If you don’t know what Google Analytics is and you want to see how you could take advantage of it in your ecommerce, this is the article for you.

Why use Google Analytics in your ecommerce?

With this tool, you will be able to analyse (among many other things):

• Which pages and products of your ecommerce are the most popular
• Of the people that add products to the cart, how many complete the purchase and how many abandon it halfway through.
• At which phase of the checkout do you lose the most users
• Which is the main channel that generates traffic
• Which channel generates the most sales for you. You will be able to find out, for example, whether users coming from Facebook Ads campaigns or those coming from organic Google searches buy the most.

All this data will help you to make decisions: increase the budget of the campaigns that generate the most sales, change copies of pages that don’t work, advertise products with a good sales ratio, and much more.

How to configure Google Analytics in your ecommerce

To configure Google Analytics, you need to have a Google account. If you don’t already have one, start here. You will use this account for all Google services, including Gmail, Analytics and Drive.

Once you have your account, you have to synchronise it with your ecommerce. Here we tell you how to do it on some of the main ecommerce platforms on the market:

• How to configure Google Analytics in Shopify
• How to configure Google Analytics in PrestaShop
• How to configure Google Analytics in WooCommerce

Some KPIs and metrics that you should control using Google Analytics

There are several basic KPIs that you should monitor using Google Analytics in your ecommerce.

Let us explain some of the most relevant ones:

• The conversion rate: The number of users that complete a purchase vs the total number of users of your website. It is important to constantly optimise your ecommerce to grow this number.
• The Average Order Value (AOV): The Average Order Value is the average cart of your ecommerce. Your goal will always be to increase this figure, through techniques like cross-selling or up-selling. You will also need to bear this in mind when establishing the price from which you offer free shipping.
• The cart abandonment rate: A key figure: of all the users that add something to the cart, how many leave without completing the purchase? It is normal for this rate to be high, and the average is approximately 80% abandonment (although it varies depending on the sector).
• Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR): The percentage of buyers that return to your website to make another purchase. If the customer is satisfied with the purchase process, shipping and the product, it is likely they will buy from you again. Of course, you always need to remind them to do so via email marketing campaigns, for example.
• Performance by channel: With Google Analytics, you can analyse what conversion rate and what benefits each purchasing channel generates for you (social media, paid campaigns, organic…). This will help you to make decisions about where to focus your efforts and your budget.

The arrival of Google Analytics 4

In October 2021, Google announced the arrival of Google Analytics 4, a completely new platform that will replace Universal Analytics (UA, the current Google Analytics).

From that date, if you want to set up your website with Analytics, it will be created in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) by default. You can, however, tell it to create it on the previous version of the platform. In doing so, it will create two versions for you: one on the old platform and one on the new one.

UA will continue to be available until July 1st 2023. After that, you will only be able to use GA4.

What updates are included in Google Analytics 4?

We need to get a little technical to explain this: The main difference between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 is the data model they use:

👉 Universal Analytics is based on sessions and page views.

👉 Google Analytics 4 is based on events and parameters.

A session is a set of interactions that a user carries out on a website within a time slot. One single session may include different page views.

In GA4, any interaction a user carries out is considered an event. Whether a page view, a transaction, whatever it is. They all become events. In turn, these events can include parameters.

Events in GA4 can be automatic (the platform creates them once you register your website) or personalised by the user.

Why start using Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is not a simple tool to use. You will need time to learn to use it and to get the most out of it (and more so with Google Analytics 4, which is even more complicated).

Our recommendation: If you have an ecommerce and still don’t know how to use Google Analytics, take some training in this tool. There are hundreds of free videos available, as well as online courses that you can take and that will help you to gain a better understanding of how it works.

La entrada Google Analytics for Ecommerce: What is it and how can it help your business aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

Have you ever done a Google search and been shown a series of products at the top of the screen? That’s Google Shopping, the ecommerce tool that Google offers businesses to get closer to their customers in the most direct way. Some of these ecommerce sites already have a dropshipping store with BigBuy.

In the tutorial How to sell BigBuy Products through Google Shopping we offer valuable information on how to start selling in Google Shopping. We recommend that you take a look at this if you are thinking about using this handy tool. It works really well as long as you do the work and optimise campaigns efficiently (and that includes dropshipping stores such as BigBuy).

But let’s go through this step by step. How do I start selling on Google Shopping? First of all you will have to get to know the tool through which sales are managed in Google Shopping: the Google Merchant Center.

What Google Merchant Center is and how it works

Google Merchant Center is the tool that Google provides for the creation of Google Shopping campaigns. We can link to our Google Ads account or we can create a Google account from scratch. In any event, we must keep in mind that we have to verify the domain through Google Webmaster tools.

The information about our dropshipping store will be extracted from the Google Merchant Center when selling on Google Shopping. Google Shopping is the Google platform where our potential customers are going to find us.

To set up a Google Merchant Center account, verify it and create the data feed, (or our catalogue for example) you will have to follow a few simple steps.

How do I create my Google Merchant Center account?

The first thing we have to do to start selling on Google Shopping is to enter the Merchant Center and register. To do this we only need to click on “Register” and fill in the data as requested.

• We must correctly select the country where our online store operates from and keep in mind that to sell on Google Shopping we must make shipments to the entirety of Spain, as they do not specify according to region.

• Your store name may not contain promotional information, or any additional suffixes (such as Inc., SL, TM, or the like). It must be something short that represents the name of your business.

• If your dropshipping store sells products relating to adult content, it is important to tick the appropriate box and  read the restrictions that Google has for this type of content.  

• In addition to the main contact, Google Merchant Center allows us to add two different contacts: one for technical matters and another for customer service. This point is very important if our dropshipping store has a technical and/or customer service department.

