External Traffic with Yousaf Sekander Part 1

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Welcome Yousaf on External Traffic

Launched brand in 2016 but wasn’t aware of Amazon FBA, started with Shopify and went hard on Adwords.

Was an up and coming trend and pushed adwords to more than £15k/month.

Standard Paid Search

Did shopping ads
Tested things on YouTube
Did a lot of remarketing through Adwords as well which was very successful
Remarketing can be a cheaper way of getting recurring visits for people that fell out of your funnel
Google shopping ads can be a bit more expensive and complicated to setup

Was there enough data around for researching keywords on this trend
Lots of data and a competitor that wasn’t very switched on
The market was not saturated and so able to go hard with little competition in the first few months

Paid search at top of funnel closest to the conversion as people are typing in the keywords
The re-marketing is off the back of that

Identify the keywords to identify the hero keywords and the questions people are searching for
Very granular campaign, 10-12 campaigns with heavy segmentation
Setup all the shopping ads and threw a lot of money at it for the first 2 months to get data
The studied the conversion rates and which keywords were driving profitable revenue
Tried to A/B Test a lot of creatives for the ads
Set a cap to 3 days, any more and you’re ineffective and annoy people
Campaign was strong and decent conversion rates averaging 10-11% conversion rate
Did a lot of pricing tests on display campaigns as well as paid search
When you mentioned price on normal paid search campaigns they didn’t work as well as they did on re-marketings

Had 83% search impressions share on Google for their niche – dramatically high
Tested the waters on Amazon and it really kicked off
Within a couple of weeks the Amazon revenue was matching their Shopify revenue
You can get a ‘vertical report’ from your Google rep to give more data/metrics
Were monitoring that heavily for months
When sales on Amazon increased, Amazon had identified this trend and Amazon started bidding heavily on the trend keywords
When Amazon identifies a trend they go as hard as they can on adwords
Cost per click went from 73p average up to £2.10
Now competing with Amazon and out-bidding Amazon became very difficult
Search impression share went from 83% to 34%

Need a merchant shopping account
Need to upload your products to merchant centre
Tricks would be if you have a hero keyword of ‘red shoes’ and you have one product that is red shoes
You have one product landing page with your red shoes
Identify additional keywords, duplicate the same product page, hide it from front page of the website but show it to Google merchant centre
You can now go hard on exact match phrase for these keywords as it has hard relevance for the keywords now

Build on own land (Shopify) not rented land (Amazon)
Has several Shopify sites that are doing well with external traffic
Getting 11% conversion rate is huge, usually more like 0.x to 1% conversion rate
Being granular on paid search campaigns was a key

The landing page is also key with really good product imagery 3d visualisation
Keep the landing page simple with description, key benefits and 3-5 reasons of why you should buy this product
Same bullet point structure as Amazon but more targeted at telling shoppers why they should buy the product
Seeing all of this on a single landing has earned their trust and get a sale
Search Google for ‘the anatomy of a landing page‘ infographic

Realtime bidding through a platform
Usually done through agencies who have access to agency platforms like Double Click
Minimum spend of £500k/annum to get access
Other agencies have popped up that use this data but in a self-service model
Match2one.com
Create display ads as you would for you remarketing ads
Load them onto the platform and then start prospecting
Allows you to show your creative ads to people who have not met your brand or seen your website
Costs a bit more but worth testing

Worth spending a lot of time in going as granular as you can get in both segmentation and optimisation
Uploaded a lot of customers as custom audiences that worked really well
If you have a trendy product and list on Amazon it will eat into your Shopify revenue massively