Whether an E-commerce business is new or old, no matter what stage the business is in, you would like to grow it, wouldn't you? But how? Organic reach for social platforms is decreasing day by day and therefore running paid ads is becoming more and more crucial for your business. From Facebook to Google Shopping to Snapchat, there are multiple platforms and numerous opportunities for your business to grow. Thus, it’s up to you to make the best use of these opportunities and expand your business.
A certain platform might or might not work for a business. So it’s important to test, experiment, and then understand which digital platform generates a higher ROI.
Some of the platforms which are recommended for an Ecommerce business at any stage of their growth include:
Running paid Ads on Facebook is not only great for generating traffic for your website, but also a great option for generating sales for your e-commerce business.
These Facebook ads for ecommerce not only include Dynamic Product Ads, but also conversion ads. A good mix of both can help improve your ROI on various ecommerce marketplaces.
Paid Traffic Conversion Funnel:
Here you can either buy the product or leave the page. Facebook innately allows the retargeting of people who might have visited your page but not purchased anything during their sales funnel journey.
Objectives you can choose for running Ecommerce Ads
If you choose this option as your objective in the primary stage, you can choose to advertise your product sets or catalogs on FB. This option allows you to choose all your products listed on the website or a particular category of products as you wish to advertise. One can choose to show the name of the product, price, discount, short description, etc by choosing dynamic product sets. Also, by opting for dynamic product ads, the most relevant product card will be shown to the relevant audience, based on their last product views, add to carts, product clicks on the website, etc. This is the best way to retarget customers who did not convert.
Instead of only having dynamic product ads, you can choose to showcase a few of your business’s best sellers in your ads. Like any other conversion advertisements, you can choose to have plain product images as a single image, carousels, etc.
Instead of only having dynamic product ads, you can choose to showcase a few of your business’s best sellers in your ads. Like any other conversion advertisements, you can choose to have plain product images as a single image, carousels, etc.
Brands can showcase their products in multiple ways on Facebook & Instagram
Why Use Google Ads?
Why not? Google Search Engine has the largest ecommerce market share. E-Commerce giant amazon gets 29% of traffic from Google Search and 25% of Amazon sellers using Google ads to promote their product.
Search Engines | Percentage Market Share |
98.30% | |
---|---|
Bing | 0.97% |
Yahoo | 0.61% |
DuckDuckgo | 0.09% |
Google Ads allow you to take advantage of the benefits of online advertising: show your ads to the right people, in the right place, and at the right time. Google Ads offers several benefits, but here are the key ones:
Targeting through ecommerce ads gives you the power to reach the right people who are interested in your products and services. Using keywords, people can now search, based on their location, the devices they use, their age, and the language they speak. You can show your ads at specific times and days. Moreover you can control the number of times a user can see your ads.
You can decide on how much you can spend per month, per day, and per ad. The most important thing is you can only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
You can decide on how much you can spend per month, per day, and per ad. The most important thing is you can only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
You can set goals and track. Google Ads allow you to track when someone clicks your ad and purchases your product/submits a lead form/downloads an app or even phones you.
Google offers a lot of other products to manage your campaign successfully. Google Ads Editor, lets you edit offline. Create multiple accounts under a manager account. You can also upload offline conversion data to increase conversions in Google Ads. Google Analytics lets you know about the user behavior on your website and ecommerce marketplace.
Google offers a lot of other products to manage your campaign successfully. Google Ads Editor, lets you edit offline. Create multiple accounts under a manager account. You can also upload offline conversion data to increase conversions in Google Ads. Google Analytics lets you know about the user behavior on your website and ecommerce marketplace.
Google Shopping Ads also are known as Product listing ads. PL Ads are product-based ads that show up for product searches across Google and Google Shopping. It Includes:
To start ecommerce shopping ads on the Google ecommerce marketplace, you need to first set up the Google Merchant Center where you can feed your products, which will then be integrated into Google shopping platforms.
To start ecommerce shopping ads on the Google ecommerce marketplace, you need to first set up the Google Merchant Center where you can feed your products, which will then be integrated into Google shopping platforms.
