The one thing certain about eCommerce stores, is that product ranges can change dramatically.
New products are constantly added and old products are often deleted. When new products are, introduced, keywords are added but marketing budgets stay the same. This can be an issue and impact the effectiveness of your AdWords campaign.
Let me explain.
Imagine you have an e-commerce store that sells five brands of shoes. Your AdWords campaign is set up to market those brands and it also has several ad groups with more generic terms like “executive shoes” or “mens work shoes” and “womens work shoes.”
You find your branded terms – two in particular converts extremely well. Another of your branded terms is a dog and doesn’t convert and only one of your generic ad groups performs well.
You then add two more ad groups for different brands. You keep your marketing budget the same.
Your paid search manager recommends pausing some of the non performing adgroups or keywords based on their past history. But you don’t want to pause it. God damn it – you sell those shoes and you want to promote it.
What do you think happens to your conversions? If you are using conversion optimiser (and if it is working well for you), hopefully they stay the same.
But it is unlikely. At this point we don’t know if your new products will convert or not.
Adding more keywords within a campaign will usually have the effect of diverting some of your advertising spend away from the other keywords to the new ones. This means you could inadvertently take clicks away from your keywords that do convert – effectively diluting your conversions and your corresponding return on investment.
At some point you call your paid search manager to find out why sales have been dwindling.
In some cases, the paid search manager is left scratching their head trying to figure out why this has occurred. They look in the change history tool and see what changes they made. Nothing looks alarming. There does not seem to be any apparent reason for the change. Except…. maybe…. just maybe – many new keywords that have been added.
The lesson in all of this to be careful when adding new products to your campaign without increasing budget. You should also be careful when using the keyword opportunities tab for keyword expansion because the same thing can happen.
if you do want to increase your budget, then you can use the new keyword planner tool to estimate budget and traffic.
This was one of the first lessons I learnt early on in my paid search career. My client wanted me to add more keywords for new products. I obliged and I received a call about sales one week later from the business owner.
Fortunately, I was able to work out what went wrong, make some adjustments and we still have the client today.
Since then, sales have more than tripled and we are very confident they will continue to grow.
The account still has the same budget (though I think it might be time to increase it) but we are very careful when adding new keywords and adgroups when the budget remains static.
As a general rule, we don’t add new keywords later in the week. This enables us to closely monitor the changes during the week and make adjustments where necessary.