{"id":142,"date":"2012-03-15T23:16:15","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T21:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/?p=142"},"modified":"2012-03-15T23:16:15","modified_gmt":"2012-03-15T21:16:15","slug":"e-commerce-pick-your-products-choose-your-bids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.adwiserhq.com\/blog\/e-commerce-pick-your-products-choose-your-bids\/","title":{"rendered":"E-Commerce: pick your products, choose your bids"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’re running an E-commerce shop, or are in charge of advertising it, and you’re looking at a loooong list of products. You have cheaper products, and more expensive products. Popular products and less popular products. High-margin products and low-margin products. And there are a lot of them. Analysis paralysis is what comes to mind.<\/p>\n

“I have over 8000 products on stock”, that’s what I heard from a shop owner. “I’ve tried to advertise some of them, which I knew<\/em> were popular, but it did not work. In the end my cost per conversion exceeded my profit.”<\/p>\n

Well, truth be told, you may not be able to advertise all of them without some serious automation in place. But what you can certainly do is to pick the lowest hanging fruits.<\/p>\n

What you need for this is, of course, Google Analytics, your product database, and a bit of math. Nothing fancy, nothing scary.<\/p>\n

And it all starts with profit. You want to spend less for advertising than you’re making by selling a certain product. You want a popular product, one that people search for, otherwise your ad will not show. And you want, of course, a high conversion rate.<\/p>\n

Assuming that you’ve been running your website for a while before making the decision to advertise your products, you can filter, in the Content – Pages section of Google Analytics, all your product pages. Usually categories have some URLs, static pages have other URLs, and product pages have easily-recognizable URLs.<\/p>\n

Let’s look at Interspire, a popular shopping cart software. A product URL is something like \/products\/some-words-here.html<\/a>. Which means that if you filter for pages matching the ^\/products\/.+\\.html regular expression, you’ll only have your product pages showing in your content report.<\/p>\n

\"Product<\/p>\n

Export that URLs list, and go into the admin area of your E-Commerce solution and match those URLs to the corresponding products (SKUs).<\/p>\n

You’ll end up with a list of products, and their respective pageviews<\/strong>, for a certain period of time.<\/p>\n

Get the sales<\/strong> for that products, in the same period of time. Then get your margin<\/strong>, per product, from wherever you have it.<\/p>\n

You should end up with a table showing you views<\/strong>, sales<\/strong>, margin<\/strong> and margin per view<\/strong>, for that list of products.<\/p>\n

Now, a product is:<\/p>\n