The quality of your campaign is only as good as the information you provide to your potential customers.
The core of the Google Search ads targeting is keywords. With the help of Google keyword planner you can get the right keywords and their bidding cost average for monthly searches and competition. You can also get keywords for a specific product or service or a whole website. It’s better to choose product-wise so that it will be easy to create the specific themed ad groups.
The Best method to add Keywords is by using match types. The match types are:
Match Type | Symbol | Example | Ads may show for the following reasons | Example Searches |
Broad Match | None | Men’s Tshirt | Close variations of the keyword, related search terms and other relevant variations. The words in the keyword don’t have to be present in a users search | Buy mens t-shirts |
Broad match Modifier |
+keyword | +keyword | All the terms designated with a +sign (or close variations of those terms) in any order. Close variations include terms with the same meaning. Additional words may appear before, after or between search terms | Men’s t-shirt and jeans |
Phrase Match | “Keyword” | Men’s Tshirt | Matches of the phrase(or close variations of the phrase) with additional words before or after. Close variations include terms with the same meaning. | Blue Men’s t-shirt |
Exact Match | [Keyword] | [mens tshirt] | Exact match of the term or close variations oth that exact term with the same meaning | Men’s t-shirt |
The next important thing is the campaign structure which needs to be followed to avoid a lot of confusion and mistakes.
The core of the Google Search ads targeting is keywords. With the help of Google keyword planner you can get the right keywords and their bidding cost average for monthly searches and competition. You can also get keywords for a specific product or service or a whole website. It’s better to choose product-wise so that it will be easy to create the specific themed ad groups.
The Best method to add Keywords is by using match types. The match types are:
Match Type | Symbol | Example | Ads may show for the following reasons | Example Searches |
Broad Match | None | Men’s Tshirt | Close variations of the keyword, related search terms and other relevant variations. The words in the keyword don’t have to be present in a users search | Buy mens t-shirts |
Broad match Modifier |
+keyword | +keyword | All the terms designated with a +sign (or close variations of those terms) in any order. Close variations include terms with the same meaning. Additional words may appear before, after or between search terms | Men’s t-shirt and jeans |
Phrase Match | “Keyword” | Men’s Tshirt | Matches of the phrase(or close variations of the phrase) with additional words before or after. Close variations include terms with the same meaning. | Blue Men’s t-shirt |
Exact Match | [Keyword] | [mens tshirt] | Exact match of the term or close variations oth that exact term with the same meaning | Men’s t-shirt |
The next important thing is the campaign structure which needs to be followed to avoid a lot of confusion and mistakes.
Dynamic search ads are types of search ads that show up, based on the content of your website.
It can be used for the following reasons
Set up of Dynamic campaign based on the targeting type
Google Display Network has 2 million sites and reaches over 90% of people on the internet. Your ads can appear on a large number of websites, apps, and video content.
Google Display can be best used for Google remarketing campaigns and also to increase brand awareness and reach through various types of audience targeting.
By integrating offline conversion, google ads will help us find similar audiences which will through Google remarketing will increase the ROI.
Google Display Network has 2 million sites and reaches over 90% of people on the internet. Your ads can appear on a large number of websites, apps, and video content.
Google Display can be best used for Google remarketing campaigns and also to increase brand awareness and reach through various types of audience targeting.
By integrating offline conversion, google ads will help us find similar audiences which will through Google remarketing will increase the ROI.
Types of audiences which can be used at various levels with appropriate demographic filters
Awareness | Consideration | Conversion |
---|---|---|
Affinity Audiences |
Inmarket Audiences |
Remarketing |
Custom intent Inmarket Audience |
||
Custom Affinity Audiences |
Similar Audiences |
Customer Match |
Similar Match |
YouTube plays a significant role in consumers’ journeys online. People use youtube to discover, understand, consider, and even to use the product. So it’s an important ecommerce marketplace for these audiences on YouTube, to increase the sales on websites.
