eCommerce Advertising
eCommerce advertising is by far the quickest way to bring traffic to your online store. It may be a case of pay for play, but, even with a small budget, you can still drive quality traffic to your website which may end up converting for you and making your investment back.
Driving traffic to a website can be very challenging, especially when your website is an online store and you need to generate sales. While there are many free methods to generate traffic that doesn’t require a financial commitment, they also require manual work to perform, which most people don’t want to do.
Sometimes, purchasing advertising space can be the fastest and most effective method to drive traffic and there’s plenty of eCommerce websites that solely focus on this as well. If you’re interested in trying this out, we will tell you five types of eCommerce advertising methods so you can create your own campaigns to generate traffic to your website.
Benefits of eCommerce Advertising
Get Traffic Fast
Content marketing is beneficial in the medium term, but it can take several months until a considerable volume of traffic is received.
With paid advertising, you can receive traffic in a matter of hours for the search terms you want to position naturally and have not yet achieved a high ranking. You could also use eye-catching banners and display them on advertising platforms to attract more visitors as well.
Better Segmentation
Paid advertising allows you to fine-tune your marketing actions since there are good segmentation criteria in sponsored advertising and it enables you to get the right type of visitors to your website.
This means you can define certain audiences to people who have very specific interests so your targets are more inclined to purchase from you.
Remarketing
Not all clicks are the same. The target audience will be in different emotional states during the purchase cycle and most clicks are purely informative. To avoid losing that qualified traffic, you can do remarketing actions to try and get your visitors back.
This is when you have driven visitors through advertising campaigns and they didn’t convert. If they have visited your product or shopping cart pages, for example, they can then be shown targeted ads specific to what they viewed in an attempt to bring them back to your store.
Fast Optimization
In a short time, you can test or prove which channels are the most effective for your target audience. If one landing page converts better than another, you can scale up the marketing efforts for your best pages and maximize your sales.
eCommerce Advertising Methods
Google AdWords
This is probably the most common form of online advertising that is out there. Google AdWords is a platform created by Google which allows you to advertise in their search engine results by bidding on specific keywords. We’re sure you have seen these many times before and maybe even clicked on a couple.
For example; search for “web hosting” in Google and at the top of the results page you should see small green boxes that say “Ad” inside them.
All these websites are paying a set amount of money every time someone clicks on these ads. This is what’s known as CPC or Cost Per Click advertising. The CPC will vary depending on what keywords you bid on and you can allocate a budget as well.
In order to start using this platform, you can check out this Google AdWords Tutorial for an in-depth guide on getting started.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads can drive huge amounts of traffic to your website and your CPC can be much lower than using AdWords. It also has better options for you to target a select group of people because you can elect to only show your ads to people who live in New York and like Poodles if you really wanted to. This means you can get laser-focused on your target market and only advertise to the people you want to see your ads.
You can get started by creating your business page on Facebook then make sure you’re logged into your account.
The type of ad you create really depends on your objective.
Do you just want more traffic to the site so people can read your content and subscribe to your newsletter?
Or perhaps you just want to focus on driving sales?
Facebook ads have a few options available to you so it’s really dependent on what you want to achieve.
Let’s take a look at three ways you can do eCommerce advertising with Facebook:
Bing Ads
Bing is a search engine owned by Microsoft and it is now one of the most popular search engines on the Internet. While it doesn’t have anywhere near the potential audience that Google and Facebook can deliver to you, it can still give you a low CPC and convert for you.
Quite a few people who have struggled with converting AdWords traffic have swapped over to Bing and are now seeing results.
The process is very simple with Bing, just go to bing.com and create an account with them. You may need to create an Outlook account for free to use to log in and then you can start your own advertising campaign similar to AdWords.
Once you’ve created an account and logged in, click on the Campaigns tab at the top.
Next, click on Create Campaign and choose the goal settings.
Now you will have 4 steps to complete through the campaign creation wizard.
After this, you can get your campaign up and running to start receiving traffic.
Bing has also written some tips for making an effective ad that you can follow.
Niche Ads
This is when you advertise on other websites in your niche to try and bring in targeted traffic. The most common way of doing this is through online forums and message boards since your competitors won’t want to agree to this.
Go over to Google and type what your niche is followed by: forum “advertise”
We have used the fitness niche as an example below.
Google search results will look different depending where you are in the world.
We ended up seeing a few opportunities from this search.
You can also try this footprint:
This will tell Google that you want it to retrieve results with the word “advertise” in the URL and that it has to be a fitness forum.
You can then contact the forum either through their advertising page or contact us page and discuss your advertisement appearing on their forum.
Some of these forums will clearly display their pricing and the length of time your ad will be live for.
You may also get to choose between having a banner or a text ad.
A banner ad is an image with specific dimensions that will be placed in an allocated position on a website and will contain a link to your website when people click on it. You could use your logo and edit the image to add a bit of text under it saying what your website is about or you can pay a designer to create you one.
