Five ways to optimize e-commerce campaigns

If you are in the e-commerce business, your aim will be Return on Investment. Understanding how to calculate your ROI will help you to make wise decisions on how to invest. Here are six ways to optimize your campaigns, writes Rocco Baldassarre in Enterpreneur.com.AnalysisFirst, you need to analyze assisted conversions at the keyword and ad level. Assisted conversions are the users who click your ad, visit your website, leave your website, and buy later. For instance, if a customer is planning to buy a smart phone, but then he/she leave your website to see if Amazon has a better deal. Then the customer comes back to your website and buys the item and this is called assisted conversion. By analyzing what keywords and ads are giving you the assisted conversions, this will allow you to better optimize the account. By analyzing which ads are generating assisted conversions, you can split test similar ads to generate even more assisted conversions.TaggingThe second pertinent thing to do is to tag everything you can, including campaigns, sources, mediums, and terms. By tagging, you can perform a deeper analysis of what triggers the assisted conversions. Though tagging ads will add additional values in the URL but do not change the URL destination. In search engines like Face book and Bing, these are called UTM parameters.Google uses auto tagging. Tags allow you to see what exactly the user clicked on, whether it is an ad that led to your product page, contact or any other page.

Focus on ROI 2 firstThirdly, besides focusing on ROI 2, in order to improve your overall performance, focus on ROI 1 as well. Most advertisers do not take ROI 1 and 2 into consideration. ROI 1 includes direct sales, meaning the users that click on your ad and buy right away. This does not always happen, so ROI 2 includes assisted conversions. Once you optimize for assisted conversions by split testing ads and keywords, then ROI 1 will be easier to optimize. ROI 1 is typically negative at first, but with the optimizations, both ROIs should become positive, Baldassarre suggests.Focus on return on ad spendThe fourth thing is to determine what is being generated for each dollar of ad spend so that you can optimize and make sure you are getting the best ROAS, advise the author. You want to make sure that your ROAS has a good ratio to your ad spend. Most of the time, the more you spend, the more you get in return. If your ROAS is very low, then you might want to re-evaluate how much you spend on ads. To get the results, you need to invest more.API and automationFifthly way is that the API and automation are very important. Try to automate your reports to understand what experience your users are having and how it impacts the bottom line of your business. API and automation reports allow you to see what is happening in your campaigns in real-time. These reports will also allow you to compare the overall results versus the last week or month of results. This allows you to see if CPAs have increased or decreased, which is very helpful.While concluding, Baldassarre writes: “ These best practices will allow you to grow your business while increasing your ROIs and ROAS. Campaign optimizations can be difficult with very large e-commerce sites, so by focusing on these optimizations, you should see a difference in results and with reporting. The better your campaigns perform the bigger return you will receive.”