Enterprise Archives

Competitor Analysis In E-commerce

Posted on 23.Sep.202104.Mar.2022 by Amir Levi

Competitor analysis is an essential part of any business’s marketing because every enterprise operates in a competitive market. And to form a strategy, you need to take into account the specifics of the product or service and understand those external factors that directly or indirectly affect the company’s development.

The e-commerce market is growing from year to year – strong players are strengthening their positions, and there are more and more new ones. The boom in marketplaces around the world is stimulating the active development of the market, creating new user experiences and expectations from online shopping. At the same time, many market participants cannot withstand the competition and fade out, losing in price competition for the buyer. According to a 2019 study, 46% of e-commerce businesses rate their level of competition in the marketplace as very tough. Only 1% said their business is out of the competition!

If you are not one of the latter, then almost any competitor is just a click away from you. Therefore, before entering the e-commerce market, you really should pay attention to one of such priority tasks as competitor analysis before the fight. Even when you don’t see your competitors, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Read our article to the end, and we guarantee that you will discover new knowledge that will help you achieve success in your online business.

In this article, you will find answers to such important questions as:

Why do competitor research?
What are the stages of systemic competitor analysis?
What conclusions can be drawn from the collected data and how to take them into account when developing an online store?

Why Is Competitor Analysis In E-commerce Needed?

It is strange that the competitor analysis is still not part of every marketing strategy because if you use it in various online stores, it will help to:

Realize a unique selling proposition (USP) and differentiate yourself from your opponents, or at least, not be inferior to them.
Determine your competitors’ internet marketing strategy. Know top traffic sources and marketing budget.
Create a budget for advertising campaigns that is not divorced from reality and initially focus on those channels and tools that the competitor pays special attention to.
Analyze the functional features of competitors’ sites, identify weaknesses and determine a roadmap for the development of your site
To probe the assortment and pricing policy.

Most developers do competitor analysis when developing a website, and rightly so. But the process itself is chaotic:

Analyzed are those whom the customer indicated as competitors in brief.
Or those whose interface the UX designer liked.
The analysis does not take place in the context of all competitors at once.

First, with such a non-systematic approach, there is a high risk of being wrong. It is not a fact that the solutions used on the selected sites are correct. Secondly, it is quite difficult to assess the competitor advantages and form your USP, identify patterns in the interface and cover all the functional features of the competitors’ online store. But this article describes a process where all risks are minimized, and it sets priorities in the roadmap for the successful functional development of the project.

What does a correct competitor analysis consist of?

Since we set ourselves the task of developing a competitive online store and predicting possible ways of developing functionality, our competitor analysis contains the following basic stages:

Sources of traffic
Usability of the site
The selling component of the platform
Content
Website technical optimization

But before that, you should first think of finding competitors for analysis using the tips below.

Identifying Key Competitors In E-commerce

It is necessary to select competitors based on different marketing characteristics. One of the most important is the “target audience and their needs”. This characteristic is refined based on the questions:

Whether your products/services are aimed at the same audience as the offers of this competitor?
Whether the products/services of the competing company solve the same needs that you are solving?
Do members of your audience meet the products/services of the competitor in question when looking for ways to meet their needs?

If the answer to all questions is yes, then the company is your competitor. It is essential to know that products may differ from each other, but solve similar needs, so you need to consider this stage carefully.

Other criteria are also critical (price/quality ratio, market share, product range, etc.), and it’s okay if you analyze a competitor that is far ahead of you in all respects (that is, choose not quite close). Such an audit will give you a lot of helpful information. The main thing is not to research those who are significantly behind you.

Where to find competitors?

Survey of employees and target audience. Ask them what competitors they’ve heard of.
Top search results and contextual advertising. Use basic queries for which customers can search for you. For example, if you have 20 queries, select those companies that have appeared in the search results 4 or more times. It is also important to consider those competitors who hit the top for basic search queries in the shortest time.
Ratings. Find industry rankings and take the leaderboards. For example, for the query “rating of construction companies”, there are many selections with arguments for the position of companies at the top.
Search in social networks. Using keywords, you can find popular groups and social media accounts hosted by your competitors.
Services. Special services will help to simplify the task of finding competitors. Their use allows finding statistics (top positions in search results, page meta tags, visibility, traffic from search, semantics) to reveal the strengths of competitors’ sites.

