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Find your audience, sales will follow

Customer Obsession 101: Ways to ensure that you’re attracting the most qualified customers for your business

As the race for online shoppers’ attention becomes increasingly competitive, it’s more important than ever for retailers to refine their marketing efforts to attract the right customers to their online store. 61% of marketers say their top challenge is generating traffic and leads.1

Increasing online sales is not a matter of reaching the broadest possible audience, however. Instead, it’s about reaching the right customers with the right message at the right time. Honing paid campaign strategies is one of the best ways retailers can increase conversions and drive overall sales.

Based on industry best practices, learnings from our digital marketing team, and insights from our collaboration with merchants, we’ve put together a list of tips to help you bring high-value customers to your site and keep them there.

Start at the bottom of the funnel

When in doubt, start with the customers you already have. Remarketing is one of the easiest ways to drive conversions because you are reaching an audience who has already shown interest in your brand.

Expand your message to lookalike audiences

Lookalike audiences—those people similar to your customer base—are a great way to expand your paid campaigns to new prospects without wasting advertising budget on the wrong prospects. By creating a lookalike audience through one of your media channels, you can put your ad in front of more people similar to your current customers.

Be strategic in your use of negative keyword match types

Negative keywords can help you create highly relevant pay-per-click ads by filtering out unwanted traffic before it reaches your site—saving you money on clicks from people looking for products you do not offer.

Yet choosing the right negative keyword match types is an area where our field-marketing professionals have seen some of the biggest mistakes. Broad match types can cost marketers unnecessary clicks. Conversely, match types that are too exact can prevent your ads from showing for relevant search queries. Be thoughtful about which queries your match types may be including or excluding.

Exclude your competition

Do not waste your advertising budget showing ads to your competitors. Excluding similar business can save you money, while helping you to avoid revealing all your cards to your competitors. With email campaigns, you can exclude email addresses containing your competitors’ domain name. Similarly, with paid social media campaigns, you can exclude your rivals’ Twitter handles. And with paid search campaigns, you can use one of many free IP address look-up tools to find your competitors’ IP address range, adding it to an exclusion list on your paid search account.

Download the full e-book Customer Obsession 101: Attracting the Right Customers to Your Site: Strategies to Improve Your Online Traffic for more great tips on improving your conversion rate.


1Hubspot, State of Inbound Marketing, 2018.