By clicking on “Continue” the terms and conditions menu appears, in this case concerning Google Merchant Center Spain. We click that we agree with the terms and conditions and click “Continue” again.

How to verify my website

To sell on Google Shopping we must now verify our dropshipping store or ecommerce website. The first step is to enter the URL of our website.

Click “save” and the page will tell us if our domain is verified or if someone else has already claimed it. If our dropshipping store is not yet verified we must do so in order to be able to start selling on Google Shopping. We have many options for this and we can choose the one that best suits us. The usual way is to check through an HTML file. In this case, we would only have to download it from the link and upload it to our site, it’s as simple as that. If we are not sure how to verify our domain, we can consult Google on exactly how to do it, especially since verification through an HTML file may not be the most suitable method for our domain in particular.

We can also verify our dropshipping store domain through other alternative methods. The Google Merchant Center Wizard offers three:

1. Through the HTML tag. We have to be able to edit the HTML code of our website in order to do this. The first thing to do would be to copy the code that Google generates for our site and paste it onto the home page. If we want to verify that everything is correct, we must re-enter the “website verification” menu and enter the address of our domain in the “website url” text bar. If the site is now verified, instead of stating unverified as it did initially, it will now indicated “verified” with a green tick.

1. It is also very important that we do not delete the code after verification, as we would lose our Google Merchant Center verification.

1. Google Analytics. We can also check our dropshipping store website through Google Analytics. It’s simple to do, but we’ll need to have editing permission on analytics. We access the analytics account from the Admin tab, open the “account” column and then click on “properties”. From there we click on “tracking information” and “tracking code”.

1. The Google Analytics tracking code is used only to verify site ownership. Google Analytics data will not be accessed
2. Google Tag Manager. To use this method we first have to make sure that our website uses it and that we have the required administration permissions. We verify the account from the Google Tag manager and then we only need to click (returning to the Google Merchant Center once more) “verify and claim” to verify that the verification is correct.

We’re almost there. To start selling on Google Shopping we still have the important step of uploading our product catalogue to the Google Merchant Center, which is called the data feed.

What is the Google Merchant Center data feed?

A data feed is a file that contains unique information about each product, within a product catalogue. To simplify this further, it is an Excel spreadsheet containing all the data on each of the products in our dropshipping store. This sheet is imported to the Google Merchant Center and hence feeds the application which provides the information on each product in Google Shopping. This feed, as its name indicates, feeds data to Google Merchant Center.

Now that you know what the Google Merchant Center data feed is, let’s see how we can adequately prepare our product catalogue, or data feed, so that we can start to sell optimally on Google Shopping.  

Prepare your data feed to import into Google Merchant Center

Contrary to how it may appear, Google Shopping does not get data from the different products that an ecommerce site puts on sale through the online store itself, but rather through the data that the user imports into the Google Merchant Center platform. For this reason you have to be very careful and meticulous when creating the data feed, because that information is what the client will see and what will help them make the decision about whether or not to enter our dropshipping store and make the purchase.

Depending on the size of your dropshipping store, you will have to use Google spreadsheets or create your own data feed, in a .txt file, for example.

Google proposes two options to upload the data feed and sell on Google Shopping. The first is to upload through text, an option that is recommended for traders with a small inventory and for new users. With a basic knowledge of spreadsheets you can make a simple file using Microsoft Excel or Google spreadsheets. If our dropshipping store is large, the second option is to set up the data feed by uploading an XML file.

Create your data feed

1. Enter the Google Merchant Center and click on “+ Data feed” to create the file that will contain your product list. The first thing you have to consider is that there are two types of attributes to sell on Google Shopping, attributes with custom values, such as “title” and “price”, in which you can customise the information and attributes you enter with standard values, such as “availability” (in stock, out of stock, pre-order) or “condition” (new, used and refurbished) with a set of predefined options. Some of these attributes are mandatory, but others are only recommended in order to optimise and improve your dropshipping store campaigns.
2. Once this is all sorted out, we can begin to register our dropshipping store data in order to start selling on Google Shopping. The first thing to do is to select the languages and countries in which you want to sell your product. Once the name is assigned to the data feed, you need to upload the feed using the chosen method. As we mentioned earlier, there are two ways to upload the data feed from your dropshipping store, through text or from an XML file.
3. To create the data feed from your dropshipping store through text, you need to use a spreadsheet editing programme, which may be Google or Microsoft Excel. Firstly write the names of the attribute in the first row, each one must be in a column.
4. The product information is found between the attribute values with the “< >” symbols.

In this useful article about Google you can find information on all the different types of product feeds that are available, the specifications of each one of them, the number of characters that you can use, how to define it for XLM and much more indispensable information that will help you get started selling in Google Shopping.

In order to sell a product from your dropshipping store on Google Shopping, it is important to know that there are three types of attributes. These are the obligatory attributes for all products, those that are only obligatory for certain categories, and the recommended attributes for specific countries.

If our dropshipping store is created through prestashop or similar platforms, there is a regular solution for uploading the online store product catalogue to the data feed. By downloading export modules from product catalogues to .csv, as can be done with Moussiq Free, we can export our entire catalogue on a spreadsheet. And by making some changes to it (setting the attribute names in the first row or modifying the attribute values to the character size that we need) we can create the data feed in a simpler and more comfortable way than from scratch. But it is important not to simply assume, but to review all the attributes, because if all of the information is not correct, Google will not accept the data feed and certain products from our dropshipping store will not appear for sale on Google Shopping.

Upload your data feed to Google Merchant Center

Once we have created our data feed by whatever method we have chosen, we can upload it to our dropshipping store from Google Merchant Center. To do this we have to select how we want to upload the feed and choose a scheduled recovery, which should coincide with the frequency of changes in our catologue.