You should pay special attention to sites with the lowest bounce rate, good pageview depth, and traffic from search and social networks. It is necessary to select from three to five companies from the general list – this is the optimal range for assessment. You can expand this list by adding one company that is larger than you in scale or holds a significant share of the market. You can learn from it an interesting experience.

Analysis Steps For Competitor E-commerce Sites

In our article, there are four main areas which it is better to check:

Sources of traffic. Particular attention should be paid to the traffic source – the main channel from where rivals get customers; this can be traffic from search results, contextual advertising or referrals from social networks, and so on. You can use Similarweb for this. Thus, you can understand what competitor advertising really works and take this experience into your company. If the main traffic sources are Facebook or Google, then you can use AdScale to create a powerful advertising campaign on these channels to establish new sales options.
The convenience of use. The first thing you should pay attention to is how the site is arranged, how many pages, sections, and texts it has, and how the content is designed. It is also equally important how simple and intuitive the catalog is, whether the menu is convenient and whether all the necessary sections are included. What matters is how quickly and easily the user can find all the information they are interested in. For example, your competitor is a large furniture store. The client wants to buy a “Sliding wardrobe” and going to the competitor’s website sees a catalog with a convenient and obvious menu; at the necessary section, it is possible to filter goods that have value, photos, characteristics. All these elements are aimed at ensuring that the visitor takes the targeted action.
The selling component of the site. The main goal of any e-commerce site is to sell. Therefore, it is worth assessing the selling component, which consists of:
- Company’s pricing policy (prices are lower/higher than the market or like everyone else)
- Range of products
- Availability of a guarantee for the goods
- The convenience of contact information
- Availability of different communication methods
- Existence of discounts, bonuses, and other loyalty programs

As a result, you can conclude where you are inferior to them from the client’s point of view and find ideas that need to be implemented in your business.

Technical optimization check. This stage consists of the analysis of such parameters as page load time, adaptability to mobile devices, broken links, sections, visual elements. Search engine optimization (SEO) also refers to the technical side of websites. Seeking sites for search engines allows you to get more traffic, and therefore leads. The main SEO parameters are positions in search results, phrases for ranking competitors, reference mass. Thus, you will receive information about the technical optimization of competitors. And also a list of shortcomings in your site that need to be corrected.

In addition to these critical parameters of competitor analysis, there is another one called content, which is of great importance for attracting the target audience of a competitor. Let’s take a closer look at it.

Content For A Selling E-commerce Site

Content is a key element of a selling site, whether it is a description of the services provided or an overview of a product. The content should be clear and exciting for the user. Firstly, it is worth checking the text on the main page and the pages of categories of goods or services. Pay attention to:

The point. What is the meaning of the text? What is trying to convey to the visitor? Put yourself in the client’s shoes and evaluate how beneficial this text can be for them. This way, you can discover the correct way of writing articles.
The quality of the text. The quality of the text is assessed by the excellent uniqueness of the text and its volume. Look at the number of characters in the texts of competitors, and it will be optimal to identify the average value and stick to it. However, you should beware of texts with useless, redundant, and insignificant information. Also, pay attention to the text style- this is how succinctly the text is written. If competitors have low-quality content, you still need to improve your texts. Thus, you can turn them to your advantage.
The presence of pictures and videos. Empty text is of little interest to visitors. Pictures, infographics, and videos increase audience engagement and retention. Even if your competitors do not use media content, use it for yourself, and you will benefit.
Structure. It is always more pleasant to read the text divided into paragraphs, with bulleted lists, without very long sentences and a single narrative logic; this can be called taking care of the reader. So, it is recommended to use it in any text.

As a result, you will receive a list of improvements for your content, which is best written down in a table convenient for you. Also, pay attention to whether the companies have a blog, what, and how they write. Part of the traffic received from information requests can convert.

