I spent my week at SES New York talking to retailers and hosted two “Meet the Expert” roundtables focused on retail SEM. Retailers big and small shared their challenges and the ways they deal with them.
Starting Out
Some roundtable guests were just getting their start with ecommerce for chain stores in Mexico. The table chipped in with tips to help them:
- Make sure you’re able to define and track success. If you can’t define and track success, there’s almost no point launching a paid search campaign.
- Plan out the structure of paid search campaigns carefully. Make campaign and ad group naming conventions consistent with categories and products. Keep seasonal and event promotions in separate campaigns.
- Bid competitively when starting out. You’ll need to break into the auction against competitors that can rely on quality score history to help their page rank.
- Determine whether you need an agency. Will your company have the budget to support full-time SEMs?
- Find tools and technology that can help you scale your paid search, and make sure they fit with your individual business needs. For example, would you like to manage social campaigns through the same platform? What about display campaigns?
- Use ad extensions and product feeds.
- Have a mobile-friendly site and extend your search campaigns to mobile.
Further Down the Road
Whether just starting out or veterans managing existing campaigns, the retailers at SES talked about facing the same challenges: deciding which parts of their product catalog to cover with long-tail keywords and relevant ads — and dedicating the time and resources to do so — versus broad-matched keywords and more generic ads. Retailers are forced to pick their battles and prioritize due to lack of resources.
Similar to the retailers we met at eTail West’s Search Summit, the majority of retailers aren’t leveraging their existing assets to discover new keywords or create more relevant ads. Existing product catalogs, on-site search query logs, and broad match reports for AdWords and AdCenter can help retailers increase their exact match keywords to serve more relevant ads to consumers.
