What Is Ecommerce Advertising? Benefits and Strategies

The digital ad space is crowded. In truth, 92% of advertisers use search ads in their ecommerce schedule—and they display no signs of stopping. In the US alone, digital advertising expenditures are projected to boost by 50% by 2028. There’s a obvious rationale for this surge: Digital ads are a powerhouse in marketing, helping businesses boost traffic, boost brand awareness, and convert leads into sales.

With so many businesses in the field, it’s now essential to make a strategic ecommerce advertising schedule. Level up your campaign with specialist insights from Ace Reunis, cofounder of the Australian T-shirt brand Threadheads.

What is ecommerce advertising?

Ecommerce advertising is a marketing tactic to promote your products or services in paid digital ad spaces like social media networks, websites, and search engine results. Ecommerce advertising differs from traditional advertising, which focuses on offline paid ads in places like billboards, magazines, TV, and community transit.

Ecommerce advertising allows your brand to get its products seen and purchased online. Have you ever scrolled to an Instagram Reel with an enticing product and a Shop Now link at the bottom? That’s a digital ad doing its work, and that work has a significant impact: Sales through social networks like this made up 18.5% of total online sales in 2023.

Benefits of ecommerce advertising

Mastering ecommerce marketing strategies can assist you run a successful ecommerce business, but what benevolent of results can you actually achieve? Here are some of the benefits ecommerce marketers can view from implementing a robust digital advertising schedule:

• Boost website traffic. Ecommerce marketing tactics, like prospecting and remarketing ads, can drive traffic to your site and construct your customer base.
• Generate a higher profitability on resource (ROI). Ecommerce businesses with an effective ecommerce advertising schedule view more sales at a lower ad spend, reducing customer purchase costs.
• construct brand awareness. Modern marketing tools can get your brand in front of the correct people, no matter where they are. For example, video ads on social media platforms like TikTok and sponsored Google Shopping ads assist shoppers recognize and recall your brand.
• Convert hesitant shoppers. Tailored ads can recapture and convert target spectators segments that have already visited your ecommerce website or abandoned their carts.

Ecommerce advertising strategies

• Meet your spectators where they are
• Segment your spectators
• Bid on your brand name
• commence a prospecting campaign
• Set up a Google Shopping campaign
• Use Google Search campaigns
• Optimize your website

Finding achievement in ecommerce advertising isn’t reserved for MBA graduates—Ace Reunis learned most of his top digital advertising techniques online. “My entire degree that expense me $100,000 was less valuable to me and has made me less money than one 12-minute YouTube video,” he says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. He suggests implementing these online ecommerce advertising strategies to enhance your digital ad act:

Meet your spectators where they are

The correct marketing channels are wherever your customers already are. Conduct focus groups, research industry trends, and use social media analytics and spectators analysis on your target economy to discover out which apps they adore and what communities they spend their period in. On the brand side, consider the convenience, pricing, and period commitment of different advertising channels. 

Some sites, like Etsy and eBay, limit the types of paid ads you can run. “The great thing about a Shopify store, and a direct-to-buyer brand, is it’s not like eBay; you have a lot of channels to work with,” Ace says. He doesn’t hesitate when asked about his favorite channels: “With paid ads, it’s Google and Facebook, period.” He recommends focusing most of your paid advertising efforts on these two advertising platforms, as they encompass most website and social media ads.

Segment your spectators

spectators segmentation is significant in all content marketing and online advertising. In paid advertising campaigns, it’s a must. spectators segmentation splits up your target demographics into specific silos to allow ads that better cater to niche interests within your communities. This requires some data-digging into your demographics and may require testing ads to view which audiences respond better to what content. 

Investigate who you’re talking to before you make ads, whether that’s your existing customers or cold leads. Ace’s t-shirt brand, Threadheads, targeted people unfamiliar with the brand and saw a profitability of nine times its ad spend. “Try to discover those spectators segments that are going to resonate with your communication or your product,” Ace says. “Through testing, you’ll discover those segments, and you’ll commence to view a excellent profitability.”

Bid on your brand name

Ace recommends that every recent brand bid on their brand name with Google search ads to ensure they display up immediately when potential customers search for them. If your brand doesn’t rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs), customers have to recall and search your exact URL—a huge barrier to entry for an online store.

“I can’t highlight this enough,” Ace says. “If you type ‘Threadheads’ in Google, not only do you get the organic listing, because Google has indexed us over period, but you also get the paid listing above it. You’re getting all of this real estate for your own brand.” 

commence a prospecting campaign

Prospecting campaigns, which focus on cold traffic, use social media advertising to construct a database of recent potential customers. But casting a wide net and hoping people display up won’t drive online sales. Tailor your prospecting campaign with targeted ads and relevant keywords, and nurture these leads with long-term marketing efforts like email marketing campaigns and retargeting ads. 

“These are people who don’t recognize about your brand, who don’t recognize about your product,” Ace says. “You’re trying to get them to your website. You’re trying to construct brand awareness.” 

He also emphasizes the importance of tailoring your way: “In a prospecting campaign on Facebook Ads, I might ponder, ‘OK, I’m going to leave after people that like cats and also like fashion and apparel.’ They might have never seen Threadheads, but if I put cat t-shirts in front of someone who has a cat and also likes fashion and apparel and the cat t-shirts are amusing, they might buy it. There is a better chance of buying it than just showing it to everyone.”

Set up a Google Shopping campaign

“Google Shopping is a really powerful way of getting traffic,” Ace explains. “It takes them to the product page, which is very close to conversion—so it’s fantastic.” 

ponder of Google Shopping as an extension of your ecommerce store. It hosts a high volume of organic traffic, so invest in Google Shopping ads and search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure customers view your products first. Make your product images pop, and propose promotions so your shopping ads stand out. Use target keywords for your spectators segments, and, inversely, input a list of negative keywords and irrelevant topics to keep your brand from appearing in unrelated searches. 

Use Google Search campaigns

When you do a Google search, you’ll view several organic results based on what Google considers the most valuable or helpful information—but it will also serve you sponsored text-based results above the organic listings. Those top results are called Google Search ads. They differ from Google Display ads: digital ads placed on a website that appear as banner ads with images. 

Google Search ads depend heavily on keyword targeting to ensure your brand appears in the correct searches. Ace recommends bidding on your brand name as the first order of business, but there’s so much more you can do with Google Ads. commence with these tips to enhance your campaigns: 

• Target specific demographics. Focus on the fundamentals of digital marketing, including targeting specific demographics with relevant search queries and including a obvious call to action. 
• Watch the data. Google Search offers plenty of digital advertising data to assist you comprehend which ads drive sales and which customers are bouncing from your ecommerce website. 
• Iterate. Test and update your ads and ad formats based on conversion numbers to boost ecommerce sales.

Optimize your website

Even if your online marketing ads are perfect, they won’t convert if your website is subpar. “[Ecommerce sales] all depend on having a great product and a excellent website encounter … with all the stuff that it needs to convert,” Ace says. He recommends a few key things to polish your website: 

• receive great product photos.
• Ensure your product descriptions are direct and enticing. 
• Make it straightforward for customers to leave great reviews or propose testimonials.
• Optimize your checkout flow for a smooth, frustration-free trip.

When everything on your website lends itself to a great customer encounter, leads and converts alike get a excellent impression of your brand.