To upload the data feed from our dropshipping store, we have to go to the menu on the left and click on “data feed” and then “new data feed”. We can select the type of import we want to make and select the file to upload. It may seem that everything has now been done, but there is still the most important part left: that Google accepts the data feed from our dropshipping store. If we have done everything right there should be no more problems and in 24-48 hours, we can start selling on Google Shopping.

Learn how to optimise your campaigns and sell in Google Shopping by following the information in this post, and get sales and quality traffic to your dropshipping store.

La entrada Sync your dropshipping store and start selling – Google Shopping Guide (Part II) aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

Google Ads is the service that allows advertisers to place advertising on the internet and show ads only to those people who are looking for or are interested in the products or services they want to promote. This means you’ll be able to show your ad when people search Google for the product you want to sell, or when someone is browsing sites related to your business sector.

For example, if we have a dropshipping store for perfumery and cosmetics products, we can use Google Ads for effective e-commerce, so that our ad appears when someone looks for terms like “buy perfumes for men”, “online cosmetics shop” or “buy anti-wrinkle creams”. Thanks to this service it is also possible to show our ads in a blog banner where we talk about the best websites to buy perfumes or a review site about the cosmetics brands available in our catalogue.

Millions of individuals and companies currently use Google Ads to find more customers. The basis of its success lies in the fact that it is a fully measurable, effective and flexible service. In this post we will emphasise the advantages and see how Google Ads can help to increase the sales of your online store.

It looks interesting, but how much does Google Ads cost?

You pay what you want to pay, and you only pay if the user clicks on the ad. It is also possible to set the maximum cost-per-click for each keyword we want to bid for. For example, we can define that we are willing to pay €0.10 maximum (cost per click) to appear when a user searches “buy perfumes for men” and clicks on our ad.

How does Google Ads determine where my ads appear?

Google uses a bidding system. There are other factors, but the maximum cost-per-click is one of the most important when it comes to determining where your ad will rank. The advertiser who is most willing to pay (cost-per-click) for the keyword that the customer is looking for will appear in the best position.

Following our previous example, we can determine that our maximum cost-per-click for “buy anti-wrinkle creams” is €0.20. If someone is willing to pay €0.25 for that same word, then they will appear in a better position than us. If someone can only bid €0.15, they will appear in a lower position. If another competitor has set their maximum cost per click at just €0.05 they will appear in the worst positions or will simply not appear at all.

Where my ads can appear

Through Google Ads you can create campaigns that are configured to display ads in Google search results (and partners that use the Google engine in their websites). In addition, they can also be shown in what is known as the Google Display Network, which includes websites, mobile apps and YouTube videos.

How do I control what I invest?

The system allows you to set your own daily budget. If you only want to invest €0.40 per day, you can do so. If you want to invest €1,000,000 per day or more, you can also do so. If we take the example above, in the first case, you will receive two clicks and your ad stops showing for the rest of the day. In the second case, your ad will be displayed until the daily budget is exhausted.

How do I know if the investment is profitable?

Advertising in Google Ads is fully measurable. You can set the “conversions” or objectives that your website has and you can check how many and in what way users perform the desired action or not.

For online stores, the most common goal is for the customer to complete a purchase. Through Google Ads we can see, the cost, the amount, the frequency and the number of purchases that have been generated through our campaigns at all times. In this way you’ll be able to detect the strengths or weaknesses of your business and take steps to optimise the performance.

If something is not working well can I stop showing adverts?

Google Ads is a totally flexible system. You can stop, change or resume campaigns, create new ads, stop bidding for a keyword and so on. All with total flexibility and at no cost beyond what you’re willing to pay.

With this information, we can assess whether we would be interested in investing in advertising through Google Ads or not. In general, this is one of the most well-used tools in the world of online marketing and all good e-commerce sites should have a campaign that promotes its products and services using this method. As we said, it is a fully flexible, measurable and effective system. Perfect for taking your online store one step further.

In the next post, we’ll discuss how to set up a Google Ads campaign for e-commerce, the basic terms to be known and will delve into the different types of campaigns depending on where the ads are going to be displayed. All this is to help you acquire the knowledge necessary to increase your business’ sales through Google Ads.

La entrada Pay-Per-click campaigns: How to use Google Ads for E-Commerce aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

Selling in Google Shopping is a great option if you are looking for new customers and to diversify your market. In this post we’ll teach you how to create and synchronise your dropshipping store and to start selling in Google Shopping.

Now we’re going to give you some interesting options for you to optimise your campaigns.

Set your daily budget and CPC

Just as selling a pen and a computer in Google Shopping doesn’t create the same type of profits, your bids should be appropriate to your market, the products you sell, the competition, and your business strategy and goals.

That’s why it is very important that when you set up your dropshipping store campaign that you are very attentive to the results and to the return on investment. If you manage to dominate a lot of the market, your CPC may be too high and you would be paying Google more than you should, or your ads may not be well-segmented and you then may have to use negative keywords. If on the other hand there are no clicks on your ads, you may have been short on your budget and bid.

To set your daily budget and your dropshipping store CPC well, you not only have to analyse the results that your campaign produces, but also to figure out a strategy

Keep your data feed up-to-date

Selling in Google Shopping is not so different to selling in any other trade. If there is no product, there is no sale. The big difference is that in Google Shopping your customers pay to enter your dropshipping store when clicking on the ad, which means that your clients might enter your store and not find what they are looking for if you don’t have your data feed kept up-to-date.

Keeping the data feed up-to-date is vital, as well as taking care of product descriptions and using the keywords to define the product. Google Merchant Center offers optimisation tips that appear in the “Data Quality” tab. They are very useful when it comes to adding some quality to our dropshipping store data feed.

