A PPC guide for home furniture brands
Author:
Categorised In:
Share:
Pull up a chair…we are going to cover all things PPC to help you with your company’s strategy.
Why PPC is essential for e-commerce
The home furniture space is highly competitive, with over 33,000 companies contributing to the UK economy. This makes appearing in a high position on the SERPs increasingly harder year on year.
This is why companies highly rely on digital marketing efforts to enhance their organic and paid performance. Investing in these additional channels allows businesses to optimise towards Google’s best practices to ensure their business ranks highly on the SERPs.
PPC is essential for all e-commerce businesses due to the high competition. PPC as a channel supports SEO as it can provide immediate exposure, drive traffic, generate insights and increase overall brand visibility. By integrating PPC activity into a SEO strategy, we can gain a comprehensive view of user behaviour, which further informs data-driven marketing campaigns.
Building a solid PPC strategy for furniture
Before we start building out a new strategy, there are four key areas we need to understand. These are: audience, goals, budget and competitors.
Understanding your audience
During the initial set-up of any PPC strategy, it’s crucial to understand the target audience so we can reduce wasted ad spend, increase conversion rates, and achieve a greater ROAS.
There are countless audience types in PPC, this is because you can show ads across the whole network in different formats. Below we have highlighted the top audience and targeting methods using a high-end furniture brand:
- Keywords:
- Bidding on terms that users would search for (e.g. ‘luxury oak wood dining table’)
- Interests & detailed demographics:
- Export the interests in the advertising platform and market those within the pre-existing categories (Luxury Shoppers, Accent Tables, Interior Design).
- Remarketing:
- This is a broad sector which we can segment into different groups. We can show ads to those who have abandoned their cart, previous customers, email opt-ins and much more.
- Feeding data back into the advertising platform allows the algorithm and your company to work together to enhance results. This is done through customer lists or by linking your CRM.
Setting clear goals
In the home furniture industry, the focus is often on sales, whether this is online or in-store. However, when we look at PPC, we want performance metrics to work towards. These would be ROAS, Conversions, Conversion Value and AOV. Other brand awareness metrics are always a priority to make sure you are seeing a return on investment.
To set these KPIs, we need to understand your profit margins, upcoming promotions and any peak periods. We can then work on a forecast based on an increase in CVR based on PPC optimisations and strategy.
Budget allocation
Throwing money into a strategy is not always the best approach. This is because different markets perform in various ways. The home furniture industry is very saturated. Therefore, the budget should be split between high-intent search campaigns (70%) and brand awareness campaigns (30%). We do this because although purchases are the key priority, we want to keep introducing new users to the brand, so we can then remarket these users with high-intent remarketing ads.
Planning allows us to look into seasonality and see where we should push more budget throughout the year to ensure you get a greater ROAS. For example, Black Friday and other promotional periods.
Competitive analysis
Industry research helps us understand audiences, as we can gather insights into competitor strategies. We do this by organically looking into competitors and using tools such as Google Transparency Centre. Historical customer data from the client can help gain a better understanding, as you are the product expert.
Mastering Google Shopping ads: A furniture must-have
Why Shopping ads are crucial for furniture
Furniture shopping is a visual process and users often want to see and know about the product before they make a purchase. This is exactly what Shopping Ads do.
Shopping Ads provide high-visibility, visually engaging product listings that drive high-intent sales. This leads to an increased conversion rate and ROAS. This is because you are showing users the product image, price, shipping and attributes upfront on the top of the SERPs.
Optimising product feeds
Google Merchant Centre is a central platform to show product listings and make changes to attributes. However, there are also a range of feed management tools which can make the process more seamless and more efficient. At Embryo we use Shoptimised and it allows us to set up rules to ensure all product feeds are following best practise to ensure Google highly ranks them.
Example of best practice shopping title:
Brand > Product Title > Colour > Product Type > Material > Pattern
Embryo > Harrison Armchair > Navy & Cream > Lounge Chairs > Cotton Blend > Striped
Bidding strategies for furniture
Smart bidding strategies are the way forward as we are able to utilise Google’s machine learning to ensure the campaign works towards improved performance based on conversion goals.
The top two bid strategies we would push in the furniture industry are:
- Target ROAS: Aims to achieve a specific average ROAS by optimising bids for conversion value.
- Maximise Conversion Value: Aims to get the highest conversion value for your budget.
When choosing the best bid strategy for your business we need to find out if this is a new ad account or if there is historical data. This is because we cannot set a target ROAS on an account with no history as Google will not know what to work towards. Whereas, if your ad account has been live for a while and has data in then we can implement our strategy with targets in place.
