The core foundations of online advertising

By Andrew Richardson, Unearth Marketing

My online traffic is up, but my revenue has stayed the same. Am I doing something wrong? We hear variations on this statement at least twice a week from prospective clients: retailers who want to increase revenue through their website, but aren’t getting the results they hope for even after dabbling in Google Adwords.

Unfortunately, the truth is you can’t just throw money at advertising and hope it works without building the core foundations beforehand. In this article, I’m going to run you through some core fundamentals of building a sustainable online presence.

Create an amazing customer experience
Customers come to your web page for two reasons: to learn more and to find the best price. Imparting your fountain of knowledge into your product copy not only increases your Google Quality Score and improves search engine rankings, but shows a customer you’re an authentic and trustworthy voice in your field. Forget the automatically uploaded supplier copy and go custom. It’ll do wonders.

Making your product copy compelling for its intended audience is essential to organic traffic. The longer someone spends scrolling on your page, the higher you rank in search results – so if you’re writing about a step-through town bike, make it relatable.

Organic clicks return a 1.5% e-commerce conversion rate (on average), compared to paid ads which return 0.2%. Build that foundation as a long term investment and watch your web traffic grow.

Tip: get staff members to write about their favourite products and provide examples of how they’ve used the product. Consumers are always searching for more information, and if you can prove that said product has solved a problem, then that hesitancy to purchase just disappears.

Understand your audience
Whilst it’s easy to understand your customer from face-to-face interactions, getting to know your audience from behind a screen has become almost impossible without the right tracking tools. Ensuring your Google Analytics account is set up correctly and tracking the right metrics is a great start, but knowing how to act on that data is where most fall behind. But hey, that’s for another edition…

Tip: set up audience tracking through Google Tag Manager, connect your audience source through Google Ads and feed your Google Analytics account in Google Ads. Leave it to collect data for a month and then start to advertise based on your custom audience. You’ll thank me later. 

If you’re looking to really nail down your audience and don’t know where to start, get in touch at andrew@weareunearth.com