2 main strategies that will fuel a successful Advertiser Campaign on YouTube:
Choose the right format for the business goals
Type | Awareness | Consideration | Conversion |
---|---|---|---|
Masthead | Yes | – | – |
Bumpers | Yes | – | – |
True view for reach | Yes | – | – |
Non Skippable 15s/20 secs |
Yes | – | – |
True view discovery & homepage feed ad |
– | Yes | – |
True view for Instream | – | Yes | – |
True view for Instream | – | – | Yes |
YouTube plays a significant role in consumers’ journeys online. People use youtube to discover, understand, consider, and even to use the product. So it’s an important ecommerce marketplace for these audiences on YouTube, to increase the sales on websites.
2 main strategies that will fuel a successful Advertiser Campaign on YouTube:
Choose the right format for the business goals
Type | Awareness | Consideration | Conversion |
---|---|---|---|
Masthead | Yes | – | – |
Bumpers | Yes | – | – |
True view for reach | Yes | – | – |
Non Skippable 15s/20 secs |
Yes | – | – |
True view discovery & homepage feed ad |
– | Yes | – |
True view for Instream | – | Yes | – |
True view for Instream | – | – | Yes |
It’s a visual ad format for ecommerce ads that runs across the Homepage of the Google App, Google.com Homepage on the mobile, YouTube Home feed, and also on Gmail. Google Discovery ads targeting is similar to display campaigns which utilize the behavioral buckets.
It is similar to universal app campaign and Dynamic search ads, which is similar to the “set it and forget it” methodology. Here the following settings cannot be managed by the advertisers.
The best campaign structure on an ecommerce marketplace is to follow the funnel strategy with respect to audiences. Target cost per acquisition bidding strategy can be followed from day 1.
Funnel | Bidding | Audiences |
---|---|---|
Upper Funnel | tCPA | Affinity Audiences & Custom Affinity Audiences |
Mid Funnel | tCPA | Custom Intent Audiences |
Lower Funnel | tCPA | Remarketing Audiences & first party data |
The best campaign structure on an ecommerce marketplace is to follow the funnel strategy with respect to audiences. Target cost per acquisition bidding strategy can be followed from day 1.
Funnel | Bidding | Audiences |
---|---|---|
Upper Funnel | tCPA | Affinity Audiences & Custom Affinity Audiences |
Mid Funnel | tCPA | Custom Intent Audiences |
Lower Funnel | tCPA | Remarketing Audiences & first party data |
Marketplaces are intermediates connecting sellers and buyers. Industry giants like Flipkart and Amazon have shown enormous growth in the past few years. Moreover, the growth rate is expected to increase even higher post covid. It is a place to discover and purchase items and ads are an integrated part of it to give an extra boost to your product or service. With Ads, you can stand out from 100’s competitors.
Amazon helps you to find the best audience from millions of customers by targeting various forms of sponsored ads that appear on top of search and product pages. Manage your ad campaigns to know insights on where you hold strong and where you lack as it helps you stand out among competitors. Choose the right product, right audience, and grow your brand.
Improve your product visibility with targeted ads that appear in search results and the product pages of Amazon and other ecommerce marketplaces.
Improve your product visibility with targeted ads that appear in search results and the product pages of Amazon and other ecommerce marketplaces.
The first step is to choose a product that you want to promote. Advertisers are allowed to promote any of their products that is buy box eligible. What is the buy box? It is referred to as the box which appears on the right side of the Amazon product page where the customers add products to purchase.
They are high impact ads that help you build your brand and gain discoverability with a highly targeted placement available on the top of the search results, left side, and bottom of the page. It is a great way to boost brand awareness. Ads come with the customized headline and logo on the search results page. It uses the PPC pricing model, which means the advertiser has to pay only when someone clicks on the ad. It gives the opportunity to drive users to the custom landing page where the advertiser can choose which products to be displayed on the page.
Why Run Sponsored Brand campaigns?
Major differences between the sponsored products and brands are, the brand’s objective, which is to reach a wide audience by showcasing brand offering with the featured products on the product listing page. While the sponsored products are ads that are limited to one specific product.