Undeniably, internet marketing skills are required to conduct a good audit. The most vital step in competitor analysis in e-commerce is to draw the correct conclusions and highlight good ideas. Whatever your personal feelings, and no matter how objectively you try to approach the assessment, there are statistics, the psychology of human behavior, and other wisdom. In addition, the amount of experience and knowledge may not be enough to identify all the disadvantages, to look deeper than a confusing text about delivery terms. But if you succeed, you can achieve only more. Knowledge in the classical marketing field, presentation of the market situation, and experience will help you determine your strategy for developing your business on the internet. All this together makes it possible to complete the analysis and achieve the goal correctly. And for maximum results, all you need is the perfect advertising to beat any competitor. Use our helpful bits of advice and AdScale to help propel your business to new heights!

FAQ

What are the strengths and weaknesses of competitors?

Each e-commerce competitor has its strengths and weaknesses, but these can be easily identified with the correct analysis.

What is the purpose of competitor analysis?

The main goal of competitor analysis of any industry or market is to obtain sufficient information about the strengths and weaknesses of a competitor, their strategy, intentions, and opportunities to improve the effectiveness of their own actions, both in sales and advertising.

Why is it important to know your competitors?

The value of competitor information is great because it allows for more systematic and representative market data in relation to consumer research. In this way, the forecasting of future technology/product market trends can be improved.

What should be in a competitor analysis?

A competitor analysis should include a detailed study of the activities of the main players in the industry, starting with price analysis, advertising, assortment, and ending with a detailed SWOT analysis of competitors.

Seasonal Advertising Campaigns

Posted on 06.Sep.202112.Oct.2023 by Amir Levi

There is an opinion that marketers deliberately exaggerate almost all holidays just to profit from people. The choice is yours whether to believe it or not. But holidays and seasonal events bring additional income to businessmen is a fact. If you’re a budding businessman or just want to learn more about seasonal advertising trends, then you’ve chosen the right article. We will talk about what seasonal trends exist, what their features are, how to properly set up advertising during each seasonal event, and how to earn more and not miss such a chance.

By the way, many people think that not every business can be suitable for some kind of seasonal promotion. Indeed, not all, but most people do not even suspect that their business can gain momentum just by participating in a seasonal event. We will not talk about the development strategy of your specific business since everyone has their case, and if our advice suits someone, then someone can only go to minus. But we will tell you what seasonal advertising is in general, how to use it correctly, and what the consequences may be.

What Are The Seasonal Advertising Campaigns?

If we walk from January to December, we can highlight the following seasonal events:

Christmas and New Year;
St. Valentine’s Day;
spring holidays such as International Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day;
summer season;
Halloween;
Black Friday;
New Year’s Eve.

Let’s now take a closer look at what each event is like.

Christmas and New Year. Now we will not talk about New Year’s discounts, beautiful advertising integrations, and garlands; this is all before the new year. Usually, people in the new year set themselves goals for the whole year. Someone wants to lose weight, someone wants to take up a new hobby, and someone else wants to start something new in their lives. And in this situation, you can help people.

Listen to society, for sure you will notice some kind of new trend. Then you can adjust your business to this trend or simply integrate it into your business. If people are satisfied with your product or service for the first time, they will return to you or advise you to their friends. Thus, the seasonal advertising campaign will be successful.

St. Valentine’s Day. It is worth starting an advertising campaign for Valentine’s Day in advance, as well as for all other holidays; this is the best place to advertise your referral system. So, one person can bring his friend or partner to you, and others can reach after them. To simplify the seasonal advertising process, use referral apps that automate the process of promoting your business.

Spring holidays such as International Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. The situation is very similar to that on Valentine’s Day. Your customers should be reminded of the referral system and advertise it again for new potential customers.

Summer Season

We will pay more attention to this part. It is often in the summer that such a phenomenon occurs in business as a seasonal decline in sales. A seasonal slump is when sales drop every year in the same season, such as in the summer when the heat makes it hard to work.

In such seasonal decline, the following seasonal advertising trends should be followed:

Bet on stable products. Or to “stars” with “cash cows”, using the terminology of Boston Consulting Group. According to their research, any product goes through four stages in its life:
- market entry or “difficult kids”;
- growth or “stars”;
- maturity or “cash cows”;
- decline or “dogs”.

