If you’re building an e-commerce business, you would want your products to launch off the shelves from day one! Unfortunately, the most cost-effective way of doing this also turns out to be the slowest — SEO. So, what is the way around that?
Regardless of how big or small your e-commerce store is, the competition is cut-through and you need to leverage e-commerce ads and performance marketing channels to get ahead of your competitors.
Although online advertising channels like search ads, email marketing, and social media marketing seem to dominate the performance marketing industry, every e-commerce business needs to find some time to experiment with Facebook and Google campaigns to build brand awareness and acquire more customers.
If you think Facebook conversion campaigns are not worth it because of other emerging platforms like TikTok and SnapChat, then you might want to reconsider.
There are over 3.6 billion (yes, that’s a “b”) monthly active users on the Meta network of apps. That’s about half the world’s population!
When you launch a Facebook campaign, you aren’t launching the ads just on Facebook, but throughout the network, which includes Instagram and any other partners that are registered with Meta!
You can get started with Facebook ads with one of the following three ad formats:
1. Catalog ads – These are ads of your products fetched directly from your website feed.
2. Single image or video ads – These ads are great to showcase products and services in a creative light. They also work wonders in terms of raising brand awareness.
3. Carousel ads – These ads are ideal to showcase a product lineup or leverage brand storytelling to raise awareness.
While Facebook is great for marketing your brand at any stage of the funnel, it is imperative that you have a full-funnel strategy in place and set up processes that consistently work to push leads from TOF (top of the funnel) to BOF (bottom of the funnel).
The e-commerce space is growing fast and Google is betting big on it by allowing e-commerce store owners to upload their catalogs to Google and empowering shoppers to make better and faster purchases right from the comfort of the search engine’s UI.
Google Smart Shopping is a feature that makes it easier for shoppers to find and purchase your products. This can help you improve your business. You have to have a Google Merchant Center account to be eligible for Google Smart Shopping.
While Google Smart Shopping has proven to be a big boon for e-commerce marketers, it will be merged into Google’s new type of campaign – Performance Max.
Performance Max campaigns, also called Max campaigns are ones that are not just limited to running on the Google search network only. They can also appear on Google’s content network and display network. With performance max campaigns, if you are running the same ads on all different networks, you will only be charged once by Google. This is because Google combines the impression from all these various sources into one. This is an easy way to save money and only pay for actual impressions, instead of paying for each separate impression in case of multiple campaigns.
Like any other new buzz in town, Max campaigns too have their fair share of criticism. Since Google rolled out these campaigns for the general public only in November of 2022, it is too early to say how the road for this would shape out concretely.
Google Brand Search campaign is when you bid on the company name within Google. It’s great because it helps you get more traffic from Google in the instance that your website does not rank high organically for your brand term or a variation of the same. It drives people to your website looking for the brand.
When you create a Google brand search campaign, you’ll have your Brand Name or Product Name in the ad itself and bid on keywords that are essentially spells and misspells of your brand name. A user who searches on Google for that Brand Name will see your ads. This is one of the most cost-effective ways to build a brand online because the CPC of these ads are typically much lower for you than your competitor because of the high-quality score.
To take your branding game up a notch, you could explore expanding your e-commerce advertising channels.
My hot tip to you would be to use Google Display Ads extensively in your remarketing efforts. If people have come across your brand on places like social media, search ads or perhaps even visited your site, but have not converted, remarketing with creative display ads is a great way to get them to convert into paying customers.
With privacy laws getting stricter by the day, it is becoming a nightmare for marketers to go after people who are highly likely to convert.
With the strategic use of multi-channel marketing in your overall marketing mix, getting conversions could be a breeze!
Nevertheless, keep in mind that e-commerce ads are great for speedy results but are not a sustainable model. Your e-commerce business also needs to have a solid organic marketing foundation in place.
A mix of e-commerce ads and organic marketing efforts is the right way to go about for any e-commerce business to sustain itself in the long run.
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