A text ad will be a lot cheaper and will just have some words placed in an allocated position. This will also have a word or character limit and the words will be a link to your website.
Solo Ads
Solo ads are when you pay someone a one-time fee to advertise your website or product to their email subscribers. You do not buy the list of their email subscribers, the owner is simply advertising for you on your behalf. There is a bit of trust involved in this as you are relying on the owner to keep their word and not your money, but there are ways to safeguard this so don’t worry.
There are two ways to buy solo ads:
1 – Fixed Price
You pay a set price and a certain number of emails will be sent.
This doesn’t mean anything. You can get more traffic off one email than you can from ten emails if it’s done right.
2 – Performance Based
You pay a rate determined by the volume of people who open the email and click the link to your website.
A far better option since you’re paying for performance and not by email.
How To Find Solo Ads Opportunities?
Find some websites with a newsletter subscription form on it that you think would have a relative audience to your niche and send them an email. Request that they can provide a screenshot of their amount of newsletter subscribers from the platform that they use that you can see as proof. Negotiate the method of delivery, how many words your advertisement will be and the price and get started.
If you don’t want to do manual outreach to find opportunities, then consider using a platform such as Udimi. They have a collection of webmasters with their own email lists who have signed up to the platform, so you have a bunch of advertising opportunities congregated in one place.
Solo ads can actually deliver a far better ROI than traditional eCommerce advertising methods.
Email lists can be extremely targeted and if you haven’t built an email list yet then utilizing someone else’s could be the way to go.
Platforms such as Udimi make it easier because the people with the email lists are all centralized so you save a lot of time on performing manual outreach. Also, you can talk directly with the list providers and view detailed analytical data on the visitors you receive from the different email lists.
Should I Try eCommerce Advertising?
Like anything, there is always the risk of failure involved. But, just because something doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
There are so many factors that come into play in regards to advertising for eCommerce such as your niche, products, website, prices, ad copy, visitors, and target demographics that sometimes you can’t even pinpoint the problem. Ads can take a while to test as well, so you may need to try different banners and ad copies to find what works instead of trying it once and giving up when it didn’t meet your expectations.
Once you find a winning formula, scale it up and increase your budget while continuing to test other ad styles and formats. This way, you have something that is working and generating results while you figure out the next one to do the same.
eCommerce advertising is proven to be effective and there’s a reason why the revenue generated by Google and Facebook for their advertising platforms continues to rise. Just try and test it and get an understanding of how it works and you too could start receiving quality traffic through advertising your eCommerce website.
eCommerce Advertising
eCommerce advertising is by far the quickest way to bring traffic to your online store. It may be a case of pay for play, but, even with a small budget, you can still drive quality traffic to your website which may end up converting for you and making your investment back.
Driving traffic to a website can be very challenging, especially when your website is an online store and you need to generate sales. While there are many free methods to generate traffic that doesn’t require a financial commitment, they also require manual work to perform, which most people don’t want to do.
Sometimes, purchasing advertising space can be the fastest and most effective method to drive traffic and there’s plenty of eCommerce websites that solely focus on this as well. If you’re interested in trying this out, we will tell you five types of eCommerce advertising methods so you can create your own campaigns to generate traffic to your website.
Benefits of eCommerce Advertising
Get Traffic Fast
Content marketing is beneficial in the medium term, but it can take several months until a considerable volume of traffic is received.
With paid advertising, you can receive traffic in a matter of hours for the search terms you want to position naturally and have not yet achieved a high ranking. You could also use eye-catching banners and display them on advertising platforms to attract more visitors as well.
Better Segmentation
Paid advertising allows you to fine-tune your marketing actions since there are good segmentation criteria in sponsored advertising and it enables you to get the right type of visitors to your website.
This means you can define certain audiences to people who have very specific interests so your targets are more inclined to purchase from you.
Remarketing
Not all clicks are the same. The target audience will be in different emotional states during the purchase cycle and most clicks are purely informative. To avoid losing that qualified traffic, you can do remarketing actions to try and get your visitors back.
This is when you have driven visitors through advertising campaigns and they didn’t convert. If they have visited your product or shopping cart pages, for example, they can then be shown targeted ads specific to what they viewed in an attempt to bring them back to your store.
Fast Optimization
In a short time, you can test or prove which channels are the most effective for your target audience. If one landing page converts better than another, you can scale up the marketing efforts for your best pages and maximize your sales.
eCommerce Advertising Methods
Google AdWords
This is probably the most common form of online advertising that is out there. Google AdWords is a platform created by Google which allows you to advertise in their search engine results by bidding on specific keywords. We’re sure you have seen these many times before and maybe even clicked on a couple.
For example; search for “web hosting” in Google and at the top of the results page you should see small green boxes that say “Ad” inside them.
All these websites are paying a set amount of money every time someone clicks on these ads. This is what’s known as CPC or Cost Per Click advertising. The CPC will vary depending on what keywords you bid on and you can allocate a budget as well.
