My top 3 tips for getting the traffic that buys this Christmas

As my new book eCommerce Marketing: How get Traffic that Buys to Your Website is published tomorrow, I thought I’d best write a blog post giving you my 3 top tips for getting the traffic that buys to your website this Christmas.

Here are the 3 things I think every eCommerce business would be crazy not to be using this Christmas if they want to grow their sales.

Top Tip #1. Use Google’s Gifts – Product Listing Ads (and layer it up!)

This year Google’s major search updates focus has moved from SEO to PPC – and it’s great news.

There’s been lots of updates (more in future blogs!) that taken together give eCommerce businesses lots of ways to improve the ROI of their Google Adwords activity.

PLA Ad exampleThe number one gift is the Product Listing Ads.

I’m seeing some fantastic conversion rates, leading to very positive returns on investment. For a wide range of businesses too – whatever your products you should be testing PLAs.

[NOTE: not available in all countries yet, and some product types are excluded]

To use Product Listing Ads you need to submit a suitable product feed to your Google Merchant Account, then link that to your Adwords account and create your new campaign.

When you set it up make sure you’re grouping products as you would keywords (this is all powered by the information in your feed). To optimise manage your bids, and keep an eye on the search terms triggering you ads – you will need to use negative keywords.

Top Tip #2. Layer your Remarketing and PLAs together for Dynamic Remarketing

One of the biggest changes to Google Adwords is that you can now merge your Remarketing and PLA set ups to show people who’ve been to your site before some of the products they actually looked at. I don’t think I really need to explain how powerful that can be, it’s so obvious.

Once you’ve got Remarketing and PLAs set up, it’s so easy to do – just use the Google Dynamic Ad Builder to drag and drop your adverts together and bang you’re ready to go live. So no graphic design skills required!

Top Tip #3. Use Pinterest

(I feel a little bit like that Baz Lurman song Use Sun Screen!) Using Pinterest is that obvious. It’s the one social media engine that really performs for eCommerce businesses.

  • It drives traffic to sites – in great volume
  • It drives traffic that buys to sites (people click on pictures of products they like, and then they buy them!)
  • It’s so easy to use…

6 Steps to getting started / moving on Pinterest:

  1. Create your business account
  2. Decide what boards you’re going to have.
    A series of pin boards about your products, and things related to your products
  3. Add the “pin” button to your browser
  4. Start pinning – BUT don’t do it on day one. Do a few pins today, a few tomorrow or next week – slowly build it up so you create more noise over a longer time period
  5. Follow boards of others who pin about similar things
  6. If you come across any like-minded pinners, consider co-curating boards with them

So that’s my 3 top tips for getting traffic that buys to your website this Christmas!

Do you have other tips? If so please add them below.