Create an ecommerce paid advertising strategy

1. Research the target audience for your products or service.

Use the Keyword Planner in Google Ads to check the search volume for your products or services. Use the Facebook Insights Manager to check the size of the audience interested in your products or services and better understand the demographics of your current Facebook audience. Use Google Analytics to better understand the demographics of your current visitors. Conduct surveys among your users to better understand their demographics and needs. Create user personas that represent your current or ideal customer.

2. Decide which marketing channels you want to use based on the audience research.

Use targeting precision as the main criteria for channel selection. Focus on the channels that allow you to best reach your target audience. For example, use Google Search to identify the keyword volume for relevant keywords, use LinkedIn ads if you have a B2B product and the targeting criteria allow you to target your desired audience, use Facebook Ads if you find out that there is an audience with interests relevant to your product or services.

3. Track success metrics to measure your paid advertising channels.

Track main business goals like transactions, revenue, and leads. Track secondary goals such as trial downloads, newsletter subscriptions, or contact form submissions, to have a better understanding of the full-marketing funnel.

4. Set up a reporting infrastructure to track your progress over time and make data-informed optimization decisions.

For the start use Google Analytics as a tool to measure the impact of your paid advertising efforts. Build dedicated dashboards in Google Data Studio to make your performance marketing data easier to consume. Combine top-level tracking such as performance by channel and long terms trends, with tactical tracking such as campaign level data with high date granularity for day-to-day optimization decisions.

5. Create a roadmap with a strategic overview of the planned marketing activities.

For example: Month 1: Test campaigns on Facebook and Google with a small budget. Month 2: Ramping up the best campaigns, testing linking ads. Month 3: Landing page optimization processes in place.

6. Create an experiment backlog for all your channels and landing pages.

List the experiments that you want to conduct in all the marketing channels. For example, testing interest-based vs lookalike audiences on Facebook, testing shopping ads vs regular search ads on Google, and ad copy test: emotional vs rational. List the landing page experiments for your landing pages used in the campaigns. Document the experiments and implement the changes for ongoing optimization of performance.

7. Analyze the paid advertising data on a strategic and tactical level, and implement ongoing data analysis and optimization routines.

Use the channel level data like Cost per conversion or ROAS per channel to decide which marketing channels to invest in. Use the campaign level data within the channels to improve their performance on an ongoing basis, for example, invest more in Google campaigns with the best ROAS.