider context! The more we understand and experience as many steps in the e-commerce journey as possible the more likely we are to see success! If you’re running PPC ads, your landing pages
For more hints and tips on how to make your paid advertising work harder for you, subscribe to our Podcast. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube.
