Hello friends I have started a new ecommerce website. I know some SEO but it is not enough to rank well for some good keywords. Also 3-4 months of time is required for organic ranking. My friends suggests me to use PPC for fast results. As my budget is low so which is the best way to get traffic. I can continue investing some money in PPC if there is enough sale.
SEO vs PPC Which Is Best For E-commerce Website?
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alexcopeland
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For ecommerce SEO can really make a difference so I wouldn't give up on it completely if you can help it but I understand how you may need instant results, in which case trying out PPC could make sense.
You need to be careful though as it can really get away from you if you're not too sure what you are doing...
I have mentioned £100 budget below and I know that is a lot and probably not where you are able to enter at... that's fine... the lower the bid amounts the less this needs to be, I have started campaigns with a £5/day budget before and just put back in what it makes until it gets up to the higher amounts... you don't need to start big to make it big... just keep reinvesting and tweaking when it isn't working...
Anyway, for a basic idea on how to set up your PPC work out how much profit you make on an item and how much you are willing to give up of that profit to make the sale. So for this example I am willing to give up 33% of my profit to make a sale.
To work out the bid you need to do a bit of math... and have an idea of how well you think this will sell...
Let's say the profit you make for each item is £15 on a sale. We have decided we are willing to give up £5 (that's the 33%) of this on each sale to spend on PPC.
Now let's say that you think you will sell to 10% of the people going through your PPC advert - so 1 sale in every 10 visits.
The £5 we are willing to spend for a sale divided by 10 is 50 pence so you would set your bid to 50 pence maximum and hope to sell an item within 10 clicks (£5 total)
Now set your total budget to an amount you can afford to lose, this way if nothing sells you won't be worrying about how to pay your rent this month, and then leave it to run for a while, ideally for a minimum of about 50-100 clicks (but this will depend on your bid/budget) and see if anything happens.
If the above scenario went perfectly the following would happen:
Max bid: 50 pence
Budget: £100
Clicks available if spend all budget at max bid amount: 200 clicks
If we sell to 10% of the people then that means out of the 200 clicks we can afford 20 will buy.
We are making a total of £15 per sale so we will make 20 x £15 = £300
Sales are £300 minus the spend on PPC of £100 = end profit £200
This is obviously just a made up scenario, and the % of people buying could be a lot less than 10%, but hopefully you get the idea of how to keep track of whether it is worth carrying on with PPC after the initial tests.
In this case of course it would be worth doing this again... I mean if you could give me £100 and I gave you back £200 every day would you do it? Of course you would... and that in a nutshell is what PPC is... if you make more than you spend then just keep on doing it! If you don't you need to try and figure out what isn't working and tweak it to start sales coming in... is it the keywords, the copy, the item... or something else... change something and test again...
Not sure if I have helped or just made it more complicated but hopefully someone can take something from my rambling! lol!
You need to be careful though as it can really get away from you if you're not too sure what you are doing...
I have mentioned £100 budget below and I know that is a lot and probably not where you are able to enter at... that's fine... the lower the bid amounts the less this needs to be, I have started campaigns with a £5/day budget before and just put back in what it makes until it gets up to the higher amounts... you don't need to start big to make it big... just keep reinvesting and tweaking when it isn't working...
Anyway, for a basic idea on how to set up your PPC work out how much profit you make on an item and how much you are willing to give up of that profit to make the sale. So for this example I am willing to give up 33% of my profit to make a sale.
To work out the bid you need to do a bit of math... and have an idea of how well you think this will sell...
Let's say the profit you make for each item is £15 on a sale. We have decided we are willing to give up £5 (that's the 33%) of this on each sale to spend on PPC.
Now let's say that you think you will sell to 10% of the people going through your PPC advert - so 1 sale in every 10 visits.
The £5 we are willing to spend for a sale divided by 10 is 50 pence so you would set your bid to 50 pence maximum and hope to sell an item within 10 clicks (£5 total)
Now set your total budget to an amount you can afford to lose, this way if nothing sells you won't be worrying about how to pay your rent this month, and then leave it to run for a while, ideally for a minimum of about 50-100 clicks (but this will depend on your bid/budget) and see if anything happens.
If the above scenario went perfectly the following would happen:
Max bid: 50 pence
Budget: £100
Clicks available if spend all budget at max bid amount: 200 clicks
If we sell to 10% of the people then that means out of the 200 clicks we can afford 20 will buy.
We are making a total of £15 per sale so we will make 20 x £15 = £300
Sales are £300 minus the spend on PPC of £100 = end profit £200
This is obviously just a made up scenario, and the % of people buying could be a lot less than 10%, but hopefully you get the idea of how to keep track of whether it is worth carrying on with PPC after the initial tests.