It is easiest and most enjoyable to work with “difficult children” because they are actively developed and sold and are relatively easy to promote. But during a downturn, Boston Consulting Group recommends betting on “stars” and “cash cows” because they are more reliable, more stable, and aimed at a broader market. If the company has “difficult children”, but because of the recession, there are no resources to “grow” them, it is worth temporarily slowing down the promotion.

Do not set “special prices” even for the best customers. Stick to your usual strategies and keep price fluctuations as narrow as possible. If you make a “luxury” discount to a customer, the customer who was left without a discount, but spent on a seasonal advertising campaign, can find out. As a result, the first customer will be able to sell the product at a low cost, and the second customer will not be able to sell anything at all – the competitors are cheaper!

Autumn Events

Halloween. This is the time of creativity, as all people make original costumes, jewelry, and so on. You can play on this by arranging a competition, for example, the best logo for Halloween. In addition, a special series of products dedicated to the theme of Halloween will help increase holiday sales and remind you of yourself. If you have an offline point of sale, embellish it and your employees; this will attract passers-by and lure them away from your store, especially if they are parents with children.

Black Friday. All businessmen are waiting for this day; this is a great chance to make more money and work for the future. It is for the future since a lot of people will stay with you after the global sale. Therefore, in order not to lose this opportunity, follow the following rules:

For a month or 3 weeks, make sure that the site is ready for the influx of visitors (test the servers for load, check the 404 error, etc.).
Select products for which discounts will apply (refer to your statistics). Remember to be prepared for the hype and make sure that the items don’t suddenly run out of stock.
Determine the amount of the discount. For greater effect, it is worth reducing prices by at least 20%. If you are not ready for such discounts, prepare gifts or bonuses for your next purchase.
Run warm-up advertising campaigns; this will help you build a base of potential buyers that will come in handy on X-day. To be remembered by future customers, use bright creatives, branding, and a recognizable character in your campaigns if you have one.

Even if everything went well, you shouldn’t relax: you can make money on up-sales – prepare lucrative offers for those who did not manage to take advantage of the discount on Black Friday.

And the New Year is very soon, and clients are already starting to buy gifts for their loved ones. Build a base of active customers and launch warm-up advertising campaigns.

New Year’s Eve

In this bright and pleasant time, everyone should think that you are a part of the holiday. That is, integrate into the new year or make people associate the new year with you. Coca-Cola is a great example of this; Santa Claus drinks this drink on their banners and immediately associates it with himself.

People buy gifts for themselves and their loved ones, toys, and decorations for the Christmas tree, new clothes, food for the New Year’s table, and much more. The promotion will be a good motive to buy your products right now while the offer is valid. Encourage buyers who are willing to spend money to do it with you.

FAQ

What is the most profitable seasonal advertising?

The most profitable seasonal advertising is New Year and Black Friday advertisements. Of course, other seasonal events cannot be ignored, but these bring the most buyers and money.

How long before the event should I run a seasonal advertising campaign?

In general, you should ideally prepare for some events a month prior. But if this is something small, for example, mother’s day, it can be done in a week.

How to attract more clients to my business at seasonal events?

During seasonal events, you need a special approach to advertising and attracting customers to you.

Why didn’t my seasonal advertising work?

Anything could happen, from a poorly thought-out advertising campaign to just bad luck. Do not despair; even with popular brands, problems occur. If you’d like to better prepare for your next campaign, check out our seasonal advertising article on our website. In addition, you will find many interesting and helpful articles that can help you in other matters.

How To Smartly Allocate Bids For Maximum Conversions

Posted on 21.Jun.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

Optimizing bids requires major time and attention. We PPC’ers have come up with many strategies to make certain we are winning auctions. Ultimately, we all want to allocate our budgets wisely to generate the highest amount of conversions. We are constantly asking ourselves, how can we optimize bids to get the most out of our keywords? So let’s take a look at what it takes to make your keywords soar.

The Key To Keywords

Today we will look at the performance of two keywords over a 24-hour period. We will be strategically bidding to maximize conversions for a daily budget of $100.