Sponsored Display Ads can be used for three stages of the buyer’s journey – product awareness, consideration, and conversion. It is a quick and easy way to start with display campaigns that automatically generate creatives and dynamically increase or decrease the bid based on the performance. These Ads are shown in product detail pages or on the related product pages of Amazon.
Sponsored Display Ads can be used for three stages of the buyer’s journey – product awareness, consideration, and conversion. It is a quick and easy way to start with display campaigns that automatically generate creatives and dynamically increase or decrease the bid based on the performance. These Ads are shown in product detail pages or on the related product pages of Amazon.
Searches – Reach Audience who search for keywords related to the product that is advertised on and off Amazon. One can choose between manual or automated bidding. Bids are based on CPM (Cost Per Impression), creative customization that is not available for searches. Enter the bid and see the daily estimated impression and reach.
Allows you to create a dedicated and elevated shopping experience with a multi-page store on Amazon. One can showcase a brand, highlight the best selling and new products from their collection. It is free and easy to build with no design experience required. One can create and use a unique Amazon URL link to your store to drive traffic from social media or blogs.
Allows you to create a dedicated and elevated shopping experience with a multi-page store on Amazon. One can showcase a brand, highlight the best selling and new products from their collection. It is free and easy to build with no design experience required. One can create and use a unique Amazon URL link to your store to drive traffic from social media or blogs.
Design Start with the black template or choose a Pre-built design from the wide range of available templates that can be beautifully customized to enhance the look and feel of your brand.
Purchases Audiences who previously purchased your advertised products but have not purchased from you in the last 365 days. It is a great opportunity for the products that would require repeat purchases. Placement on and off Amazon and bids are based on CPM (Cost Per Impression).
Stores Insights dashboard You can use insights from your store to optimize ad campaigns. The dashboard shows the metrics like traffic trends, product sales, top product pages, and sources.
Product Targeting Choose between Categories and Individual products to target. Individual product targeting is where one can enter multiple product ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number) to set and start with targeting. The category is usually broad and ideal for advertisers who have a lot of good reviews and rank higher in their category.
Multi-Pages Amazon store comes with three levels of pages. This allows you to display your brand as a whole with one dedicated page with products that can be displayed on the following pages.
Views Shoppers who have viewed detailed pages of the advertised products or similar products but not purchased in 30 days. Placement is off Amazon. Bids are based on a CPC basis, customization is not available.
Drive brand-specific audiences and create an impact on a wider audience with various ad formats and experiences where one can map all the phases of the customer journey with highly targeted ad campaigns. With 100 million monthly and 20million daily users with one out of every 5 visitors making a purchase, Flipkart stands as one of India’s best place to market ads.
A new and highly interactive ad format that engages customers right from the image on the homepage to the purchase page. Using LookBook advertisers are free to arrange and present the products as they like to be displayed.
A new and highly interactive ad format that engages customers right from the image on the homepage to the purchase page. Using LookBook advertisers are free to arrange and present the products as they like to be displayed.
FSA (Flipkart Shopper Audience) gives the power to show ads to e-commerce profiled audiences outside of Flipkart. One can take advantage of interest-based audience segments that are highly purchase driven. The targeting is based on interest, behavior, location, gender, category affinity & buying propensity. Video, mobile interstitial full-screen ads, and custom banners are the popular ad formats available. Get real-time insights into the campaign dashboard.
Create Brand integrations and sponsorships with the video format. Videos can be shown as original content, in synchronized content, and as partnerships.
Create Brand integrations and sponsorships with the video format. Videos can be shown as original content, in synchronized content, and as partnerships.
A casual gaming platform to fascinate and drive awareness, engagement, and retention of a brand through the Flipkart Game Zone. Develop custom integrations to drive brand interaction and engage customers.
Contextual Targeting
Based on user’s device
Channel, Page & Zone
Demographic Targeting
Based on user demographics
Gender, RFM, Age bands, Parents, Users, Customers, Married, Kids Gender, Kids Age, Location
Behaviour Targeting
Based on user’s shopping behavior/ preference
Action based categories (Browse/ Add to cart/ Purchase), Preference based categories, recency, price affinity, brand affinity, banking & payment methods.
