eCommerce PPC: 10 Best PPC Strategies for Brick-And-Mortar Websites

If you’re looking for information on how to grow your brick-and-mortar business using digital marketing, there’s a good chance that you’ve come across tons of eCommerce strategy ideas. As a primarily offline company, it is easy to think that these tactics won’t work or are too difficult to use.

The truth? Driving traffic to your page is just as easy with paid advertising. Here are 10 of the best Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies for brick-and-mortar websites.

1. THINK LOCAL FIRST

When it comes to eCommerce PPC marketing, the world is pretty much your oyster. After all, it doesn’t matter where someone is when they’re looking to shop online. But brick-and-mortar businesses have to take a different approach, which means targeting local keywords and ads that show potential customers that you’re just around the corner.

2. USE GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Most eCommerce strategies start with engaging on Google My Business, Google’s free tool for small businesses. However, a lot of brick-and-mortar companies do not realize it even exists. By signing up for a free profile, you can improve your overall organic search results and improve your Pay-Per-Click ads with elements like the local ad extension, including your address within the ad.

3. LOOK FOR KEYWORDS WITH DECENT MONTHLY SEARCHES

One of the most important PPC strategies is to choose keywords with a decent number of monthly searches. The exact figure is going to largely depend on the industry you are in and the audience you’re looking to target, but you want it to be at least 100 or more searches a month.

4. USE CALL EXTENSIONS

As a brick-and-mortar business, the most important aspect of your PPC strategy is to get potential customers to take action offline. Do this by adding call extensions to the text in your ad, which allows people to call directly from the search engine results page (SERP) instead of having to go all the way to your website.

5. THINK OUTSIDE OF GOOGLE

Another eCommerce strategy that you can adopt for your own paid advertising is to think outside of Google. There are other search engines, like Bing, that offer the same service at lower rates. And there are also social media sites, such as Facebook and Yelp, that all do local PPC that works.

6. MARKET CONTENT FIRST

When many brick-and-mortar businesses jump right into Pay-Per-Click strategies, they instantly want to just push the call-to-action (CTA). The truth is that using paid advertising to drive traffic to a blog, article, video, or other content can be even more powerful, as it positions your offline brand as a leader in your industry. In fact, this can be a simple way to get PPC and search engine optimization (SEO) to work together.

7. USE LAYERED AUDIENCES

One super powerful way eCommerce websites boost Pay-Per-Click success is by using layered audiences. This means choosing settings that show ads to audiences based on demographics, affinity, and other elements. You can even target key life events, like marriage and graduation. The good news is that this strategy works to target offline customers, too.

8. REVIEW YOUR CAMPAIGNS FREQUENTLY

eCommerce PPC requires constant review of what is working and what isn’t doing so well. As a brick-and-mortar business, it is important to deploy this same strategy by constantly adjusting your bids, ad copy, audiences, and other elements to help come up with a winning campaign.

9. PROMOTE WHAT YOU CAN ONLINE

With eCommerce, almost everything about the customer journey is online. However, brick-and-mortar businesses have a bit of a tougher time with this. That’s why it is important to try to promote what you can online. If that’s selling gift cards, booking in-person appointments, or doing curbside delivery, giving people the option to start the process online and promoting that option through paid advertising can really increase engagement.

10. KNOW WHEN YOU NEED TO HIRE HELP

It can be hard to jump into paid advertising for your brick-and-mortar business if you don’t have a background in digital marketing. That’s when it becomes important to hire experts, which is where an eCommerce PPC and paid search agency can help. They know the best tactics to get you noticed and have the eCommerce case studies to back it up.

WRAP UP: YOUR BRICK-AND-MORTAR BUSINESS NEEDS PPC

If you’re thinking that the same PPC tactics used by online businesses don’t work for brick-and-mortar companies, think again. These 10 ideas are just the beginning of what you can achieve with paid advertising.

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