AdWords are where e-commerce success stands. But can stores afford them?

Search advertising is one of the primary methods of promoting online stores. However, data from the Shoper platform shows that only one in two e-shops conducts this type of activity. The reason is a lack of resources and experience.

56 percent of e-stores have never run an AdWords campaign, according to data from the Shoper platform. Meanwhile, the search engine is the place from which the customer very often starts shopping in an online store. He looks for the product he is interested in, checks the price and availability on various sites. At the very beginning of the sales funnel, stores should maximize their efforts to reach as many customers as possible. The main ways to do this are store positioning and AdWords advertising. Even if a store is losing out to competitors in the search engine results, through AdWords text advertising or Google Shopping it has a chance to draw traffic to its site.

Giving stores access to online marketing experts is one of the first steps to professionalizing e-shops. After all, the reason for not running advertising campaigns is most often a lack of knowledge on the subject, 46 percent of stores surveyed by the Shoper platform admitted this. For 28 percent of sellers, the activity is too costly and for 11 percent it takes too much time.

- Launching and merchandising an e-store is one thing, getting traffic to it is quite another," assesses Tomasz Tybon, sales director at Dreamcommerce, provider of Shoper software. - When starting to sell on the Internet, one needs to know not only about the products offered, but also about the mechanisms of Internet marketing. Not all sellers have such knowledge, and it is very important at the very beginning. To help e-shops at the start, at the beginning of 2016, the Shoper platform introduced the Shop with Orders service, under which a one-month AdWords campaign is launched and run for free for each new store. After a month, the store can continue working with the platform, run the campaign itself or outsource it to an agency.

E-shops, however, rarely become clients of performance marketing agencies due to the too small budgets they have. According to the survey, half of the stores are able to spend no more than PLN 500 on a two-month AdWords campaign. The same number of retailers are able to accept the cost of a single inbound transaction from a Google ad at 5 percent of the value of a shopping cart. 28 percent of stores are unable to determine such a cost, which also confirms their lack of experience with marketing tools.

- After more than a year of running campaigns for stores, we can see how much our stores needed such a service. So far, nearly 300 customers have benefited from the campaigns we run," Tomasz Tybon calculates. To date, the platform has generated more than PLN 4.6 million in revenue for clients. In March, an AdWords campaign service was launched for stores using the software in India and Turkey. Soon, Shoper also plans to offer stores assistance in running Facebook campaigns.

What to consider when starting an AdWords campaign advises a Google expert: - When planning a campaign for an online store, it is important to focus first and foremost on the goal. Answer the question: what do we want to achieve with these actions and in what timeframe? Is it just about increasing sales, or is it also about improving the platform's brand recognition and increasing the customer base? As in all other aspects of business, the key here is a strategic approach and long-term planning of activities and budgets," explains Grzegorz Sawicki, an expert at Google Marketing Solutions.

The data comes from an online survey completed by 413 e-shops on the Shoper platform from January 2016 to March 2017.