When selling in Google Shopping, it is very important that we be very precise when creating and updating our data feed. If not, Google will not display our products. We have to be sure that the URLs are real and not 404 pages, as well as paying attention to the details, such as that the currency we have selected is from the country where we are showing our ad campaign. Or if we have a plan to use Google Shopping for mobiles and our store is not responsive, then it probably isn’t optimised for mobile internet. The details are the key.

Quality of ads, optimising text and images

Google Shopping ads deserve the same care as any Google Ads campaign. Also, the texts have a maximum number of characters that we will have to keep an eye on if we don’t want our titles cut in half. The titles and descriptions should also be rich in keywords that will appear in searches, and we can also add negative keywords to avoid any unwanted matching.

Taking care of the images is also very important, as they are a key element in the success of campaigns. In order to be able to sell in Google Shopping we must upload high-resolution images and if possible that have no watermark, preferably with a white background and that focus on the product.

Modifying your bids

You can modify your product bids depending on location and seasonality. If you don’t want to lose money when selling in Google Shopping you must limit the visibility of your ads to only those audiences located in places that you distribute to with your dropshipping store. This way, you will avoid people clicking on your ads who can’t make a purchase in your store as you are unable to serve them.

You can also adjust the bid to the days and hours that best suit you. Over time you’ll be able to get to know your users better and know how they behave while accessing your dropshipping store. By evaluating your campaigns you will be able to achieve better results with less investment and work with Google Shopping in an optimal manner.

It is also important to take into account the seasonality of certain products when prioritising a campaign, since we can indicate which ads will be more or less important for our dropshipping store.

Differentiate yourself from the competition

Selling in Google Shopping from a dropshipping store is not always easy, because with many products the competition is so high that it prevents us from standing out in the market.

One option offered by Google Shopping is to include promotions in our articles. By adding promotional texts in our Google Shopping ads we can stand out ahead of the others, although we must make sure that this promotion is present on our website.

Another way to differentiate ourselves from our competition when selling in Google Shopping is by looking for, detecting and analysing new trends in our market. One of the advantages of selling in Google Shopping is that we can find out which words users have found us with, which will give us lots of clues as to how we should position our store.

In order to be able to highlight our products and to start selling in Google Shopping, it is essential to optimise the data feed and to work conscientiously with our dropshipping store information content. Get the most out of your dropshipping store!

La entrada Learn to optimise your ecommerce and start selling on Google Shopping aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

If you have a dropshipping store and it is synchronised with BigBuy, or if you own an online business which involves e-commerce, then you have probably already thought about promoting your merchandise on an online advertising platform.

Google Shopping is a great option for dropshipping suppliers and it is, above all else, a very practical way to show off your products and to increase sales possibilities. Of course this service is offered by the technology giant Google, which has fantastic results, as long as advertising campaigns are organised efficiently..

But, let’s begin at the beginning: what is Google Shopping and what can it be used for?

As we mentioned above, Google Shopping is a service offered by Google, on the one hand for internet users, and on the other for anyone who has an online store. It is a way to put items up for sale. Internet users can very easily see the product they are looking for and compare prices between the different stores which offer it. Those who run online stores list the products which they want to promote and using a bidding system by product and category, they pay Google for visits to their online store.

It is very easy to to see what Google Shopping is all about. All that you need to do is to search for a product on Google and if that product is being promoted by any online business, then a comparison of the different stores offering the product with images of it attached will be shown.

It is a very simple tool since at a glance the user can see a variety of products related to their search and filter them by price, seller, showing only new products or sort by score and opinion of other users.

Nevertheless, what we are interested in here is how to help dropshipping store owners whose store uses BigBuy to sell using this tool and that is why we are asking:

How does Google Shopping work?

Below we will share a tutorial which will show you how to start using this tool for sales, just follow these steps:

Step 1: Create an account on Google Ads and Google Merchant Center

The first step to setting yourself up for sales on Google Shopping is to create an account on Google Merchant Center. Through this tool you can enter the characteristics relating to your store as well as those of the products which you have for sale. If you also have an Analytics or Google Ads account, you can use that to create this account since Google allows you to synchronise data between one account and the other. If you do not, you can also sign up for a new account.

Once you have you have done this it is time to verify your online store.

Step 2: Verify your dropshipping store on Google

Google Shopping requires you to verify your online store’s domain name and the products which will be sold on it. You will be offered various options to do this. You can use the one which suits you best, but we would recommend that you use another essential tool: Google Search Console.

Step 3: Prepare your sales catalogue

Once your business has been verified, it is time to publish the contents of your catalogue on Google Shopping, that is the data feed. Using these Google Shopping feeds, you can enter all of the technical information of the products into the tool including: ID, description, title, product name, category, price, photo and further options all have to be filled in.

It is important to pay attention to the details which could differentiate your products from those of the competition. For example it is important to write both the title of the product and the description using keywords which are easily identified by Google and make it easier for your customers to find your products. For example: your product is a wardrobe which is called ‘Amazon’, not many people will know your product by name, but a lot of people will find it through category or type of product (in this case ‘wardrobe’).

In short, you will need to enter data using an Excel spreadsheet which will then be processed by Google so that they can show the products from your catalogue to your potential clients.

Once the information has been entered into the feed, it will be sent to Google. If this is your first time doing this then we would recommend that you use the test mode first, so that you can fix any possible errors before releasing the your final version on Google Shopping. It is important to remember that Google Shopping is not automatic, that is to say that after you publish your feeds, it can take between 24 and 48 hours or even several days for them to show up.