*Stats for Keyword 1:*
Bid	Position	Clicks	Conversions	Cost	CPA
$1.00	5	5	3	$5.00	$1.60
$2.00	4	7	4	$14.00	$3.50
$3.00	3	10	7	$30.00	$4.29
$4.00	2	12	8	$48.00	$6.00
$5.00	1	18	14	$90.00	$6.40

*Stats for Keyword 2:*
Bid	Position	Clicks	Conversions	Cost	CPA
$1.00	5	10	2	$10.00	$5.00
$2.00	4	20	4	$40.00	$10.00
$3.00	3	30	7	$90.00	$12.86
$4.00	2	35	9	$140.00	$15.56
$5.00	1	40	12	$200.00	$16.67

According to the statistics of the above keywords, we can calculate a winning combination for our budget of $100.00:

Keyword 1 with a bid allocation of $5.00, in position no.1 and a 78% conversion rate is yielding 14 conversions. Costing our budget $90.00.
Keyword 2 with a bid allocation of $1.00, in position no. 5 and a 20% conversion rate is yielding 2 conversions. Costing our budget the remaining $10.00. Our $100 daily budget yields 16 total conversions with an average CPA of $6.25.

Winning Combination:

*Keyword 1*
Bid	Position	Clicks	Conversions	Cost	CPA
$5.00	1	18	14	$90.00	$6.40
*Keyword 2:*
Bid	Position	Clicks	Conversions	Cost	CPA
$1.00	5	10	2	$10.00	$5.00

Make The Complex Simple

Keyword management is a complex and time-consuming process. As you know, there are many more variables to consider with AdWords auctions: positive, negative, positioning, performance according to the time of day/week/month, etc. The number of variables can feel endless for Google Ads campaign managers. Here at AdScale, we have created a platform to simplify this process to smartly allocate budgets for your bids. Let our AI automatically adjust bids to strategically boost the results of your keywords – giving you time to focus on a strategy, rather than tactics.

How To Smartly Allocate Your Budgets In Google Ads

Posted on 19.Jun.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

We all know the old adage, “You need to spend money to make money.” While this quote is very applicable for those of us managing AdWords campaigns, a crucial word is missing…
You need to spend money wisely to make money.
This is especially true when allocating budgets to specific campaigns. No one wants to waste their budget by allocating funds ineffectively.

Smart Spending

Here we will walk through the budget allocation process to maximize the performance of all of your campaigns.
For this example, we have 3 campaigns: A, B, C. Our current budget is $1000 and our goal is to smartly allocate the budget to maximize conversions.

Campaign	Impressions	Impression Share	CTR	CPC	Rate	Clicks	Conversions	Cost	CPA
A	1000	80%	10%	$1	10%	100	10	$100	$10
B	2000	50%	10%	$2	10%	200	20	$400	$20
C	3000	30%	10%	$3	10%	300	30	$900	$30

1. Prioritize the highest performing campaign by sorting campaigns according to lowest CPA.

Campaign A has the lowest CPA at $10. We will focus on optimizing our budget to reach 100% of the impression share.

Stats for Campaign A:

Campaign	Impressions	Impression Share	CTR	CPC	Rate	Clicks	Conversions	Cost	CPA
A	1000	80%	10%	$1	10%	100	10	$100	$10

Current impressions: 1000
Divided by impression share of 80% = 1250 maximum impressions
1250 X 10% CTR = 125 clicks @ $1.00 = $125.00
We need to allocate $125 for the maximum potential impressions.
Remaining budget: $875.

3. Select the 2nd highest performing campaign.

Stats for Campaign B:

Campaign	Impressions	Impression Share	CTR	CPC	Rate	Clicks	Conversions	Cost	CPA
B	2000	50%	10%	$2	10%	200	20	$400	$20

Current impressions: 2000
Divided by the impression share of 50%= 4000 maximum impressions
4000 X 10% CTR = 400 clicks @ $2.00 = $800
We need to allocate $800 for the maximum potential impressions.
Budget: $875-$800=$75

5. Allocate the remaining budget ($75) to the lowest performing campaign (C).

There’s so much more we could have factored into these equations: bids, Quality Score, CTRs, etc. We simplified the examples to make them easily understandable, but the amount of variables campaign managers need to consider is overwhelming.
Here at AdScale, we have created a platform to smartly allocate your campaign budgets. Let our AI automatically adjust budgets to strategically boost your results.

