Nick Whitmore

About Nick Whitmore

Ecommerce product descriptions: tried & tested advice

I really enjoyed reading Graham’s article about great ecommerce product page copy last week. It set me thinking all afternoon and all night.

Ecommerce is an area I spend most of my time working in, both on my own ecommerce websites, and my clients’ ecommerce websites.

While a lot of the people that contributed to Graham’s article represent ‘the big boys’ of ecommerce and online marketing, I wanted to share my personal experience with writing ecommerce copy.

My operations are a lot smaller than those of the contributors to Graham’s article, but at the same time my experience is just as important to ‘the little guys’ out there, running ecommerce websites on a shoestring budget.

You don’t necessarily have to add amazing functionality to your product pages in order to make sales. Perfect the copy and you’ll be well on the road to success.

Using Google PLAs? It’s time to get granular

I hate the word granular. I spend half my life tweaking and fiddling with PPC campaigns across different platforms.

The word granular invariably means spending even more time setting up campaigns. The problem is, the only way to achieve, monitor and maintain success in PPC is by going granular. The same holds true for Google Product Listing Ads.

I first went granular with my bog standard AdWords search network text ads soon after starting out in PPC. I went granular with my Product Listing Ads at a much later stage however.

When I first setup Product Listing Ads (PLAs) I had to do so with the assistance of the official Google documentation and a few third party guides. It’s all a bit fiddly.

Most of these guides seemed to encourage large ad groups for one reason or another. Against my better judgement I just went along with it, wasting thousands of pounds in the process.

How to make money from AdWords without using the experts

Back in my early days of running websites and trying to forge a living online, I stumbled across PPC in the form of Google AdWords.

I liked the idea of driving traffic to a website nigh on instantly. That was until I ran a few of my keywords through the old Keyword Tool and saw exactly how much the estimated CPCs were: upwards of £5 per click!

I broke into a cold sweat because I knew all of my biggest competitors were using PPC, I just didn’t see how it could be profitable and I knew right there and then that my sites were going to fail.

I just couldn’t afford to pay £5+ per click.