Step 4: Create and optimise your first campaign

Once the product feeds for your drop shipping store are on Google Shopping, it is time to differentiate and optimise your campaign.

What do you need to remember to run the best Google Shopping campaign?

• Set out your daily budget and the CPC (cost per click): how much are you prepared to invest on a daily basis and how much are you prepared to pay per person who clicks on your link? There are many variables involved here: product type, profit margin, quantity and quality of the competition… particularly at the beginning, we would recommend that you are very attentive to the results of your campaigns. If nobody clicks on your products, it means that, probably, your budget is too low and if you are hogging the market then it is possible that your CPC is too high and you are paying Google more than it is worth.
• Use keywords: we have mentioned this earlier, but we must insist! Using keywords correctly in the product descriptions can significantly differentiate your site from the competition.

We recommend that you take a glance at this post to find out more about optimising your advertising campaigns and selling on Google Shopping.  You will find some useful tips.

Step 5: Some final tips for getting the right CPC and tariffs

As with any business, the key to success when it comes to promoting your dropshipping store on Google Shopping is to know how to differentiate yourself from the competition. Here is some final advice to help you do just that:

• Work out negative key words: just as you need to make the most out of your positive key words, you must also look out for negative ones, i.e., words which are associated with your products but which will not lead to a sale. For example, if you sell trousers, the search term “how to make trousers at home” will not lead to any sales, but you will still pay for clicks with no gain.
• Work out search trends: Google Shopping lets you know which words users have searched for to find your products. This information will give you a good idea of how to write your product descriptions.
• Adjust your offers depending on the day and timings: once they start spending money in your store you will get to know your customers better, and you will know their buying habits. Look at your campaigns so that you can work out the best (and worst) times during the week and adjust your offers and discount levels accordingly, and you will be able to reach sales targets that you never could have imagined before.

Now you know what Google Shopping is and how this powerful tool works, so get going and start selling now!

La entrada What is Google Shopping? Start selling with this guide aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

We know what linkbuilding is and the different types of link construction or generation that exist, both internal (on-site) and external (off-site). In this article, we will try to define the different aspects of developing a good on-site linkbuilding strategy for our dropshipping store, ie, within our own website.

We will then define and explain the steps to follow to easily get our dropshipping store listed on Google and multiply our chances of getting a better SEO.

1. Do an SEO study that serves as a basis for the strategy

This isn’t done only for our interlinking plan, but if you are going to be executing an SEO strategy then the first thing you will need to do is keyword research, in order to determine which are the most workable keywords to use as regards your target audience.

In the SEO for e-commerce article, you can also see more information about which factors to consider when making such a selection of the most important keywords.

2. Prioritise your content through on-site linkbuilding

Here comes one of the most delicate points and into which the most time and attention should be put, as it will be the basis of a correct implementation of an on-site linkbuilding strategy.

One must first determine the whole dropshipping store structure or content hierarchy in a prior document, such as Excel, and establish the main keyword for each one. The objective is to make sure that all the links are correctly placed and to create a logical navigation from the main sections to the secondary areas, and vice versa.

How do I create this document? Follow these steps:

• Divide the online store content into hierarchy columns, ie., in the first column would be the home page, then the main sections, within them are the secondary areas, and finally the products.
• If your dropshipping store is very extensive and the job of entering all the products would be time-consuming, no problem: you can set-up the on-site linkbuilding strategy based on the categories and simply concern yourself with making the cross-selling as attractive as possible (which we’ll explain a bit later).
• Set up the last column to set the main keyword for each section, as we’ll explain next.

3. Defining the keywords for each section

The idea of defining these keywords (if possible, one per section) is to make sure that all the internal links that point to that section contain that keyword or a small variation of it in its anchor text.

When it is time to choose a suitable keyword for each section we must consider the following:

• The keyword must be consistent with the content of the section, that is, the keyword must appear in the text of that section.
• This keyword appears in the main header (H1) of the section.
• The URL of the section contains that keyword or a very similar one.

Make sure that the URL of each section or product contains either exactly the same keyword or something very similar to that which we have already set up for it.

Let’s look at an example, where our keyword and anchor text were original gifts:

• The destination URL would have to be as follows: https://www.bigbuy.eu/es/regalos-originales.html
• Also, “original gifts” should appear in the text of the page in question.

4. Set up the specific links

You will need to create the link architecture in the interlink tracking document we have created as follows:

Main section 1 → link to secondary sections 1

Main section 2 → link to secondary sections 2

Secondary sections 1 → link to main section 1

Secondary sections 2 → link to main section 2

It is all about creating a network of links from the main sections to their secondary areas and vice versa. But we don’t want to mix section links with each other, since this does not make it clear to Google which categories are the main ones and which are secondary. That is, the pages in section 1 will always point to other pages in section 1. We will not link a page in section 1 to a page in section 2.

5. Also, think of your users in terms of browsing and cross-selling

Although we have already mentioned that the main objective of our on-site linkbuilding strategy is to provide Google with an understanding of the content structure of the dropshipping store, it is also very important not to neglect our users and to make it clear where they can easily find the links they need to navigate the website.

We are interested in making the link structure consistent for users because the more pages they visit and browse in our online store, the better we will be valued by Google. Search engines take note of the rebound percentage of a website when deciding if they will put it in one of the desired first positions. Just in case this term does not ring a bell, the rebound percentage is the number of people who, after accessing your website, then abandon it without completing any action. Unlike most such statistics, the rebound percentage must be as low as possible (imagine a page with an 80% rebound. This would mean that, out of 10 people who enter your website, 8 leave without doing anything. Worrying, right?).

