I have spoken with many entrepreneurs over the past year. I noticed one commonality between them – they all want to pay as little as possible to get their business off the ground. They tend to focus exclusively on drawing visitors through SEO and social media. They are either too scared to invest money in paid traffic or would rather have a very high profit margin than a scalable business.
Avoiding paid traffic entirely can be a huge mistake. You can generate a much steadier stream of income, scale your business more and test your ecommerce landing pages better with AdWords, Facebook ads and other forms of paid traffic.
However, scaling your ecommerce business with paid traffic isn’t easy. You need to follow these tips to create an ecommerce business model that incorporates paid traffic.
Don’t “Settle” With a Campaign – Always Keep Testing
While I have worked with affiliate marketers and ecommerce sites, I found that many marketers stop testing new variables after they hit a decent ROI. This is a big mistake for a couple of reasons:
- Making small changes can have a profound impact on your ROI.
- Campaigns on many traffic sources will burn out eventually. A PPC campaign on Adwords may last for years, because you will have a steady supply of new visitors. On the other hand, media buys, Facebook ads and many other types of traffic are going to burn out eventually. Even on AdWords, your campaigns may stop converting if you aren’t using evergreen ads.
The only solution is to keep testing. Test new ads, landing pages, traffic sources and offer deals. You will eventually find something that clicks.
Stick to One Traffic Source to Start
If you find a traffic source that seems to be working, you will want to stick with and scale as much as you possibly can. If you are generating a $100 a day profit with AdWords, you can easily boost it to $1,000 a day by testing new variables, scaling your traffic and learning more about the nuances of the platform.
Learning a new traffic source is tough. Facebook and PPV ads are totally different from AdWords, so don’t start using them until you know you have squeezed every penny you can out of AdWords first.
Start by Testing the Most Important Variables
Some variables have a much bigger impact on the performance of your campaigns than others. You want to focus on the factors that will be most likely to affect your ROI. According to David Ford of AffPlayBook, Tim Ash of SiteTurners, and other experts, you should focus on the following variables first:
- Landing page styles
- Ad formats
- Products you are selling
After testing these factors, you can start running split-tests on other variables, such as your headline copy, images and Call-to-Action buttons. These variables can have a profound impact on your campaign as well, but not usually enough to turn a campaign that is losing money into a rip-roaring winner.
Fine-Tune Your Targeting
Whether you are using AdWords, Facebook, PPV, or media buys, perfecting your targeting is key to creating highly profitable campaigns. There are many details that you need to learn. For example, in AdWords, most people only focus on choosing the right keywords. However, they can also optimize their targeting with:
- Negative targeting keywords
- Day-parting
- Using gender and age targeting
- Geotargeting
You will need a good tracking platform to test these variables and optimize accordingly. Once you have been able to prioritize these variables in your paid advertising campaigns, then you will be able to generate a significantly better ROI on your ad spend.