There are many reasons that eCommerce businesses pursue eCommerce PPC, or pay-per-click, strategies, in various forms. Paid search strategies can increase brand awareness, strengthen a business’s competitive positioning, eclipse competitors’ ranking for a variety of highly competitive keywords, boost conversion rates, and bring in additional web traffic.

An eCommerce PPC advertising campaign can, of course, also generate revenue for an online business. When managed skillfully by a team of eCommerce PPC management professionals, a PPC strategy can generate significant increases in revenue, especially during short, highly competitive periods of time.

The latter is the main reason that most online businesses allocate some of their marketing budgets to paid search campaigns – it all comes down to money – and PPC services can reap big gains.

The thing is, not only is there more than one type of paid search ad, there are multiple platforms offering paid search strategies. Top contenders include Google (via Google AdWords), Bing (through Microsoft Advertising), and social media platforms, such as Facebook (through Facebook Ads Manager). A business can profit significantly by utilizing the paid search capabilities of only one platform, such as Google AdWords. However, a unified eCommerce PPC management strategy directing efforts on more than one campaign, on more than one platform, will produce the greatest results.

Our client, Lady Black Tie, specializes in offering fashion-forward formalwear to savvy shoppers around the country. Demand for their products has grown so steadily over time that they grew from a regional supplier to a nationwide brand that is well-respected for their unique products.

Business for Lady Black Tie is also highly seasonal; many of their customers are bridesmaids gearing up for wedding season, or young ladies prepared for Prom, Homecoming, and other formal festivities. As a result, customer search queries change throughout the year, as does demand for certain styles of fashion.

Lady Black Tie has some entrepreneurial savants behind the scenes, responsible for a successful business model and insightful marketing techniques. They sell high-quality products, have developed a loyal following on social media, and use historical sales data to guide their promotions.

The company had already established a strong brand and positioning in the market, even going far enough to establish the foundation for a successful paid search campaign.

At the point that Lady Black Tie partnered with us for eCommerce PPC management services, they were already running a successful Google Shopping campaign. Due to the highly visual nature of their products and the client’s original, aesthetically stimulating product photography, their shopping campaign was already progressing profitably. This is not a case wherein a client came to 1Digital® Agency looking for a fix; it is a case of us taking a good thing and making it better.

1Digital® Agency’s PPC experts took over management of Lady Black Tie’s Google Shopping campaign and expanded their Google PPC campaigns with Search and Display ads. When we assumed management of the PPC campaign, it was right around the Prom season in April of 2021.

We updated targeting associated with the campaign towards girls in the proper age bracket and leveraged tools on the client website to manage in and out-of-stock alerts. In conjunction with our optimizations of the PPC campaign, we configured In-Stock Notify to send out alerts to interested shoppers when items of interest were back in stock; that way, visitors that might not have converted through the ad the first time around due to out-of-stock notices would return to complete the purchase. The client had a banner season, with significant gains.

The data above corresponds to the performance of the client’s Google Ad campaigns during April 2021, as compared to the previous period. As you can see, revenue, transactions and the overall eCommerce conversion rates jumped significantly. Transactions and revenue in particular experienced significant gains, more than doubling performance from the previous period. Session durations also increased significantly while the bounce rate decreased.

While this client has produced a variety of visual content, including photography and videos, our eCommerce PPC experts assembled and configured the ads, updating our targeting across Google Search, Shopping, and Display channels to let the visual presentation of these ads work their magic. We adjusted targeting continuously to give a boost to ROI and cut back on the overall cost associated with   the campaigns.

When prom season was over we retooled the Google PPC Ads campaigns to focus more on the late Spring and early Summer wedding season.We shifted the budget and messaging of the ads to target brides and bridesmaids; adjusting messaging to advertise the fact that Lady Black Tie makes it possible for all bridesmaids to get on the same order.

Lady Black Tie, with its loyal social media following, already had been running a successful Facebook Ads campaign; again, the instance was one of us taking the reins and improving on a good thing while uniting our paid search advertising.

Lady Black Tie has a large, loyal cohort of followers on its social platforms and works with a professional modeling agency to produce photography and videos to promote its products. Our PPC experts took those raw materials and converted them into Facebook Video and Carousel Ads that answer a lot of customer queries before they even have a chance to ask them.

Our Facebook Ads display Lady Black Tie’s products in a favorable yet realistic light, addressing customer concerns about how the dress will lay and flow, as well as giving a subjective impression of its character. The appealing nature of the ads piqued user interest; our placement and targeting help to seal the deal.

Facebook Ads Manager allows for some of the most useful targeting in all of paid search marketing, which we have been able to use to great effect to streamline their Facebook Ads for heightened levels of conversion and profitability.

We’ve placed a special emphasis on age-based and marital-status-based targeting. Facebook also allows for more precise targeting based on interest and intent to partake in upcoming events. By targeting users that are slated to attend upcoming weddings and formal engagements, we’ve been able to precisely position Lady Black Tie’s ads for success.

Our PPC project managers also keep close tabs on user behavior across platforms while gauging the health of our clients’ paid search campaigns. We’ve noticed that the average session duration for users across all of Lady Black Tie’s platforms is uncustomarily high – close to ten minutes – signifying a high degree of engagement and interest. Interested customers visitors and consume content for prolonged periods of time, belying their interest.

As we optimized their campaigns, we were careful to be succinct with messaging; although Lady Black Tie enjoys a committed, loyal following, the highly visual nature of their products requires that the ads be visually heavy and light on text. Our ads used minimal text, perhaps graced by an emoji, letting the pictorial or video content do the heavy lifting.

Many of the seasonal optimizations and changes in messaging that we conducted for Lady Black Tie’s Google ads were also reflected in their Facebook ads. We changed messaging during the Spring and Summer to pivot with changing consumer preferences, keying in on different seasonal buying patterns, such as Prom, weddings, and now that we are entering the Fall, Homecoming. Our responsive approach to changing the messaging of their social media ads is one of the keys to the ongoing success of their campaigns.