To reduce the rebound percentage we will need to perform a few different actions:

• Make the navigation structure of our online store easier and more logical to follow. This can be done through “breadcrumbs” for example. This term refers to the path that the user has followed from the start of the menu to the page where they then find themselves.
• Establish our cross-selling strategy. This is done through the suggested products on each product sheet.

Once we have everything ready, the ideal thing to do is to review the website as if we were a user so as to ensure that the content is categorised in a logical manner (not only for Google, but also for the users themselves).

These are the five basic phases of creating an on-site linkbuilding structure for our dropshipping store in order to help improve SEO positioning.

La entrada How to design my online store’s internal link structure aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

Creating and configuring an Google Ads campaign is a simple task. However, if you want your campaign to give you the best results, you will have to follow all the necessary steps until your ads are activated. Setting up the account and the campaign are the first steps, and in this post we will show you some guidelines that you will need to follow when launching your pay-per-click advertising.

Creating the account and billing profile

The first thing you have to do is create the account. To do this, sign up for Google Adsusing your email address and fill in the data relating to your business. You will also be asked to complete the billing profile for the account. You can make payments whichever way you prefer (in advance, by card etc). However, we recommend that you provide your account number so that Google can collect payment for your clicks directly. That way you won’t have to worry about anything else and can avoid possible campaign delays, in case you run out of funds or the card expires.

Account Planning

Before you start creating campaigns and advertisements, we recommend that you consider what type of account you will have. Google Ads has three main levels of accounts that you should understand. Campaign, ad group and keywords. With this in mind, we recommend creating a campaign for each product family, and different ad groups for each subfamily within it and that within subfamilies you also include all the relevant keywords. For example:

(Account) Dropshipping Shop Example:

(Campaign) Perfumery

• (ad group) Colognes for Men

  – (Keywords): Colognes for men, buy colognes for him, online cologne shop, Calvin Klein men’s cologne, cheap colognes for men…

• (ad group) Perfumes for women

  – (Keywords): Perfumes for women, women’s perfume online shop, Carolina Herrera fragrances, buy perfumes for women.

• (ad group) Unisex Perfumes

    – (keywords): buy unisex perfumes, unisex gift fragrances, online perfume shop, cheap unisex perfumes…

(Campaign) Cosmetics

• (ad group) Blushers

  – (keywords): Buy Estee Lauder blushes, online blusher shop, buy cheap blushers…

• (ad group) Mascara

  – (keywords): Online mascara shop, buy mascara online, Max Factor cheap mascara….

• (ad group) Eye Shadow

  – (keywords): Buy Lancome eyeshadow, buy eyeshadow, online eye shadow store.

Setting up Campaigns

The next step in setting up Google Ads is to move on to campaigns. Once your strategy is planned, campaigns will have to be created. And the first step is to select the type of campaign we want to create. In another post, we explain the various kinds of campaigns. For now, we recommend you choose “for search network only”. You will then have to choose the countries and languages you are interested in. If you want to promote “fitness” products in Spain and France, you will have to create two different campaigns.

Finally, you will have to define the budget for the campaign and your default bid (don’t worry, this can be changed at any time). To get an estimate, we recommend that you consult the Google Ads keyword Planner, in the tools section.

Setting up ad groups

The first thing to do is to name the ad group. We then need to include the keywords that we want to attack with the ads that we will create later and that will be included within this group. As always, all of these data can be modified later. Between 10 and 20 key words would be a good number to begin with. Remember to use those that your customers would use to search for your products.

Once you have set up the ad group, you will need to create the content for each one. We recommend using more than one ad so as to be able to evaluate the performance of each one as well as what will be most effective in achieving the intended objectives. When we create the text of the advertisement we should follow three main recommendations:

• Use the keywords you have defined within the ad text itself
• Make use of calls to action like “Get informed!” or “Call us!”
• Direct traffic to pages strictly related to what your potential customers are looking for.

Account Tracking

Once you have everything set up, you will have to keep track of the various campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Properly configuring Google Ads is important. But it is of no use if the campaigns are abandoned to their fates and no data and conclusions are extracted that allow one to continue improving their performance. There are all kinds of metrics that will allow you to get all the information you need about your campaigns and how to improve the performance of each of them.

La entrada Setting up your Google Ads account. Tips to remember | Google Ads Guide II aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

These days it is almost impossible not to have been subject to an email marketing action from some ecommerce site if you have an email account. Offers, promotions, corporate information … the contents of these emails can be of any kind. Email marketing is one of the most well-used in the world of online marketing and continues to be one of the most effective channels when it comes to generating conversions in any kind of online business.

According to the study Current state of marketing by email in 2016 from the Newsletter2Go platform, 98% of respondents claim to be willing to increase investment in email marketing for their e-commerce site in the future. And another very interesting study on the subject of email marketing for e-commerce is one by ADigital, entitled Research on the use and perception of email marketing. Of those interviewed as part of this research, a quarter states that between 10 and 20% of their online sales were made thanks to the use of email marketing.

In short, email marketing in e-commerce is more alive than ever and as we previously mentioned, it remains a key and indispensable channel in any online e-commerce marketing strategy. In any case, for our strategy to be effective, we must follow some guidelines that will help us to capture the attention of users, as well as to prevent our mails from ending up in the dreaded spam folder.

