• You can set your own budget depending on your advertising goals. If you own an ecommerce website, you will probably want to be a bit more aggressive with your ads; therefore, a larger daily budget would be more beneficial, as you will achieve more clicks and more potential sales. However, this does depend on your market; for example, if you are operating in a very niche market, you might not need a very big budget, whereas if you stock a more widely available product, the keywords will cost more as there will be a higher number of other companies aiming to attract the attention of potential customers.
  
  
• If done correctly, PPC advertising will get you to the top of Google's results pages. Whenever we ask clients about their SEO goals, 95% of them say, "We want to be at the top of Google." Well, by using PPC, you can reach the 'top of Google' instantly - that is, if your AdWords account manager has done a good job and created a top-quality advert for your product. This means that you will get noticed, get clicks, and get sales. Even if you are already at the top of Google's organic results, PPC can still be used to support your current rankings. With your products at the top of the organic results, the PPC results AND Google's Shopping feed, customers would find it difficult NOT to click through to your site!
  
  
• You can target specific demographics. Are you planning on expanding your business to another area of the country, or even to a different country altogether? Would you like to expand and test to see if there is a demand for your product/service elsewhere? Or perhaps you just have a bricks-and-mortar shop, and you only want to advertise to people in the immediate surrounding area? Whatever your target area is, search engine adverts can help you to reach it with ease.
  
  
• You can track everything. Between AdWords and Analytics, you can see where your customers are coming from, what they are searching for, and the paths that they take through your website to come to a purchasing decision. For this, you can see if you are pointing your customers to the correct landing page, as well as if they are converting then and there or if they are just adding things to the basket and comparing prices with your competitors. You can also test the success of the keywords you're using - are people coming through to your site via a broad keyword search, then failing to convert? If so, why aren't they converting? Are they converting, but taking a long time to do so? What are they looking at on your website? AdWords and Analytics can answer all of these questions and more, providing a wealth of valuable information for you to analyse.
  
  
• You can test quickly. Do you remember the good old days of direct marketing, when you'd step through your door to find piles of marketing communications lying on your doormat? Or the days of Web 1.0, when online advertising platforms were nowhere near as intricate as they are now, and you had to sort through hundreds of pages of data? Back then, the campaign results took ages to interpret, and you wouldn't know whether or not a campaign had succeeded until several months later. Nowadays, Google AdWords allows you to see data almost instantly, and meaningful data interpretation can be achieved in weeks instead of months. You can test all kinds of strategies and factors in a very short period of time.
  
  
• You can compete with global companies. Whether you're a one-man band selling products out of your garage, a modest SME, or a multi-national company, you'll be in direct competition with everyone else when it comes to PPC advertising (something that was unheard of until quite recently). Don't let this put you off, though - sure, the big companies may have a slightly larger budget than you, but if you're clever with your advertising, you could well receive a better response than a large company that's been around for years.

• Keep your prime content above the fold. People get a lot of emails nowadays, and if your customers have to scroll down to find out why you're emailing them...well, they won't. They'll delete your message and move on to the next one. That doesn't mean you can't put anything under the fold, but you should definitely put the 'meat' of your mailer right at the top if possible.
  
  
• Brand strongly and consistently. You want to make sure that the recipients of your email know who it's coming from. You also want to make sure that, if they click through to your site, the transition from email to web page is as smooth as possible. Consistent branding is essential for both of these goals - make sure your company name and logo are exactly the same in your mailers as on your website, and make sure that they're prominently displayed in both places too.
  
  
• Use your best images. If you're promoting products in your mailer, make sure you've got decent photos of them. Images are what make people click, and the better your images are, the better your CTR (click-through rate) will be.
  
  
• Don't go overboard. There's always the temptation to cram as many different products and offers into a mailer as possible, but with this sort of thing, less is almost always more. A single clearly-stated, well-presented promotion will elicit a better response from your customers than a confusing, overcrowded jumble.
  
  
• Check your landing pages. What page(s) are you linking to from your mailer? Is the content of your email campaign an accurate reflection of the corresponding content on your website? If not, you'll probably see a lot of people clicking through to your site and then leaving right away because they couldn't find what the email promised them.
  
  
• Put some thought into your subject line. The subject line is the single most important element of any email marketing campaign - after all, if nobody's interested in your subject line, they won't even bother to open your email and see what you've sent them. Do your best to write something that will grab the attention of your customers without looking too much like spam. Oh, and be sure to triple-check your spelling - nothing will kill the recipient's trust more quickly than a typo in the subject line!

An ecommerce website probably isn't right for you if:

• You aren't equipped to deal with a large volume of orders. Opening up your business to the whole country (and possibly beyond) will almost certainly result in a lot more orders. This is great news if you can handle the demand, but if you can't, things will very quickly turn sour, especially if customers aren't receiving the goods they've paid for. In the age of the internet, disgruntled consumers can ruin a company's reputation astonishingly quickly!
  
  
• You only want to target a small area. Want to keep your business local? If so, ecommerce may be the wrong choice for you, particularly if you don't have the means to fulfil orders from outside your chosen territory. That said, we have produced ecommerce websites for a few region-specific businesses, and they've done very well indeed - just make sure that visitors know right from the outset that your site only caters to one location!
  
  
• Your products are too complicated for ecommerce. Some things simply can't be sold directly over the internet. This is often the case for companies who specialise in bespoke items; it is possible to integrate some customisable features into an ecommerce website (for example, we have built sites that sell things like personalised clothing and customised labels), but after a certain point, it just becomes too complicated for the end user. Alternatively, perhaps you'd rather get people on the telephone instead of selling to them online - giving your customers a phone number instead of an online checkout allows you to speak to them personally, provide a better solution for their requirements, and perhaps even upsell your products and make more money!