In order to start using this platform, you can check out this Google AdWords Tutorial for an in-depth guide on getting started.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads can drive huge amounts of traffic to your website and your CPC can be much lower than using AdWords. It also has better options for you to target a select group of people because you can elect to only show your ads to people who live in New York and like Poodles if you really wanted to. This means you can get laser-focused on your target market and only advertise to the people you want to see your ads.
You can get started by creating your business page on Facebook then make sure you’re logged into your account.
The type of ad you create really depends on your objective.
Do you just want more traffic to the site so people can read your content and subscribe to your newsletter?
Or perhaps you just want to focus on driving sales?
Facebook ads have a few options available to you so it’s really dependent on what you want to achieve.
Let’s take a look at three ways you can do eCommerce advertising with Facebook:
Bing Ads
Bing is a search engine owned by Microsoft and it is now one of the most popular search engines on the Internet. While it doesn’t have anywhere near the potential audience that Google and Facebook can deliver to you, it can still give you a low CPC and convert for you.
Quite a few people who have struggled with converting AdWords traffic have swapped over to Bing and are now seeing results.
The process is very simple with Bing, just go to bing.com and create an account with them. You may need to create an Outlook account for free to use to log in and then you can start your own advertising campaign similar to AdWords.
Once you’ve created an account and logged in, click on the Campaigns tab at the top.
Next, click on Create Campaign and choose the goal settings.
Now you will have 4 steps to complete through the campaign creation wizard.
After this, you can get your campaign up and running to start receiving traffic.
Bing has also written some tips for making an effective ad that you can follow.
Niche Ads
This is when you advertise on other websites in your niche to try and bring in targeted traffic. The most common way of doing this is through online forums and message boards since your competitors won’t want to agree to this.
Go over to Google and type what your niche is followed by: forum “advertise”
We have used the fitness niche as an example below.
Google search results will look different depending where you are in the world.
We ended up seeing a few opportunities from this search.
You can also try this footprint:
This will tell Google that you want it to retrieve results with the word “advertise” in the URL and that it has to be a fitness forum.
You can then contact the forum either through their advertising page or contact us page and discuss your advertisement appearing on their forum.
Some of these forums will clearly display their pricing and the length of time your ad will be live for.
You may also get to choose between having a banner or a text ad.
A banner ad is an image with specific dimensions that will be placed in an allocated position on a website and will contain a link to your website when people click on it. You could use your logo and edit the image to add a bit of text under it saying what your website is about or you can pay a designer to create you one.
A text ad will be a lot cheaper and will just have some words placed in an allocated position. This will also have a word or character limit and the words will be a link to your website.
Solo Ads
Solo ads are when you pay someone a one-time fee to advertise your website or product to their email subscribers. You do not buy the list of their email subscribers, the owner is simply advertising for you on your behalf. There is a bit of trust involved in this as you are relying on the owner to keep their word and not your money, but there are ways to safeguard this so don’t worry.
There are two ways to buy solo ads:
1 – Fixed Price
You pay a set price and a certain number of emails will be sent.
This doesn’t mean anything. You can get more traffic off one email than you can from ten emails if it’s done right.
2 – Performance Based
You pay a rate determined by the volume of people who open the email and click the link to your website.
A far better option since you’re paying for performance and not by email.
How To Find Solo Ads Opportunities?
Find some websites with a newsletter subscription form on it that you think would have a relative audience to your niche and send them an email. Request that they can provide a screenshot of their amount of newsletter subscribers from the platform that they use that you can see as proof. Negotiate the method of delivery, how many words your advertisement will be and the price and get started.
If you don’t want to do manual outreach to find opportunities, then consider using a platform such as Udimi. They have a collection of webmasters with their own email lists who have signed up to the platform, so you have a bunch of advertising opportunities congregated in one place.
Solo ads can actually deliver a far better ROI than traditional eCommerce advertising methods.
Email lists can be extremely targeted and if you haven’t built an email list yet then utilizing someone else’s could be the way to go.
Platforms such as Udimi make it easier because the people with the email lists are all centralized so you save a lot of time on performing manual outreach. Also, you can talk directly with the list providers and view detailed analytical data on the visitors you receive from the different email lists.
Should I Try eCommerce Advertising?
Like anything, there is always the risk of failure involved. But, just because something doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
There are so many factors that come into play in regards to advertising for eCommerce such as your niche, products, website, prices, ad copy, visitors, and target demographics that sometimes you can’t even pinpoint the problem. Ads can take a while to test as well, so you may need to try different banners and ad copies to find what works instead of trying it once and giving up when it didn’t meet your expectations.
Once you find a winning formula, scale it up and increase your budget while continuing to test other ad styles and formats. This way, you have something that is working and generating results while you figure out the next one to do the same.
eCommerce advertising is proven to be effective and there’s a reason why the revenue generated by Google and Facebook for their advertising platforms continues to rise. Just try and test it and get an understanding of how it works and you too could start receiving quality traffic through advertising your eCommerce website.