- Promotions and Sales
In Shopping Ads we take advantage of promotions and sales. This is because you can add promotional labels over shopping listings to entice users to click-through and purchase. We can also have price cards with the old price and sale price so users can see how much they are saving.
People fall for sales and promotions because they tap into psychological desires for saving money and getting a good deal. This often leads users to make quick purchases as there is a sense of urgency with a lower price tag.
Beyond Shopping ads: Other essential PPC channels for e-commerce
There are many other channels to utilise to push your brand via PPC. These include Search, Performance Max, Display, YouTube and Discovery.
Upper funnel
The channels that sit on those high shelves are Display, Demand Gen, YouTube and Discover. These are brand awareness channels that use a broad audience to reach potential customers that are not yet looking with intent. Targeting is commonly done through interest and can be layered with remarketing audiences and search terms.
Creating the ads is where things can be more visual and all upper funnel activity is creative led. It’s important to have your brand, core messaging and CTA in all creative assets so when users see these ads at first glance they remember what’s been said and who it is from.
Lower funnel
Whereas channels sitting in the bottom of the funnel are Search and Performance Max. These channels are aimed at users who are ready to purchase and are actively looking on the market. You can also use remarketing efforts on these channels to drawer in final conversions.
Search: These are text ads that let us reach people through search results. We look at the search volume for your business categories. E.g Soft furnishings, sofas, chairs, lighting ect. Then this can help inform an ad structure and ad copy.
Performance Max: This channel serves ads across the entire Google Network across a single campaign. This is where we can utilise search, shopping and creativity all within one central campaign. (If ad spend budgets are going to be low just having PMax live is a great way to maximise potential).
Analytics and optimisation: Making your PPC work harder
Analytics
Now the strategy is planned you might think you can sit back and relax, but no. We need to make sure that the results and data we gather from PPC channels is fed back into Google Analytics so we can review performance and make future strategy decisions.
Integrating with Google Analytics allows us to track conversion data based on channel groups, understand user behaviour, monitor top performing landing pages and so much more.
Google Adwords and Microsoft Bing also have reporting capabilities. This is where we can look at daily performance for core e-commerce metrics such as ROAS, CPA, CTR and CVR.
Optimisations
Optimisations are the soft furnishings of the PPC world. These are the daily/weekly changes we make to the account to ensure we continue to make your PPC work harder. These optimisations include:
- Search Query Analysis
- Ad Copy Quality Checks
- Bid Strategy Adjustments
- Budget Allocation
- Audience Targeting
SEO and PPC synergy: A powerful combination
It’s a non-negotiable to buy a dining table without chairs so why wouldn’t you sync your PPC and SEO strategy. Aligning your digital marketing creates greater search engine visibility, generates more traffic and provides valuable data insights which will allow us to make smarter marketing decisions.
A clever way for the two channels to work together is keyword alignment. We do this by pushing category keywords on PPC that perform below position 3 organically on the SERPs. This allows SEO to optimise category pages while we focus our PPC efforts towards these keywords. To make sure we are not cannibalising on our keywords we also export top performing organically ranking keywords alongside PPC keywords to cross reference performance to see where we could reduce PPC spend as Organically performance is high for some categories.
Why partner with a digital marketing agency?
You wouldn’t buy a mattress without testing it so why would you roll out PPC without knowing the digital marketing landscape. Partnering with a digital marketing agency provides access to specialised expertise and a knowledge filled team who can plan effective strategies.
At Embryo, you also gain access to our in-house developed Supertools which have changed the way we analyse data, plan campaigns and scope out the competition on the market.
Final thoughts
In today’s crowded home furniture market, PPC is not just a accessory – it is the backbone that will help your brand stand tall. The foundations to a strong strategy is truely understanding your audience, goals and competition. Working alongside other digital marketing channels to create a well rounded multi-channel approach to dominate the market from all angles.
Top things to remember:
- Shopping ads are here so we can capitalise on users intent to shop
- Upper funnel channels make users aware of your brand and capturing their data for further down the funnel
- Tracking is key to success so we can make smarter decisions based on user behaviour
- Optimisations keep your ads in check and optimal on the SERPs
- PPC and SEO complement each other when the right strategy is in place
What’s next?
Are you ready to start your PPC journey? Book a session with our talented, award-winning team at Embryo to speak about how we can help you take over the home furniture space on the SERPs.
Lets work together and generate conversions you can lean back on.
