Camping Tents - $14.7k/mo
How you could successfully launch a profitable D2C tent brand, and generate consistent revenue through paid search ads.
You may already know that camping tents saw an ecommerce boom last summer, as would-be travellers opted instead to camp in their home countries.
This doesn’t mean that the market is saturated though; far from it.
The paid search landscape around tents still appears to be under-priced, and is an attractive option for anyone who could start building a brand in time for the North American and European summer.
Keyword analysis
You can see the top 50 non-brand search keywords in the space here, along with an estimate of click prices at the top and bottom of each results page.
There’s naturally plenty of demand for camping tents, with just under a million monthly searches on those keywords in the US, Canada, & UK, despite it being January. This figure rises to around 2 million, when demand peaks in May and June.
What’s perhaps more interesting though is just how cheap some of the volume is. If you wanted to start conservative and target a $0.10 CPC, you could still expect to bring in around 1.5k clicks a month through search ads ($150/mo).
Campaign build
I’ve put together a typical campaign build that you might use to sell camping tents via paid search. You can find it here.
If you’re not familiar with this type of spreadsheet, it’s basically a list of keywords and ads that you can upload into a search ads platform to start bidding on relevant keywords.
Each keyword has its own tailored ad copy, meaning you can serve relevant ads on every keyword that you’re bidding on. This might cost you hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars from a marketing agency.
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Targeting strategies
In addition to paid search, you could also grow a brand in this space using social & display ads.
Prospecting
Within North America, Europe & Asia, Facebook Ads counts some 88 million people as being interested in camping, which provides a natural starting point for running prospecting campaigns.
While large audience sizes can be good, I’d be worried in this case that the audience size is too large, and likely includes people with only slight interests in camping (not enough to push them to buy a tent).
To refine the audience further, I’d look at targeting people with more specific camping-related interests. Examples of these are the smaller campsite (11 million users) and backpacking (wilderness) (13 million users) audiences.
Retargeting
Because camping tents are fairly high-tickets items, purchase journeys may be longer than they are on other sorts of products. With this in mind, retargeting would likely play a key part of any social or display strategy.
Because prices on tents can be so high, and purchasers may not be as sensitive to the initial price of the item, it could make sense to add a small amount onto your list price and offer the same amount of discount in your retargeting ads.
This could help push users over the edge, especially if your discount code is time-limited, and help drive sales that you wouldn’t otherwise have gotten.
When planning a retargeting strategy, it’s important to remember that not all products will appeal to each site visitor. Just because someone’s been looking at a small 1 person tent doesn’t mean there’s any chance they’ll be interested in a top-of-the-range 8 person tent.
As such, it’s important to only retarget people with the products they’ve looked at, or ones immediately relevant to what they’ve looked at.
Profit forecasting
So, what sort of profit and ROI could you expect to see if you built a brand around camping tents?
I’ve put together an interactive dashboard here which lets you forecast the profit you could make from running paid search campaigns in this niche.
You can adjust the inputs along the top of the dashboard to see how different conversion rates, margins, and bids would affect your results. If you’re unsure, you can enter ranges for the inputs, and your outputs will be displayed as probability distributions.
The numbers in the dashboard rely on forecasting data from Google for the relevant keywords. They’re also just projecting profits on Google search ads, not including any other channels, so are really a lower estimate of the volume you could generate.
Creative strategies
If you also ran social or display ads, what sort of creative would you use?
For any retargeting ads, you’d want to use creative similar to what the user has already seen on your site, to reinforce the memory of the product in their mind. This is most easily achieved by using a shopping feed/dynamic ads, which can pull your site imagery automatically into ads.
For prospecting, it’s important to tap into people’s real wants. People don’t want a tent in and of itself, they want adventure, travel, and closeness to nature. Nobody is going to buy a tent for the sake of it - however they may buy one to help them achieving these ideas.
It’s much easier to sell someone on the idea, and then to sell them on a tent, than it is to go straight to selling them a tent.
Summary
So that’s a quick roundup of how you could grow a brand selling camping tents online.
The huge amount of search volume for these sorts of products, particularly as we approach the summer months, makes it an attractive prospect for search advertising. You can also use social & display prospecting and retargeting to push people through the buying journey, and bring in incremental revenue.
If you have questions on anything above, drop me an email and I’ll see if I can help.
Thanks for reading.