Creating our
Artist Shop with Threadless was only the first step in attempting to sell our designs. We've been reading about the challenges of marketing products, but it wasn't until we tried it that it really sank in; selling stuff is hard!
There have never existed more tools and resources to help you get started, but learning how to use these tools efficiently is key to the success of your store. Being fans of Google services, we picked AdWords to launch our first campaign. These are the 4 biggest takeaways after almost a month of launching the campaign.
1) Pick the right type of campaign for your product
When we first registered with AdWords, the service guided us through the creation of our first text ad. We were so excited about the simplicity of it all that we didn't realize that this was a big mistake. In just a few minutes we had our very first campaign. It was just a matter of waiting and watching the orders come in.
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| Great way to promote your brand... if people already know about you. We are not there yet! |
A week later and with only 15 clicks to our ad it hit us; we were trying to sell t-shirts with cute dog things on them, but no one could see that in our text ad! We quickly picked our favorite designs from our store and created a responsive ad with the exact same settings and keywords. The next day we got 174 clicks! This is what our ads look like today:
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| I think we are on to something: 174 clicks/day VS. ~2 clicks/day |
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| Much better! Now people know what we are selling! |
Choosing the right type of ad that best showcases your product will definitely increase the impact of your campaign.
2) Don't assume too much about your target audience
We thought we had this part completely figured out. We are dog owners; we know plenty of dog owners; our moms are crazy about dogs, and we are members of a dog park where we meet plenty of dog people. With Valentine's day around the corner, we were certain that we could easily target female customers 40 years or older with a few design ideas involving cute dogs, hearts and lots of pink things.
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| Like a moth to a flame! These were the first designs we used in our responsive campaign. |
Boy, were we wrong! According to the demographics reported in the AdWords console, close to 60% of our clicks were coming from male users, and our biggest age group was 18 - 34. It turns out that guys were clicking on our ad and landing in a store that had absolutely no t-shirt designs for them. Analyzing our data has helped us create designs that appeal to everyone besides our moms.
3) Page Load Time matters
Our Threadless Artist Shop offers some flexibility in the layout, colors, and products that appear in the home page, but we don't have any control over the server configuration and the performance of the site. So, when Google Analytics reported slightly slower-than-ideal page load times for the home page (most resources recommend keeping it under 4 seconds), we removed many of our product pictures, which helped us shave off time. We used
WebPageTest.org to see if our changes had an impact.
4) A specific audience is better than the entire world
When we first set up our campaign, we didn't target a specific geographic area. Just target the whole world, and we'll sell millions! Big mistake! This gave us lots of traffic, but we weren't selling anything. We discovered that the majority of the traffic was coming from countries where the local currency made our products really expensive. Because we can't adjust our prices per country, we dropped the entire world, and we are now marketing to segments that are more likely to purchase our products.
This is exactly what we were expecting when we started Doggiest: a lot of mistakes, a lot of learning. Feel free to leave us a note if you have any advice, or you just want to say hi! You can also check our store
HERE.
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