In this article we will give you a series of guidelines to follow when launching an email marketing campaign. Ready? Then keep reading…

Adapt to new trends

Online marketing is a constantly evolving subject. This should encourage us to be up-to-date on all the latest innovations and trends in the sector, as well as adapting our strategies and actions constantly. As far as email marketing is concerned, we might highlight three key trends for the coming year:

• Newsletters in motion: the first newsletters with animated GIFs began to appear in 2015, which had a great impact and generated good results in terms of interaction. Thanks to the general advancement of all e-mail platforms, in 2017 more and more corporate emails have animated/moving elements, either GIFs, presentations or inserted videos. However, some mail readers still do not read them well and only show them as a fixed image. Keep this in mind so that if it happens, the email does not lose any of its meaning.
• Simple and responsive designs: it is well known that that more and more users check their email using their mobile phones. Modelling these newsletters by thinking first of mobile phones and of  PCs secondarily, instead of the other way around, will be a key to success in 2017.
• Personalisation: there are more and more tools in email marketing that allow you to personalise emails so that the user receives only what they need and what is relevant.

Segment your database

As we mentioned in previous paragraphs, personalisation, not only in messages but also in the type of content, is one of the key factors for the success of an email marketing strategy in e-commerce. In this regard, it makes sense to offer content that is relevant to each group of users based on their likes and needs.

Let’s look at a simple example from an online dropshipping store for pets. One way to segment our database would be by type of pet, cat owners for example. A weekly newsletter to this segment with the latest product updates for cats would be much more effective than a generic newsletter to our entire database.

Design campaigns that add value and capture the attention of your customers

Did you know that 70% of internet users have used coupons or discounts that they have received by email at least once? Two for the price of one promotional campaigns or those with discount coupons, usually have a high success rate with customers, although they are not the only ones that generate good conversion levels.

A newsletter or bulletin is another of the most common email marketing actions used in e-commerce. This is an email that is usually done periodically (weekly, fortnightly or monthly) and that often combines different types of content, such as products, articles or innovations from the store, for example.

There are countless email marketing actions that can bring very good results. Here are some examples:

• Welcome campaigns for new subscribers.
• Campaigns for special dates: Christmas, Mother’s Day, Black Friday, or our online dropshipping store anniversary, for example.
• Informative campaigns. This could be to announce the launch of our blog or a new section of our online store for instance.
• News: products, collections, services, etc.
• Tips relating to recently purchased products.
• Congratulations on birthdays, festivities and so on.
• Customer testimonials.

If you want to know more about different types of emails, you can look at this other post on the BigBuy blog which goes into more detail on the subject.

Define your KPI and analyse the success of your email marketing campaigns

Once you have created your database segmentation lists, defined your email campaigns, designed the different creative elements and adapted your messages, it is time to launch … and of course to track the results.

After all, you’re going to get little or nothing from your email marketing strategy if you don’t analyse the results of the actions taken. There are different KPI or key indicators for measuring the success or failure of an email marketing strategy for an e-commerce store, although the best ones will be those that well define your business.

We will now detail the most important:

• Opening rate: % of users who have opened your email.
• Un-subscription rate: % of users who have unsubscribed from your notifications.
• Rebound rate: % of failed emails or those that have not reached the inbox.
• Click rate: % of clicks in the email (of the total number of mails and of those that were opened).
• Conversion rate: % of conversions (sales for example) on total shipments.

Do you have any questions or comments on how to implement an email marketing strategy for your e-commerce site or dropshipping store? We look forward to your comments!

La entrada How to design an email marketing strategy for effective e-commerce aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

Many businesses are satisfied with attracting new customers but do not worry about loyalty. This is a serious mistake since customer loyalty is cheaper than attracting them. Although that does not mean it is easy.

What happens is that a lot of the time we are not aware of the few efforts that can cost a loyalty strategy in e-commerce. Some actions cost more and others are much simpler. Let’s list some of the points to keep in mind when carrying out our loyalty strategy. With just one of them, we will be able to verify how a customer’s trust is strengthened and how we can improve our possibilities of purchase.

Customer service, the face of the company

In a physical store, the customer can receive many inputs from the company: if the area is illuminated, if the sales assistants are pleasant and if the products are displayed correctly…. The shopping experience itself tells you a lot about the company. Well with e-commerce the same thing occurs: the client draws conclusions from the company knowing their e-commerce, the stock of products, the contents of the descriptions…. If we do not make that analogy we can ignore an important point such as customer service.

Marking a loyalty strategy that puts the post-sales service in the spotlight is very important. Companies such as Amazon manage to retain customers due to the quality of its customer service, offering call quality and ease when it comes to making returns.

Personalise interactions

As we discussed earlier in this article on newsletters for e-commerce, it is very important to customize the interactions with our users.

When we talk about “personalising” we speak, on the one hand, about calling the user by their name, but also offering content that interests them. If, for example, we have a pet product store, it is a good idea to differentiate between dog and cat products, so we will not send dog products to cat owners, nor cat products to dog owners. We will focus on communication and our loyalty strategy so that each user receives useful information tailored to them. This increases our engagement and loyalty to our online store.

Use social media and connect with your audience

Not many companies use Facebook for commercial purposes as the sole objective, what it is clear is that the goal that social networks best meet is the loyalty of the public. If we offer our audience interesting content through social networks, they will not follow us for commitment, but with a real interest. Often the content does not need to be created by us, nor does it need to talk about the brand. It is enough that it is content that gives us personality and links us to our users.

In the same way, social networks continue to be a channel of customer service. For better or for worse, some users will tell you the good things about their experience (and those who have had bad ones, even more) or will talk about their experience of the brand. However, it allows many of them to ask questions or voice their concerns, so it is important to also be available to them.

Competitions are another way to connect with our audience and make them interested in our products; they also generate activity within social networks and people’s movement, so we can include it both in our loyalty strategy and in the recruitment of new customers.

Discounts and coupons within the loyalty strategy

If we want to be loyal to our ecommerce audience, discounts and coupons are a good option, as long as they are offered exclusively or only available to customers after a purchase or after a period without buying, because of a specific time of the year, their birthday….Loyalty strategies based on sending discounts or coupons to customers aim to reward the customer for their loyalty, as well as loyalty programs that accumulate points or discounts, increasing customer satisfaction and the possibility of repeat purchases.

