Running and marketing a successful eCommerce brand has become increasingly difficult in recent years. There are a number of factors, but one of the things that contribute to the challenge is a mindset I call One-itis. This is when a business owner or marketer is hyper-focused on just one marketing strategy. I see this a lot with brands that only run ads on Facebook or TikTok.
Sadly, brands with One-itis are the ones that are suffering the most this year. A big factor was the iOS14 update; things went downhill for a lot of Facebook ad users. Suddenly, people were not able to track all of the important metrics that they needed in order to run and grow their businesses. This led to a lot of improper tracking, lost sales, and total chaos for eCommerce brands.
But they don’t realize that there are other ways to reach the same audience besides just with Facebook. And in fact, these methods — such as Google Ads or text-message marketing for ecommerce — are better because Facebook ads, in the recent time periods, are only generating a 1x to a 3x ROAS in majority of cases.
There’s many different things I learned about both Facebook ads and Google ads in my five years of handling them not only for my own brands, but also for clients under my Google ads agency, Yoru Marketing. Let’s discuss them in detail.
Facebook Ads One-itis
Only 4 years ago I was guilty of the One-itis mindset and was hyper-focused on Facebook ads. But in October of 2019, I got that unfortunate email in my inbox that said “Your account has been suspended”.
It was one of the lowest points for me because I had nothing else going on. It was the only ecommerce brand that I had running and the only income source that I had at that time. So for that one-month period, I was pretty depressed. But the silver lining was that it pushed me to figure out different ways to grow.
First, I ditched my eCommerce brand because I wanted to start fresh from the ground up. Then I started with Google ads. And for the past four years, I have been spending both time and money trying to understand what works and what doesn’t for Google ads.
The key to Google Ads
I’ve learned a lot of things, but the number one, most important factor to Google Ads’ success is consistency.
With Facebook, it felt like I was just running after the top-winning product. One after the other, I was chasing them in a constant state of anxiety wondering when the product was going to die out and when my next winning product would pick up. It didn’t feel like I was building a real solid business.
With Google ads, I was consistently testing up to 200 different products in one single campaign at any given time. I really started getting momentum with my personal brand and getting reliable results. And when the pandemic hit, and everybody was sitting at home, things really took off and I was able to spend a lot more money and test a lot more to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.
Focus on a multifaceted strategy
One thing many people don’t understand about Google ads is that it’s not just about what you do at the campaign level. It’s not the buttons you click on the Google ads dashboard that really matter. What really matters are the things you do outside of the dashboard.
A good ads strategy is multifaceted and considers things like conversion rates, landing pages, the customer journey, your SEO, SMS best practices, email marketing, etc. You can easily get One-itis with Google ads if you don’t approach it with a funnel strategy.
And these elements affect each other. For example, your landing pages and website influence something called the Quality Score. This score is important as it determines whether you’re ranked in the top 5 results or even the top 100 in shopping results. Your bounce rate is one of the factors that influence this score. So ask yourself things like “Why are customers bouncing?” Is it because there’s something technically wrong with the site or is it influenced by the content?
Another example is SMS campaigns and promotions, it’s great to have a communication strategy for retargeting. Plus it’s all automated. I only check the Ads dashboard 2 or 3 times a week, the rest of the time I’m focusing on other elements like my email marketing flows and optimizing my retargeting with text marketing.
Set up a winning Google Ads strategy
The strategy I suggest for eCommerce store owners is to create two shopping campaigns. Both for testing; one high-bid campaign and one low-bid campaign. (I won’t break these down here but you can learn more about this approach on my YouTube channel.)
These are two of the campaigns I create to test, regardless of what shopping campaign type and strategy I’m using, whether it’s standard shopping, smart shopping, or nowadays, performance max campaigns.
Personally, I don’t really like using standard shopping campaigns these days as they are basically becoming extinct. Google prefers smart shopping and performance max campaigns because, in reality, Google wants to keep control so it makes smarter decisions for you.
While I don’t personally know how smart Google is, I have found that Google usually knows what the right bid should be and how to scale successfully. And ultimately Google knows how to get you the best return on ad spend you’re aiming for. And believe me, it’s much much greater than Facebook ads. In fact, the average ROAS for Google right now for my own brand, as well as my clients’ brands are around 4X to 10X. These numbers might seem insane for Facebook ad users but this is the norm with Google.
In summary, I’d suggest just setting a very, very low target ROAS percentage on these campaigns or unchecking that target ROAS box. And then just let the algorithm do its thing.
Remember where the customers are looking
Remind yourself where your customers are. Usually, the first thing a consumer does is go on Google and type in what they are looking for. They don’t go on Facebook with a purchase mindset. It’s mostly done through Google, so you want to start there or at least begin testing the possible success it holds for your business.
And always keep in mind the 360 marketing view in relating to Google ads – we don’t want you to catch One-itis?