PPC spend is crucial for thousands of businesses across the UK, often though there is a heavy focus on profitability and the direct Return On Ad Spend (or ROAS) that comes through PPC. However, as we know with things such as the rise of attribution, the buying cycle can be an extremely complicated thing and with this knowledge, last click has become obsolete.

When you start to delve a little deeper into people's buying behaviour you start to understand that people will interact with businesses in so many different ways. So if you only focus on one channel, it would stand to reason that you are potentially missing out on sales because of that strategy. 

Using Analytics Ecommerce tracking allows us to see how all of the business channels are performing using reports in analytics such as the Source/Medium report. This gives us a much better picture of how the overall website is performing and with clever tweaks, you can also create custom sources to take into account offline sources as well.

Once this is considered & you have built up enough information you can use the top conversions path report in Google Analytics to see how all of these sales channels play into one another, in my experience for 99% of ecommerce business, PPC is starting sales that convert on other channels. 

Therefore if you are to only focus on the more directly profitable areas of PPC such as Shopping & Search, it will limit how much you can grow as a business because it will only drive so many sales, most of which come through PPC & only offer limited amounts of extra through other sources such as organic or direct. Once these are maxed out and running at the level of direct ROAS you are as comfortable, how do you grow? 

I should probably say at this point I am only giving a brief outline of how/why to use the subjects below, it is by no means a how-to guide but I feel this is how you guys can look to push forward given what I have just discussed above, because I each of these could be a blog piece in themselves and would make this one go on forever … (& nobody wants that).

I digress because this is where the upper funnel comes in. The next steps most people will have tried but not always followed through with usually due to not understanding how to judge the performance of Remarketing & Dynamic Search. Remarketing is there to try and recapture people who have already engaged with our business, it will not always convert directly but will likely drive more of those longer path sales and you should see an increase in your direct & organic traffic as well as some direct PPC sales. Dynamic Search should be used primarily to augment your current search campaign to find the extra variations of searches you are missing out on with your current search offerings and to cover the unique ways in which people search because as Google has highlighted 15% of all searches are new searches and have not been searched before.

Then I would recommend you try to get on to Wider Display & Video. These are the areas where you will be able to become very creative not just with your adverts themselves but with how you want to target people, to really help grow/create your brand identity. We are in the digital age and you can reach people constantly, which would be impossible with traditional wider marketing such as TV advertising, also the cost associated with traditional advertising make this a much more cost-effective way to grow your brand than TV or Radio advertising. Like the rest of PPC, they are measurable & although it is difficult & other forms of marketing will play parts in growth, it is a lot easier to measure the impact of these campaigns for your business than traditional advertising.