The Best Platforms to Run Your eCommerce Ads

best platforms to run your ecommerce ads

When growing an eCommerce business, you simply cannot afford to ignore marketing.

Growing an eCommerce brand solely on organic traffic is near impossible to achieve. This is why you need to enhance your organic marketing with some paid advertising.

In this article, we’re going to discuss the best platforms to run your eCommerce ads.

In this guide, we’re going to talk about the most important eCommerce advertising platforms and what makes them great. Ecommerce has brought a revolution to shopping, doesn’t matter what you need, there’s a platform online that deals in it.

You could be doing everything right with your eCommerce store, and be you’ll have no tangible result if you don’t include eCommerce paid advertising.

Ecommerce sales grew by 25% worldwide in 2020. And this number is only projected to increase. If you own an eCommerce store or you have one in the works, this is great news as the eCommerce industry is only projected to grow.

Before you start any eCommerce advertising campaign, there are things you need to know and boxes that need checking.

What to Know Before You Start Your Ecommerce Advertising Campaign

For your eCommerce ads to work, your ad must have a combination of things. An ineffective eCommerce advertising campaign is worse than having no advertising plans at all. Attention spans continue reducing drastically, this is why you need to make sure everything is right before you start an eCommerce marketing campaign.

  1. Focus on SEO

You can have the best eCommerce website in the world with all the right products and it would be ultimately useless if your website is not optimized for search engines.

SEO is a major requirement before any kind of eCommerce ad is run. SEO makes it easier for your ad to be effective and produce the right kind of results for your campaigns. SEO also makes sure your organic strategies are more effective.

  1. Simplify and Optimize your website

A customer should be easy to navigate from your product age to your checkout without so much as breaking a sweat. Cart abandonment issues are at an all-time high, this makes it extremely important for your website to have an incredible user experience.

Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is also another way to ensure your website is optimized and you’re not leaving potential customers on the table.

One of the most important pages in your eCommerce website is the payment page. This has the highest drop-off cases in eCommerce. Making it the page that needs the most attention. To reduce this, you need to make sure you’re offering multiple payment options.

  1. Understand your target audience

Before an eCommerce ad or any ad in general, you need to know who you intend to target. Who do you want to sell to? What do they do? What pain points are they trying to solve? These and more are referred to as “buyer personas” and they give you a general idea of who your audience is. 

Before you run your eCommerce ad, before writing the copies, and running test ads, you must make sure have a buyer persona.

When you create a target audience before running an eCommerce ad, you know who you’re marketing to and what they’re trying to achieve. This means instead of trying to attract everyone, you’re increasing your focus to make sure your eCommerce ad is targeting the right people.

There are multiple ways to do this, but two of the best ways to do this is with Facebook insights and google’s audience report. These eCommerce advertisement tools give you a real insight into where your customers are coming from and how to create your personas to match your business.

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The Best Platforms to Run Your eCommerce Ads

Digital marketing is a surefire way to grow your eCommerce store and increase revenue. Without further ado, here are the best places to run your eCommerce ads.

eCommerce Advertising With Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social media platform with over 2 billion active monthly users around the world. What this means is that your customers are surely there. Regardless of the result of your buyer personas, they are on Facebook.

Facebook is an eCommerce ad platform that has a conversion rate of 9.21% which is higher compared to that of Google ads. This makes Facebook a necessary platform for running eCommerce ads to reach a large audience and make the most out of your marketing campaign.

There are a few things you need to know before creating eCommerce ads on Facebook. You must know your ad goal/objective and the type of ad you want to create. The ad objective is what you hope to achieve from running an eCommerce ad, and this type of ad is essentially the type of ad you want to create on Facebook.

Facebook ads Include:

  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Carousel
  • Lead Forms
  • Dynamic Product Ads

Deciding the ad type you want to use depends almost entirely on the type of product you hope to sell.

Carousel is the best ad type for an eCommerce business because carousel ads let you advertise different products in a slide. What makes it even better, is the ability for each product to link to different landing pages.

In eCommerce, a product page is essentially a landing page for that product. So, pick your best-selling products and use carousel ads to link them to their specific landing pages.

When running eCommerce ads on Facebook, make sure you do not neglect to retarget. Sometimes, potential customers check out products they’re interested in but do not commit. Retargeting ads make it easy for you to continue showing the ads to those interested people till they commit.

eCommerce Advertising with Instagram

Instagram has over a billion monthly active users, and over 70% of them admit to having purchased something through the app. This means when it comes to eCommerce advertising, Instagram is an important platform to include in your eCommerce strategy.

Before running an eCommerce ad on Instagram, you must have a business account. Instagram offers the same ad types as Facebook. Both platforms go hand in hand when creating a result-driven eCommerce advertisement strategy.

An often neglected aspect of Instagram is the story feature. Instagram reports that over 500 million users use the stories feature daily. What’s better, you can run your Instagram ads directly to your Instagram stories to increase conversion.

 eCommerce Advertising with Google Ads

Google is the biggest search engine and as such, it’s an important advertising platform. Before choosing Google as an eCommerce ad platform, it’s important to make sure you understand the types of ads types on Google.

There are three types of eCommerce ads on google,

  • Google Search Ads
  • Google Display Ads
  • Google Shopping Ads

Google Search Ads

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Google search ads are the kinds of ads that appear as results when users search a particular phrase or name. From the image above, our search term was “Shopify” and the results are companies that won the bid for the keyword “Shopify”.

Google search ads can be very competitive. This does not take anything away from its effectiveness as an advertisement strategy.

Is Google Search Ad effective for an eCommerce business?

If the aim is to increase brand awareness and recognition, then it is a fantastic strategy. When it comes to sales, google search ads are effective because they completely match the searcher’s intent.

This means whenever a user searches, “Where to buy Kitchen utensil” you know the user has intentions to purchase that particular product. Hence, there’s a bigger chance of this resulting in a sale.

Google Display Ads

Display ads are ads that appear as banner ads or sidebar ads. They appear on websites registered in Google’s display network.

When it comes to conversion rates, google display ads have a much lower conversion rate, but they’re also a lot cheaper. To get the most of Google ads, they should be used as retargeting ads to increase brand awareness.

Google Shopping Ads

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When it comes to a google eCommerce ad that focuses on increasing purchases, Google shopping ads are the best options.

Google shopping ads appear in google shopping tabs next to the results. Google shopping ads include the product title, the price, and other details. If your item is not expensive and has a great rating, Google shopping ads are a great way to increase sales.

How to Decide the Best eCommerce Platform?

This depends ultimately on the kind of eCommerce ad you want to run. If you want to increase brand awareness, google search and display ads are the best options. If your objective is to increase sales, then Facebook and Instagram are also great options.

The ad platform to use depends entirely on your campaign objective.

Additional information: Retargeting is a great eCommerce advertisement strategy that should not be left out of your campaign.

Conclusion

Almost all social media platforms have one form of advertisement or the other. Does this make them good platforms to run eCommerce ads? No.

Deciding your ad objective is the first thing to do when choosing the best eCommerce platform for your eCommerce business.

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