4 Tips To Effectively Manage Google Ads Budgets

Posted on 11.Jun.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

When it comes to Google Ads optimization, we tend to think of activities like bid management, adding new keywords, adding negative keywords, bid adjustments, modifying ads, and improving landing pages. But what about budget optimization? How important is that? Well, according to an examination of thousands of our clients’ Google Ads accounts – it is crucial!

Here are 4 practical tips that will help improve your budget’s performance:

1. Monthly Budget Vs. Daily Budget

Setting a fixed daily budget doesn’t make sense. Some days perform better than others. And weekends perform differently than workdays. Google can choose to double your daily budget without any warning and not necessarily on the days that you want it doubled.

Having a monthly plan, where you set different daily budgets based on the past performance of each campaign – will help to smartly allocate your budget on high-performing days and save money on low-performing days.

2. Prioritize By Potential Impressions

So, what is the best way to distribute your advertising budget between campaigns, that will maximize your account’s performance?

This is how it’s accomplished:

Sort your campaigns by CPA from lowest to highest
Calculate the maximum potential impressions of each campaign by dividing the number of impressions by the impression share
Select a campaign with a low CPA and allocate the budget required to maximize impressions
Continue this process until the budget has ended

3. Daily Time Segments

When you check your daily heat map, you can see clearly that specific hours are performing better than others. Logically, you should maximize your impressions by allocating more ad spend during the high-performing hours and reducing it during the lower-performing times. See the heat map below:

4. Consider Google’s Response Time

Here’s a nice trick. Since Google’s response time to budget changes is much quicker than changes to bids – you can take advantage of this delay and lower your budget spend during low-performing hours without changing your bid amounts.

In the picture below, you can see a high-performing time segment between 8 am to 6 pm, but from 12 pm to 2 pm the performance is lower. Lowering the bids for these hours will not do any good. It will take Google 1-2 hours to respond and by the time the change takes place, you will have to change it back. You’ll be running in circles.

What’s the trick? Lower the daily budget at 12 pm and set it to half the current daily cost (to avoid Google’s 2X factor), and return it to the original budget at 2 pm. We, at AdScale, hope you have found these tips valuable.

Our system can do all of this (and more!) for you automatically.

Get to know our automated platform here or by scheduling a free demo today!

5 Challenges Faced By Agencies And Media Companies

Posted on 07.Jun.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

Overcoming the many challenges of digital marketing is no easy feat. Agencies and Media Companies encounter complex variables at all levels of their businesses. In an effort to better understand this, let’s examine a list of the 5 most common challenges facing your company as well as gain some insight to address them.

1. Maintaining Healthy Gross Margins

As the digital marketing landscape becomes more competitive and complex – margins become smaller and smaller. The larger companies are opting for in-house solutions. Additionally, when the competition is on the rise, then pricing continues to drop. You’ll find yourself using all of your resources for lower returns.

2. Navigating Between Complex Platforms

The established advertising platforms are constantly evolving and becoming more complex to better serve audiences. While newer and smaller platforms continue to arrive with their own specific set of parameters. You will need to keep up with this highly dynamic industry or you will be left behind.

3. Reducing Customer Churn Rate

What’s more important: acquiring new customers or retaining existing ones? Existing customers provide the financial foundation for your business to grow. But with so many digital marketing services available, customers are finding it easier to switch suppliers.

4. Measuring Marketing ROI

In the digital age, everything is measurable and customers are expecting continuous improvement. Meeting customer demands in today’s competitive market is becoming more challenging due to the annual inflation of Price-Per-Click. Customers are measuring agencies by nominal expectations but are not adjusting according to actual data results.

5. Scaling

Initially, agencies are in lock-step with dozens of customers and provide them great service. But as the customer base grows, agencies fall into the trap of trying to scale their business without increasing margins.

Your Solution

AdScale’s AI-driven algorithms efficiently scale your business while increasing profit margins. This means that you will be able to easily advertise across known and new platforms without worrying about missing your next customer.

Let our AI do the heavy lifting so that you can focus on what matters.

Learn more about our automated platform:
Start your 30-day free trial today, or get an in-depth product walk-through by scheduling a demo.

