The world is full of evolution in almost every aspect. If we talk about business, a huge shift is visible in terms of strategies, approach, and planning. Online businesses are readily trying to test, experiment, and iterate on the latest ad strategy like ecommerce ads. 

What is e-commerce advertising? 

An act of placing paid content on an online or offline property is Ecommerce advertising. A website, social media network, podcast, search engine, newsletters, or other interactive elements such as chat or instant messaging are examples of online properties. While the offline properties include more traditional forms of advertising. E.g., TV spots, radio commercials, out-of-home advertising (such as billboards), direct mail campaigns. 

These paid messages help businesses and products reach people who may or may not have heard about it. A business could aim at growing brand awareness, getting a direct response like app signup, sale via advertising campaigns. 

Types of online advertising for e-commerce 

You can always plan with one of the many ecommerce advertising strategies and networks. Based on the goal for the campaign, it becomes easy to determine the type of advertising campaign. Some businesses prefer to drive sales and revenue, or improve brand recognition, or drive website traffic, or acquire more email addresses for the mailing list. The key performance indicators (KPIs) vary for each goal. 

Display ads 

These are one of the earliest forms of web-based advertisements, also referred to as banner ads. With passing time display ads have gotten much suave with ad networks like Google. It enables a business to dynamically target people based on interest, demographics, location, and much more.  

Choosing display advertising with a “direct-response” mindset isn’t advisable. Most ads get a low click-through rate (CTR). Also, to be noted that these are typically billed in cost-per-thousand impressions, or CPM, format. Therefore, as a marketer, if you want to display ads start with a small budget. 

Facebook and Instagram ads 

Facebook for Ecommerce is heaven as billions of people spend their time on social media, especially Facebook and Instagram. Apart from this, social media platforms give a huge variety of options in ad formats and targeting. While picking Facebook for Ecommerce you can display image-based ads, video ads, lead ads, slideshow ads, dynamic product ads, and more. On the other hand, Instagram is owned by Facebook allows you to manage both Facebook and Instagram ads together in the Facebook Ads Manager interface. 

Adwords 

Google Ads for e-commerce (previously known as Google Adwords), act as a great way to show up in front of customers while they search for products or services offered by your business. This is a PPC (pay-per-click) or SEM (search engine marketing) type of ad format. Google’s popular PPC model enables you to pay when somebody clicks on an ad to visit your website. Google takes into account the following factors when determining your ad placement: 

• Keyword: It is e-commerce Google ads most important factor & surely within your control. The chosen keyword is important as it triggers your ad to appear when somebody searches for that keyword. 
• Match types: Broad, Phrase, and Exact are the three keyword match types set by Google. 
• Quality score: It measures the relevance of your ad and landing page to the user’s search query on a scale of 0-10. 
• Expected CTR: It is an analysis to find out which keyword performs over time based on Google history about the ad copy and landing page. The Ads with higher expected CTR appear often as compared to those with low expected CTR. 
• Google product ads / Google Shopping campaigns: They display when a user searches for certain keywords but you pay only when they click. But Google product ads are not just limited to text, hence are more visual. 

Retargeting 

The best way to maximize the traffic that’s coming to your site as everyone visiting is not converting. It’s a proven fact to influence people to get back to the site either by clicking on an ad or by going directly. Various digital e-commerce platforms and ad networks provide the retargeting service but Google ads for e-commerce and Facebook ads for e-commerce are the most common.

Final Thought

A digital e-commerce strategy that works well for one e-commerce business may not be effective or suitable for another. This is why testing and measuring your return on investment (ROI) on both online and offline channels is important. Before starting with e-commerce ads, begin with testing one or two specific channels with a small budget. An e-commerce digital marketing agency adroitly plans upon scaling up a small budget on ads that are converting well. It’s no wise choice, to begin with, a big budget and waste money trying to figure out what works. To understand what ones are most effective keep a track of the cost of CAC and LTV of each advertising channel.  

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