On the other hand, there are discounts there to attract customers that, although they are also a way to direct traffic to our website, are not within the loyalty strategies.

Private or exclusive sales

In the current market, being a VIP is very democratized, but it does not cease to please. Carrying out a loyalty strategy that rewards loyal customers with early or private sales of new products in a timely manner is something that costs planning time, but not money directly.

Planning a consistent loyalty strategy is very important to improve our online business, but do not forget that, however much cheaper it may be in economic terms, it requires time, dedication and effort, such as the development of a CRM or content that generates engagement with the clients. Carrying it out will require having to listen to our customers and know what they want. Only in this way can we carry out a loyalty strategy that improves visits, traffic and sales in our online store.

La entrada Discover the best e-commerce loyalty strategies aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.

Next, we offer a series of Google Ads-related terms that you will have to master to get the best performance out of your campaigns. This Google Ads glossary aims to help you know what you are talking about at all times so that you can best interpret the information that the metrics present to you.

Conversion

This is the objective of a campaign. When a user performs the action for which the account is designed a conversion takes place. The most common conversions (especially in dropshipping stores) are the purchase of a product or service. However, you can define more than one type of conversion in the same campaign: registering for a newsletter, downloading a PDF catalogue or downloading an app on your smartphone. A conversion could even be being followed on social networks.

Quality Score

When a user performs a google search, the algorithm gives each advertiser a score based on the bid, the relevance of the ad with respect to the user’s search and the target page. This is known as a quality score. Optimising this parameter and making your ads and target pages relevant to user searches is key to getting a good campaign performance.
One has to be very logical with regard to this. If someone is looking for a “cheap hotel in Paris” and you offer a €500 a night hotel, that person will never click on your ad. And if they do click, they’ll leave in a hurry as soon as they see the prices. Google is able to detect this and will give you a low quality score, as it also does if your landing page loads very slowly or has broken links. At the end of the day, Google is a search engine and is responsible for finding the best results for its users. You’ll therefore do better if you adapt yourself to what people are looking for, and will be penalised if you do the opposite.

Keywords

This is the list of words or search phrases that you are willing to pay for them to appear when searched for. These are usually the terms that your business’s potential customers would use to search for the products or services that you offer.

Keyword Matching

One of the properties of keywords is that one can set how strictly they will adhere to the terms searched for in a search engine. Matching can vary from “wide” to “exact”. When you set a broad match for a keyword, ads relating that keyword will also be displayed in Google when one searches for synonyms. If the match is set as exact, it will only be displayed when the Google user looks for exactly the same term you have defined as the keyword.

CTR (Click-Through Rate)/click percentage

This is the number of clicks received, divided by the total number of impressions that your keywords and ads have generated. If an ad or keyword has been shown 100 times (100 impressions) and clicked on it 3 times, the CTR will be 3%. So the higher our CTR, the better. It means the ad is working well.

CPC / CPA / CPM

These are terms relating to the bidding method being used and refer to the cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition or conversion (CPA) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). An Google Ads Bidding Glossary could be broader, but these are the basic terms to be mastered.

CPA is one of the most interesting. We derive this using a simple formula, as in the following example. If I invest €100 in an Google Ads campaign and only acquire one conversion, my Cost Per Acquisition will be €100. Instead, if with the same campaign of €100 I get two conversions, my CPA will be €50.

Once we know this, we will have to consider whether this CPA is profitable or not. In the event that each acquisition brings us a profit of €1000 for example, we could say that it’s profitable. However, if that person has only bought a product costing €15, we are clearly losing money and will have to rethink our campaign.

Conversion Percentage

This is the number of clicks divided by the number of conversions. If two users out of 100 who click on your ads complete a conversion, the percentage of conversions will be 2%. The higher the percentage, the better.

Landing page / destination URL

This is the page in your web domain where users who click on your Google  Ads ad will go to or “land”.

Ad Extensions

If a user carries out a search which is closely related to what you are promoting, Google may allow you to add extra information to the ad you have written. These are ad extensions. There are several types (call, geographical location, websites) and they show additional information relevant to the user who is searching.

Media Position

Indicates which media position your ad appears in when displayed. The maximum is 1 and the lower the value that this metric has, the higher the ad will be displayed (preferred position).

Cost and Average Cost

This refers to the total cost in a given period, or the average cost per click of the keyword, ad group, or campaign being analysed. It is a monetary figure shown in the currency in which you have set up your Google Ads account.

Experiments

This is a feature that allows you to compare how certain changes would affect the performance of a campaign or ad group. This is what is known as A/B testing in other areas. This is a very useful tool to test changes without risking the entire budget, as you can configure the experiment so that is shows the desired percentage with respect to the original campaign or ad group.

Opportunities

These are suggestions that the Google Ads system itself works to improve the performance of the different campaigns and ad groups included in the account. It is advisable to look closely at these points, because they are automatically generated and do not always positively impact on performance. In fact, Google Ads is very likely to periodically recommend that you invest more money to obtain more profitability. Investing more is a possibility, but it is not always a good idea. Examine these opportunities very carefully!

By knowing these terms, you can get an idea of the trends your campaigns have. Knowing the system and the nomenclature used is a basic task when it comes to getting the best possible results with Google Ads. Remember, we have already covered what you need to do to set up Google Ads in other articles, and this will help you to remove the element of chance from the use of this tool.

La entrada Google Ads Glossary: nomenclature and basic concepts to master – Google Ads Guide (Part III) aparece primero en Blog Dropshipping y Ecommerce para tu negocio | BigBuy.