5 Tips For Creating Effective Landing Pages

Posted on 06.Jun.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

Having an effective landing page is the foundation of marketing successfully online. It doesn’t matter how much quality traffic your site receives; if your landing page is ineffective your business will hurt. To help you improve your conversion rate, we gathered these 5 tips to create an effective landing page.

1. Keep It Clean

The overall layout of your landing page has a major effect on the number of conversions your business will receive. It’s important to design your page with the main focus of your business in mind: making it easy for visitors to connect with what you are selling. Shoot for easy navigation with a clear hierarchy – using strong contrasting colors to separate between background, foreground, and call-to-action buttons. The users should know where to go clearly and easily.

2. Less Is More

A good landing page should be simple. Provide the necessary information that visitors need in order to feel confident to hit that buy button. Make information concise as to not overwhelm visitors and use bulleted lists to make essential info easily scannable.

3. Call To Action

Visitors navigating your site will always want to know what to do next. Be direct, clear, and assertive with your call-to-action buttons. Using a strong command verb with a sense of urgency is proven to increase user responses. Use it!

4. Above The Fold

Prioritize your important marketing messages to be above the fold. The most important part of your webpage is the space visitors see before they have to scroll. Do not hide your call-to-action buttons or forms in areas that require searching.

5. Mobile & Speed

These 2 variables have a major impact on user experience.
If your site is not yet mobile-friendly then you will miss out on a major segment of visitors. As of 2018, 51% of all sales are made from mobile devices.

Time is money. It’s important to measure the load time of your landing page. Most web users will abandon a site that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. You don’t want first-time customers to navigate away from your site to your competitors because of a slow load time

Bonus Tip: Learn From Others

There’s nothing new under the sun. Take a look at your competitors’ landing pages – learn what they do effectively and also learn from their mistakes. Check out: LandingFolio: a gallery featuring the best landing page designs – organized into searchable categories.

Another Tool Suggestion for building an effective landing page is Aritic Pinpoint. With the help of a pre-built Aritic landing Page template, you can create high converting landing pages to improve the conversion rates of your marketing campaigns. Inside the Aritic platform, you can use the drag and drop landing page builder to edit existing Aritic landing page templates for making new landing pages

The AI Difference

Now that you’re ready to optimize your landing page, it’s time to optimize your campaigns with automation to reach the best audience possible. That’s where AI-driven advertising for e-commerce stores steps in to customize and then automate processes for cross-channel advertising, synchronization, as well as bid and budget automation. The marketplace is quickly changing and, by using AI, you’ll know you won’t be left behind.

5 Scenarios When You Should Not Increase Your Bids In Google Ads

Posted on 04.Jun.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

You know how the story goes. You have a high-performing keyword with a good CPA and want to generate more traffic. So you increase the bid amount expecting better results, but all you’re left with is diminished returns.
Don’t fret – we’re here to help!

Go to adscale.com and try our 30-day free trial
For an in-depth product walk-through – schedule a demo today!

Conclusions:

Target CPA> 0.95

When your current CPA is close to the target CPA, there’s a high risk that increasing your bid will cause the actual CPA to become higher than the target CPA. You’ve just turned a good keyword into a bad one.

When your search loss rank is lower than 5% – increasing bids will not necessarily buy you more impressions, but this can increase CPA.

Average Position Is Higher Than 1.2

When your average position is higher than 1.2, increasing the bids will not substantially improve your position nor will this improve the CTR. Most likely, it will only increase the CPA.

High Budget Utilization

If your account is utilizing its full monthly budget, increasing bids for some keywords requires lowering bids for others. In this scenario, you should prioritize the keywords with the highest potential. Increase the bids for those keywords first, while decreasing bids of the remaining keywords.

Insignificant Data

Having sufficient statistical data is critical for making informed decisions. For example, increasing your bid does not guarantee a significant increase in conversions. Rather, additional information regarding market trends, targeting, and essential metrics should be examined.

Finding Long Tails – The Sisyphean Task Of The Digital Age

Posted on 24.May.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

Digging through Search Query Reports to find the hidden insights on a frequent basis is a highly repetitive and Sisyphean task. Every time you start from the beginning, it never ends and there is always more, as long as your campaigns are running.

