Not Another Ecommerce Search Checklist: What Actually Drives Profitable Growth

Most ecommerce search campaigns do not fail because of a single mistake. In many cases, performance plateaus slowly, costs rise, efficiency lowers, and growth becomes harder to sustain. When that happens, it can be tempting to dial up bids and budgets.

But more often than not, the real constraints sit deeper in the foundational elements that determine how efficiently a campaign can scale.

Outlined below are areas often overlooked by teams, yet they have a significant impact on ecommerce search performance.

1) Campaign Structure

Imagine drafting a campaign structure for a skincare brand. What comes naturally is segmenting campaigns by product category; moisturiser, sunscreen, serums etc. Each campaign optimised for its own return on ad spend, as return on ad spend (ROAS) measures revenue relative to ad spend, is widely used and is relatively easy to track.

However, does a moisturiser specifically formulated for eczema treatment have the same profit margin as an everyday use moisturiser? No. This is where it becomes crucial to factor in the profitability of products as opposed to just revenue when structuring campaigns.

For example, the eczema treatment moisturiser may sell for £20 with a 70% margin, while the everyday moisturiser sells for £20 with a 20% margin. If the algorithm treats both the products as ‘£20 conversions’, it assigns an equal weighting to both.

If £10 is spent to acquire each customer, a £4 profit is made on the eczema treatment moisturiser, but £6 is lost on the everyday moisturiser after fulfilment and ad costs.

Instead, when campaigns are structured based on product categories and gross margin, there is an opportunity to bid aggressively on higher margin products and bid down on products where the profit margin is slim, shifting the focus from revenue to contribution.

By separating high-margin and low-margin products within the campaign structure, bidding strategies can respond accordingly. Higher-margin products can sustain more competitive bids, while lower-margin products require strict efficiency targets.

With time, this alignment ensures the budget is directed toward products that enhance overall profit, not just reported ROAS.

2) Feed Optimisation

Often seen as backend hygiene within an ecommerce campaign, feed optimisation is a powerful targeting tool that is often underutilised. The process includes enhancing product data in order to ensure it is accurate, relevant and engaging.

When all aspects of the product feed are optimised to their full potential, it allows products to appear more frequently and prominently in search results, increase match rates with user queries, withstand competitive auctions, lower costs, reduce instances of disapprovals and convert at a higher rate.

Key Areas To Optimise Within a Product Feed Include:

Product Title and Description

Ensuring higher intent keywords, such as brand names, are placed first. 

Images

Inclusion of high-resolution images ensures visual clarity and professional representation.

Product Category

Assigning products to the correct category ensures accurate matching to relevant search queries and sends stronger relevance signals to the algorithm.

Price & Availability

Updating the feed with accurate price and availability data ensures ads are served correctly and prevents negative user experiences caused by pricing discrepancies and out-of-stock products.

Additionally, incorporating the use of custom labels (which are not visible to users) facilitates the tagging of products with internal data, such as ‘high margin’ products.

These labels make it easy to filter and group products into a high-margin products campaign, allowing more aggressive bidding and aligning ad spend with profitability rather than just revenue.

3) Landing Page Experience

A lot of time is spent on optimising landing pages for desktop; however the mobile experience is often overlooked. As more users shop on mobile devices, ensuring a seamless mobile landing page experience is now more crucial than ever.

Key Aspects That Should Be Optimised To Ensure a Seamless Mobile Experience:

Page Load Speeds

Quick page load speeds ensure lower bounce rates and, in turn, higher conversion rates. With potential customers browsing on the go, pages slow to load are far more likely to lose their attention than on a desktop.

Accessible Buttons

Key buttons such as ‘buy now’, ‘add to cart’ and ‘checkout’ should always be easily reachable with the thumb. This helps reduce the amount of steps the user needs to take in order to convert.

Checkout Process

Allowing the option for aspects such as guest checkouts and one tap payments helps reduce friction points in the checkout process and lowers the likelihood of users dropping off. This is more important on mobile, where smaller screens, slower typing, and on-the-go usage make completing a purchase more difficult than on desktop. 

Each element of the mobile journey influences whether a shopper completes a purchase, especially on smaller screens where friction is magnified.

Optimising the post-click mobile experience allows a fast, intuitive, and mobile-friendly journey that keeps shoppers engaged, reduces drop-offs, and ensures that ad spend drives real profit rather than wasted clicks.

4) Remarketing

When set up strategically, remarketing campaigns can achieve far more than simply lowering CPCs. While it can be tempting to serve the same remarketing ads to everyone who visits the site, what sets a winning campaign apart is its ability to segment by intent.

Ads and bids should reflect the user they are targeting – was it a cart abandoner or someone who spent ten seconds on the homepage?

By tailoring messaging and bidding to these behaviours, the campaigns can focus resources on users most likely to convert, for example, cart abandoners or repeat visitors, while avoiding overspending on casual browsers.

This strategic segmentation allows remarketing efforts to drive meaningful conversions and contribute directly to profitable growth, rather than just generating cheaper clicks.

On the other hand, it is equally important to exclude users on the remarketing campaign who have already bought and converted from other campaigns. This is because continuing to target them results in wasted ad spend and can negatively impact campaign efficiency and overall profitability.

Final Thoughts

Ecommerce success is not just about driving clicks to the website and achieving a ROAS that looks healthy on an ad platform’s dashboard; it is about driving measurable, profitable growth that helps scale a business.

Campaign structures based on profit margin data, regular feed optimisations, seamless mobile landing page experience and strategic remarketing campaigns are foundational decisions that determine whether your ecommerce campaign is effective and drives profit or erodes margin over time.

If you are ready to move beyond ROAS and drive real profit, click here to get in touch with one of our PPC experts and to take your ecommerce growth to the next level.

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