In this case of course it would be worth doing this again... I mean if you could give me £100 and I gave you back £200 every day would you do it? Of course you would... and that in a nutshell is what PPC is... if you make more than you spend then just keep on doing it! If you don't you need to try and figure out what isn't working and tweak it to start sales coming in... is it the keywords, the copy, the item... or something else... change something and test again...
Not sure if I have helped or just made it more complicated but hopefully someone can take something from my rambling! lol!
O
operationoffers
Guest
Alex has some good ideas and a good grasp of campaign budgeting.
When you are running a PPC campaign you want to see if you want to run it as a CPM or CPC. I would recommend running a few different campaigns and see which one is performing the best and based on what your average CPC you can make the decision on if you want to switch to a CPC basis.
as a rule of thumb I would try not to go over 25% for advertising on any one campaigns meaning if your average sale price is 30 then try not to spend over 7.50 in advertising for each sale. of course it really all depends on your other expenses as well.
PPC marketing is just a tool of course. it is a way to get your website in front of people searching for what you may have to offer them. Make sure you make the most of each visitor. link bait them when you have any opportunity...such as share this website/video etc... and get this free report / enter your email for this free report.
Use social media / forums / groups / classifieds / directories / bookmarking/ articles as much as possible or your time will allow to further market your website. you can use fiverr too but do not rely on fiverr or use it as a crutch, it is only a tool as well.
Good luck. If you need further help let me know. PM or contact me through my website. There are many others here that are knowledge as well.
When you are running a PPC campaign you want to see if you want to run it as a CPM or CPC. I would recommend running a few different campaigns and see which one is performing the best and based on what your average CPC you can make the decision on if you want to switch to a CPC basis.
as a rule of thumb I would try not to go over 25% for advertising on any one campaigns meaning if your average sale price is 30 then try not to spend over 7.50 in advertising for each sale. of course it really all depends on your other expenses as well.
PPC marketing is just a tool of course. it is a way to get your website in front of people searching for what you may have to offer them. Make sure you make the most of each visitor. link bait them when you have any opportunity...such as share this website/video etc... and get this free report / enter your email for this free report.
Use social media / forums / groups / classifieds / directories / bookmarking/ articles as much as possible or your time will allow to further market your website. you can use fiverr too but do not rely on fiverr or use it as a crutch, it is only a tool as well.
Good luck. If you need further help let me know. PM or contact me through my website. There are many others here that are knowledge as well.
If you need to reach real success you should find a balance between these two techniques
Emvee
Active Member
PPC is not free but neither is SEO - that's what most people don't realize.
Doing SEO means that you are spending time and energy for results that you can achieve through paid methods by spending a fraction of the time. Either you spend time and energy or you spend money - the choice is yours. If you're doing both SEO and PPC you're spending time, energy and money. That's a waste!
But not everyone is successful with paid campaigns whether it is PPC, PPV or Facebook PPC. As a beginner, you will need to spend or rather lose money on some campaigns and learn your lessons through anaylzing data that you collect from your campaigns. Not that all of your campaigns will be unsuccessful - you might have some profitable campaigns as well which is a learning too because you know then what you did right.
Once you learn the right techniques then you can apply what you learnt to launch campaigns and work out your spend depending upon the ROI that you're looking for. The good part about PPC is that once you have successful campaigns running you can afford to spend only a few minutes to go through your reports and tweak your campaigns if necessary. If you're doing SEO it will take up more time since you need to be adding content regularly and looking out for rising competitors every day. If Google decides to change its algorithms for the umpteenth time as it usually does, all your SEO efforts might even go waste overnight.
Doing SEO means that you are spending time and energy for results that you can achieve through paid methods by spending a fraction of the time. Either you spend time and energy or you spend money - the choice is yours. If you're doing both SEO and PPC you're spending time, energy and money. That's a waste!
But not everyone is successful with paid campaigns whether it is PPC, PPV or Facebook PPC. As a beginner, you will need to spend or rather lose money on some campaigns and learn your lessons through anaylzing data that you collect from your campaigns. Not that all of your campaigns will be unsuccessful - you might have some profitable campaigns as well which is a learning too because you know then what you did right.
Once you learn the right techniques then you can apply what you learnt to launch campaigns and work out your spend depending upon the ROI that you're looking for. The good part about PPC is that once you have successful campaigns running you can afford to spend only a few minutes to go through your reports and tweak your campaigns if necessary. If you're doing SEO it will take up more time since you need to be adding content regularly and looking out for rising competitors every day. If Google decides to change its algorithms for the umpteenth time as it usually does, all your SEO efforts might even go waste overnight.