Advanced Targeting
At App versions, Handset brands and models
Custom Targeting: Targeting to custom set of users through Audience Manager
Contextual Targeting
Based on user’s device
Channel, Page & Zone
Demographic Targeting
Based on user demographics
Gender, RFM, Age bands, Parents, Users, Customers, Married, Kids Gender, Kids Age, Location
Behaviour Targeting
Based on user’s shopping behavior/ preference
Action based categories (Browse/ Add to cart/ Purchase), Preference based categories, recency, price affinity, brand affinity, banking & payment methods.
Advanced Targeting
At App versions, Handset brands and models
Custom Targeting: Targeting to custom set of users through Audience Manager
Purpose: Setting predefined goals helps the marketers to achieve a particular objective and also motivates the team towards achieving it.
Setting goal:
Using Competitor analysis tools like SEM Rush, Ahref, Moz and Sprout will help us better understand our competitors.
The most important part of digital planning involves creating a media plan, which needs to be meticulously drafted considering the campaign objective, budget, and target audience.
Branding Campaign: Reach, Clicks, Page Visit, Cost per reach
Performance Campaign: Clicks, Conversions, Revenue, ROAS
As an Ecomm marketer, you would have already known about the clients’ expectations. At the end of the day, they just want to see the sales data and cost per sales data. Whilst having all the data in the world to show the performance of a campaign, ROI and ROAS are irreplaceable for E-commerce.
As an Ecomm marketer, you would have already known about the clients’ expectations. At the end of the day, they just want to see the sales data and cost per sales data. Whilst having all the data in the world to show the performance of a campaign, ROI and ROAS are irreplaceable for E-commerce.
Returns on advertising spend (ROAS) is the most common metric used by digital marketers, which represents the aggregate revenue for every rupee spent on advertising. For example, ROAS = 3.5 represents that every one rupee spends on digital ecommerce ads will generate sales of 3.5 rupees. If you are considering selling.
Return on investment (ROI) is more of business-centric data, which represents the percentage of profit generated from digital ads divided by the digital spend. This helps the organization to better understand whether digital ads are contributing to the success of their business.
All the data is already collected and seeded in their respective platforms, though some of the tools help us to better track the user and help us to use the vast data collected from their activity. We have a vast number of tools exclusively built for website optimization, custom reporting, behavior analysis, A/B testing, CRM management, and marketing automation. Some of the prominently used tools are Google analytics, Supermetics, Optimizely & Crazy egg.
Google analytics could be described as more of a powerful analytics tool, free of cost for most of its features. This would be sufficient enough for the whole e-commerce website. Once you get used to it, you can do anything from creating a custom audience, importing it to different platforms, tracking events and tracking website activity. This provides useful insights on user behavior and helps us to track revenue generated from different sources. In March 2016, it released Google Analytics 360 packed with advanced features which you can opt for if your website receives more than 10 million page views per month.
Most of the advertisers use Supermetrics as an additional reporting tool along with Google analytics. This tool brings all the data from different sources including google analytics, Shopify and provides us with valuable insight along with data visualizations. It also allows you to export all the data received from different sources to your marketing data warehouse for more powerful reporting.
Especially when you have multiple products and wanted to test which product works for which users then optimized could help. It aims at providing a more personalized user experience. It experiments by showing different products to different users based on which ads they came from. Alongside it also has multiple other A/B testing options that could help us to incline towards driving more conversions.
A heatmap tool developed to track user activity on your website, this gives insights on which part of your website receives more attention and which receives less attention. So that we website developers can decide to optimize their websites. It helps in making critical decisions of placing a call to action buttons on highly engaging parts of your website.
Salesforce is the world's largest CRM software company which accounts for 20% of the CRM market share. SalesforceIQ is a subsidiary of salesforce for managing small and medium-sized Ecomm businesses. This serves as a relationship intelligence platform that could potentially scan email, phone calls, social platforms, and prioritize them and keep salesperson informed on potential threads.
