Maximizing E-Commerce ROI

We use our expertise in digital advertising & email marketing to scale e-commerce brands.
Our strategies (detailed below) drive an average of 4X ROI for our dozens of clients around the globe every month.

Where E-Commerce Brands Miss The Mark

You Aren’t Testing Enough Pictures, Videos & Taglines 

It’s not enough to A/B test anymore. You need to A/B/C/D/E/F/G test and here is why: the variable in all of this digital advertising is your creative. With these digital advertising platforms, you can run 10 completely different ads to the same group of people and see which one people click on most and then stop running the 9 ads that didn’t do as well as that one. 

Example: That would be like McDonald’s running 10 different commercials during an NBA game then asking every single person who came into their store the next day which commercial actually compelled them to come into the store. If one commercial drove in way more customers than the other 9, they would only run that one commercial. That would never happen! But you can do just that with digital advertising. 

We will often test 10 to 20 different ads for a week, see which one gets the most amount of clicks at the highest click through rate as well as which one contributes to the most amount of sales or leads, then run just that one until the performance starts to drop. Once the performance starts to drop, you create 10 new ones, test them against this best performing one, and keep the cycle going.

You Are Getting Into Stupid Bidding Wars And Wasting Budget

 “I tried Google ads and they didn’t work because the cost per clicks in my industry are way too expensive and our competitors would always outbid us” is one of the most common statements I hear these days. My response to that is that you should have just bought Google stock when you launched the campaign! Seriously, Google makes millions of dollars a year just from companies trying to outbid each other to come up on popular terms.

We find what we call “low volume / hyper relevant” keywords for all of our clients that are on average less than half the cost per click of the expensive ones they are buying. More importantly these keywords are more tailored to you and your target customer.

Example: One of our clients is a travel agency specializing in group trips. Most keywords related to travel agencies are north of $5 cost per click. So when we started to do some research, we learned that a hundred thousand people a month google travel agency related keywords but about 500 people a month google specific airlines group travel departments. Two years ago, we were the only company to bid on “Delta Group Travel,” “Southwest Group Travel,” “British Airways Group Travel” and we still are today. Because only 500 people Foogle them a month and no one else bids on these keywords, the cost per click is less than 50 cents each. Not only are we saving money by not competing in the stupid bidding war with other travel agencies, but we are getting a better bang for our buck because this traffic is hyper relevant to what we sell. 

You Aren’t Setting The Objective Of Your Campaigns Properly

In both Facebook & Google, you have the option to set an objective for your campaigns. This is your opportunity to tell the algorithms that place the ads, who to really show your ads to. You can choose between traffic (you just want more people to your website), conversion (you want people to buy your products or submit a form to become a lead), engagement (you want people to like or comment on the ad), and so on…

Most companies set up every campaign for conversions because they want all their campaigns to make money. The reality is when you set campaign objectives to “conversion” these ad platforms charge you more because they know that this campaign is engineered to make you money. They know you are willing to pay more for a campaign engineered to make you money versus just getting likes. 

Harvard Business School tells us that someone needs to see your brand five times before they even decide if they are going to convert into a customer. I have read some new reports that say that with all the content consumption we have these days, that number is closer to 10.

So with that in mind, why are you setting your prospecting campaigns (your campaigns showing to people who don’t know you exist) to a conversion objective? Prospecting should always be set up as a traffic campaign. Set all your prospecting campaigns to a traffic objective and your retargeting campaigns to conversion. 

Example: We just took over a Facebook account for a new client and their cost per click was $1.25 on their prospecting campaigns, which were set up for conversions. We switched those campaigns from conversions to traffic campaigns and the cost per click dropped to 50 cents in the first three hours! It doesn’t always work out that well, but one little change started giving them double the amount of traffic without spending a penny more. Then after two weeks of running those campaigns, we turned on retargeting and BOOM, sales increased drastically. 

You Aren’t Testing Different Conversion Buttons And Page Layouts

If you have read it this far, you should get a treat, this is a long post! Anyways, we’ll round out with a short and simple one: you need to test more conversion points on your website. Play around with button color, wording, sizing, fonts, page layouts, and so on… 

The success of any ad campaign is just as much dependent on a good ad as a good website or landing page. We talked before about how A/B testing creative isn’t enough. You need to test more conversion buttons & page layouts too! 

Example: We saw a drastic decrease in leads for a client when they changed their website from black text and white backgrounds to white text and black backgrounds. When I say we saw a drastic decrease, it went from 7 leads a day to zero all because the CEO liked the look of it better. When we showed them the numbers, they quickly changed the site back. 

That’s it! That’s how we achieve 4X ROI on average for our clients.