Digging into the SQR for potential long-tail keyword insights

This article focuses mainly on the importance of long-tail keywords and will omit the other features/results which you can learn by analyzing the Search Query Report.

What Is A Long Tail Keyword?

Long-tail keywords are search phrases that are longer and more specific. Often, visitors that are closer to a point-of-purchase will search using 3 + words with high specificity.

Why Should I Use Long-tail Keywords?

Ask a child what type of cake they want for their birthday?
The answer might be Chocolate cake with vanilla filling and whip cream with cherries on top. When requests are so specific – it’s a clear indication that the person really wants what they’re asking for.

The same is true for Search Engine Marketing. Consumers with detailed search queries are normally well-researched and have a higher potential to convert. To bring this highly-convertible traffic to your site one should focus on long-tail keywords. Google rewards more relevant keywords with higher Quality Scores. Therefore, as long-tail keywords have lower competition, a higher relevancy (earning them a better QS), and lower search volume, you might receive a better ad ranking for less money.

Work Less Than Sisyphus

AdScale does the heavy-lifting – freeing you from the monotony of rolling the proverbial “keywords boulder” up the mountain. The Tweak & Fix module automatically scans the Search Query Report for long-tail combinations.

It continuously finds the high yield long-tail combinations and recommends them in the client’s dashboard.

Which can be applied via AdScale with 1-Click to your AdWord’s account.

Let our powerful modules lift your campaigns to new heights with automated data-driven insights to optimize your long-tail keywords.

Go to adscale.com and try our 30-day free trial
For an in-depth product walkthrough – schedule a demo today!

How Important Is Your Quality Score?

Posted on 22.May.201821.Feb.2022 by Amir Levi

Understanding Quality Score is essential for success in SEM advertising. Let’s get to know how Quality Score affects your ads.

What Is Quality Score?

Quality Score (QS) is Google’s measure for ad quality assigned specifically at the keyword level. Based on this metric and max cost-per-click (CPC), Google will determine your ad rank. Quality Score is rated on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the highest score. The higher score leads to a better ad position and/or higher impression share and lowers actual CPC.

Why Is Quality Score Important?

It’s in Google’s best interest to provide the most relevant ads in their search results. Google encourages compliance by charging less for prominent ad positioning when advertisers’ Quality Scores are higher. Quality Score works in conjunction with your maximum bid to determine your ad rank during an auction. This means if your QS is too low, you will pay much more per click or won’t appear in search results at all.

Quick Tips For Improving Quality Score

According to Google, Quality Score is comprised of 3 main factors:

Let’s take a look at what can be done to improve each of these components:

Expected CTR & Ad Relevance

The main goal is to improve CTR of your keywords. This is accomplished by concentrating efforts on high-volume keywords and ad groups. They have the highest impact on your average QS at your campaign and account levels.

Segment high volume keywords that have low CTR into separate ad groups – and tailor your ads specifically to each group
Make certain your ad groups contain closely related keywords – the ads you create for each ad group need to be precisely relevant to each keyword
Add negative keywords
Be diligent with low-performing high-volume keywords – pause them if optimization efforts are ineffective
Pause/remove low-CTR ads and extensions – add improved ads instead

Landing Page Relevance

Landing page experience is measured by how well your site provides users with what they are looking for after your ad is clicked. AdWords analyzes your landing page to measure relevance between your ads and site content. If the site provides a poor user experience – your Ad Rank, CPC, and positioning will all be affected negatively.

There are important variables to measure and implement when optimizing your landing page:

Improve speed! If your page is not fast enough customers will not wait
Use these tools to measure your page’s load speed: PageSpeed insights, GTMetrix
Maximize relevancy between ad content and landing page – e.g.: a user searches for “black Ray-Ban sunglasses” – provide the link to the page offering that specific brand/style of sunglasses, rather than an “accessories” page or a product page with unrelated characteristics
Less is More: provide users with a clean, uncluttered page experience – make it easy to navigate products/options with a streamlined cart to checkout process

You are now on your way to making the grade. Improve your Quality Score and as a result – improve your business!

Here, at AdScale, we have developed a tool for tracking your Quality Score. Our platform makes this task ultra-simple. For the DIYers, this also can be accomplished using an AdWords script that will keep track of your account’s scores.