Optimizing for Goals: Once you start your marketing campaigns, it is always important to keep track of campaign performance on your preferred ecommerce marketplace. It is recommended to monitor daily and make decisions to align with marketing goals. Not every campaign will deliver the expected results, there should always be a plan B when performance drops. Listed down some of the common optimization steps followed
Demographic & Geographic: Although we would have defined the demographic and geographic segments in the media plan, we can still exclude certain segments that aren't converting and increase bid adjustments to the converting segments. Most marketers do these adjustments after gaining enough data.
Shifting budget between Channels & Platforms: If Facebook is driving more sales than the google shopping campaigns, we can shift the budgets to Facebook if it has opportunities to scale. Similarly, if the ROI on Flipkart is better than selling from your site, we can have more budgets for Flipkart.A/B Testing Creatives: Similarly you can always do A/B testing to identify the best performing creative.
Redefining Audience: In some cases, the audience segments need to be refined when the conversion rate drops drastically given the case when no other external factors are involved. This in turn needs to be discussed with the advertiser to better understand the core audience segments of the product performing in other mediums
DV360: It is a Google Demand Side platform that enables us to reserve priority slots or inventories across exclusive collection display, video, native, and mobile inventory available in real-time. Seamlessly you can bid for reserved deals and also participate in open auction buy from a single platform. DV360 provides an ample number of features, some of the important features are listed below,
Audience: This platform provides a license for the marketers to use a wide pool of powerful audience segments which includes 1st party, Google data, and 3rd party audience at different levels of the campaign structure.
Reach: Having DV360 enables us to reach the audience present in various ad exchange networks which allows us to participate in private and public auctions, while Google ads are limited to websites having Google Adsense. This feature helps marketers to reach a wider and relevant audience.
Integration: Being google's product, it can be easily integrated with Google Ads, Google Analytics, Youtube, and also it allows you to integrate with several third party tools for advanced tracking and reporting.
Private Deals: Through DV360 we can book slots of a particular publisher that works best for our product. This provides a high level of transparency to both publishers and advertisers as the payment and performance are guaranteed and the performance and statistics are available to both ends.
Target Options: This platform provides a wide range of targeting options right from selecting inventory source, demographic, geographic, and more advanced features like selecting the position of inventory whether above or below the fold. Along with brand safety options where we can also opt for paid third party verifications like integral ad science.
A Social Media app made in India to go local and grow local.
Why ShareChat?
Massive Scale in regional audiences with 60Mn MAUs
Significant time spent on short video consumption by users.
Multiple ad placements like impact, native video, image post, exit interstitial, etc
PROGRAMMATIC READY
ShareChat users:
Tier 2/3/4 users
Entertainment focused
Internet Age <2 years
Video/Image preferred
70% of Male, 30% of Female
Age Group
18-24 years 50%
25-30 years 30%
So if your audience matches with the above Sharechat users, Go ahead try Sharechat
Especially if your products are designed or interested in a younger audience segment, this is for you. Of all the available social platforms, Snapchat has the youngest audience segment, nearly 210 million daily active users that includes 23 million users from India.
Advertising on Snapchat is a bit challenging, as asking the audience to swipe up with less than 10 seconds of our ad shown. But it has proven to drive better returns for a lot of brands with effective communication and ad formats. Also, the 18-24 generation audience having the behavior of first to adapt to the changes, the new brands look at Snapchat as an option to build their loyal audience base.
Snapchat has three main ad features Snap Ads, Snapchat Filters, and AR Lenses. Snap Ads can drive you awareness, website traffic, app install, and conversion based on the setting you choose while creating a snap campaign.
Snap Ads: Snap Ads are short vertical video ads with a maximum length of 10 seconds. These ads have higher visual attention than Facebook and youtube ads as the ad covers the whole screen. You can also use a Long-form video format if 10 seconds is not sufficient.
Filters & Lenses: We can iterate filters similar to Twitter hashtags for live events and storefront branding where we can also use creative AR lenses, encouraging to show up on selfie shots for better engagement with the brand.