Your e-commerce strategy isn’t complete unless it includes video

But the most important thing that marketers and advertisers can bring with them into e-commerce is creativity. Not just creativity in design and visuals, but new and innovative approaches to how just about anything is done in the retail space.

Content creation

Very few brands employ no video content whatsoever. Video is an incredibly engaging medium and can drive a great deal of revenue if you do it right.

Video has always played a large role in the social media space, but now it’s becoming even more prevalent, and important to use correctly, with the use of Google Ads and Performance Max (PMax).

PMax allows users to create one streamlined campaign, tied to multiple key business goals, by using machine learning to continuously improve performance across a variety of Google channels such as Discover, Display, Gmail and YouTube.

PMax requires you to create a new kind of video content. You can’t just repurpose existing social media videos and expect them to have an impact.

You can, however, adapt the video content that you already have to make it more appropriate for use with PMax. Not building videos with the automation capability of PMax in mind will reduce the ways that you can efficiently repurpose and employ that content to maximize potential business gains later on.

Google Creative Studio will house all of your assets (static creative and video files), and allow for edits and adaptations to be made there. It’s a real cost-saver and a good place to start; amending the assets you already have on hand, and enabling you to creatively employ existing collateral in a new and effective manner.

Campaign structure

Google is championing a holistic, automated approach to modern search, where multiple elements are grouped together to enrich users’ experiences and understanding.

Far too many practitioners in our area are reluctant to transition toward this new approach to search, and still find themselves dependent and reliant upon the granularity offered by previous structures. They’re afraid of moving away from single keyword ad groups and granular controls over their campaigns.

But there’s still a degree of being able to do that with new campaign types and Google’s direction of travel (particularly regarding the retail space and shopping).

Maximizing profitability

The launch of PMax should encourage everyone to start taking a more creative and holistic approach to paid media marketing and inspire e-commerce businesses to re-examine how they structure their campaigns to maximize profitability.

A common mistake is thinking that this amalgamation prevents any deeper campaign focuses; PMax allows businesses to drill down into campaign structure at a granular level so they can use the tool to creatively examine and employ more campaign elements than just product category splits or product level splits. Businesses can build campaigns using factors such as average order values and ASPs to help generate more profit and drive down margins.

In this day and age, with tools like PMax at your disposal, you should be using elements such as margin and profit to structure your campaigns. This creative approach to campaign structure allows retailers to get the most revenue out of products, and presents opportunities to apply creative approaches to paid media campaigns that extend outside of the digital or simply ‘bidding’ sphere.

At Found, we’ve been encouraging retailers to start considering offline elements when bidding. We don’t always think to look at total margin or profitability when bidding, but taking it into account can help drive performance even further and do so in a more efficient (and even more profitable) way than you might have considered before.

For more dispatches from the frontiers of selling online, head over to our e-commerce deep dive hub.