As an e-merchant, you’ll inevitably resort to online advertising at some point. Whether it’s to promote your products, your services, your brand, or your organization, online advertising is a must to increase your sales and generate more revenue.
However, it’s a job that must be handled with care. Here’s the definition of online advertising and some basics to establish and maximize the impact of your business’s advertising campaigns on internet users!
Definition of online advertising
Online advertising, digital advertising, or e-advertising is an action that consists of advertisers promoting a brand, products, or services to target audiences via the internet and social networks in an organic or paid way.
To generate the greatest impact possible, your web marketing strategy cannot do without the impact of online advertising. Although this advertising content has a cost, the expenses are lower for online advertising than for traditional advertising, which can help lower your overall ecommerce marketing costs. Moreover, to sell your products and services, connected advertising media and internet ads will be able to reach precise, qualified targets, depending on your parameters and the performance of your content.
Your services, your products, and your business’s image will be able to be carried by digital means if, however, you choose the right levers, the right advertising sources, or the right ads. We’ll therefore detail the advantages of online advertisements to consider in your ecommerce marketing strategy. We’ll also analyze the types of content you can create when advertising on the internet—the different types of ads on different media so that your company, your products, and your services can become unavoidable.
Why advertise online and how do you create a good campaign?
Along with SEO and email marketing, online advertising is one of the top acquisition channels for an ecommerce business. Let’s take a look at some of its advantages!
Advantages of online advertising
There are several advantages of online advertising for ecommerce: online ads can highlight the many assets of your brand, your products, your services, and your values. Increase your average basket, your turnover by encouraging people to buy, make your offer known, get data from your customers and users by proposing a subscription to a newsletter, enhance your content creations, your videos, your brand image... Digital is an inexhaustible source of visibility for a business, and online advertising offers opportunities to take without delay.
- Precise targeting: with online performance research, you’ll have the chance to target precise customers by setting up your different campaigns on the internet. Thus, with the cost of the money invested or the time used to create your ads, you can be rewarded quickly if your campaign is well built and you know your customers well.
- Personalization: with online advertising, whether you organize your ads or choose to be helped by a specialized agency, each ad can be customized for very specific segments on Google, Instagram, Youtube, Google, Facebook... This type of ad marketing allows each campaign to be broken down into sub-campaigns in order to personalize your message to each target. Beyond the users, it’s media that can be personalized: more mobile than computer? No problem! You or your agency can simply modify the options and formats to reach people who prefer using mobile devices for even more advanced targeting!
- Traffic and conversion: if all your advertising strategy is going well, the results should appear on the number of visitors counted but also and especially on your number of sales, which should increase significantly!
- Analytics and tracking: throughout your advertising campaigns, you can keep an eye on their performance, almost in real time. The sites and platforms offering to create ads on the internet have complete dashboards to monitor the campaigns. So, if your ad doesn’t perform exactly as expected, you can change its options along the way.
- Accessibility for all budgets: who said advertising was expensive? Thanks to the web and especially social networks, advertising campaigns are now open to everyone. Video content never seen before in your country? Something new to announce to your network? Information about the evolution of your homepage? A new ecommerce digital marketing strategy to develop on YouTube? Each piece of content created can be boosted quickly by adding a personalized budget, a cost from only a few dollars!
Types of online advertising formats
- Search or SEA campaigns
Search or search engine advertising (SEA) represents the purchase of keywords so that an ad can be displayed at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) and thus give the highlighted sites more chances to accumulate traffic.
It’s a paid link, preceded by the mention of “Ad” especially on Google, unlike SEO which is organic and therefore free. On Google, these campaigns are established on Google Ads, the dedicated platform that establishes a bidding system on keywords.
This type of advertising makes it possible for advertisers to target internet users already interested in the subject covered by the ad. This technique is ideal for ads with a limited duration.
- Display advertising
On blogs, websites, or mobile applications, there are interactive advertising inserts: this is display advertising.
This type of advertising is ideal when your company needs to communicate about a special, temporary offer or targets a specific period of the year. This technique is flexible, for example, by letting the provider choose to display your advertisement according to their criteria or by imposing yours.
Programmatic advertising has grown in display thanks to artificial intelligence that determines the best places and times to display ads according to the target.
Real-time bidding or RTB is a display advertising technique based on bids to give the advertising space to the highest bidder.
- Affiliate campaigns
The person in charge of a site, the “affiliate,” will add a link or display to another site’s ad or offer. The affiliate is paid according to the number of clicks received. The advertiser then takes advantage of the affiliate’s visitors to boost their conversion.
- Advertising on social networks (ads)
This advertising technique is based on creating campaigns on social networks through different media (feed, story, etc.). YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat... All platforms allow you to create ads to reach active and engaged targets according to their age, gender, interests, etc.
You can use turnkey tools such as SocialShaker. This solution allows advertisers to develop operations on web pages or social networks in just a few clicks. To give you an idea of the figures, 84% of people say that the interactive format has contributed to a better image of the brand against 64% for a classic format.
- Retargeting on the Internet
Retargeting is the use of ads that are displayed to users who have already been on a website and who have already shown interest in a particular web page, product, or service. Thanks to the tracking and storage of browsing data, these retargeting ads remind users to return to a website to finalize their purchases or to discover offers similar or complementary to their previous searches.
- Advertising/influencer marketing
This refers to posts made by content creators with a large following on blogs and social networks. In exchange for payment to the influencer, the product, service, or company benefits from the aura and engagement of the partner personality to generate sales.
Example with product placement—a watch in this case
How do you create money-making ad copy?
Use a strong message
First of all, you need to present your offer in a distinct and concise way. To do this, use different levers to bring out a punchy and effective message while targeting your customers! You can use different levers for your internet advertising: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.
A short and simple sentence remains ideal. It will more easily hold the attention of your readers and is going to be more understandable. You can even dare to be original to create a real opportunity. Finally, introducing a time factor into your ad will create urgency and commitment.
Keep a promise
As we all know, the competition is tough, very tough... So you have to differentiate yourself! Make a promise to your audience and stand out. You can identify yourself with: a particular offer, a quality/price ratio, a key advantage, a saving, a discount, an element that you monopolize in your market. Your advertisement is going to definitely become attractive and your web-marketing strategy will be successful.
The plus that makes the difference
What do you think drives customers to buy? Promotions of course! A discount is the little extra that will make your online advertising the star of the moment! A free delivery, a discount on your product... It’s up to you to define the most relevant thread according to your strategy.
For example, you can create a direct, effective, concise and colorful call-to-action to maximize its visibility. Simply put, a call-to-action (CTA) is a link, a button, or a visual that encourages the user to perform an action (add to cart, sign up, etc.).
To easily create a CTA, you can use the Button Optimizer tool, very useful to create the perfect design in a few clicks that is going to appeal to your audience.
What are the important details in the appearance of an ad?
An attractive design to appeal to the internet user
Your advertising message must be qualitative. It must have a real coherence with your graphic charter. Also think of inserting your logo! Your advertising space must be adapted to your identity. Internet users must recognize your company at first glance when they view your ads.
First of all, keep it simple. Place a light frame for banners with a white background to avoid any floating. Second, know that a white background works better than a complex visual. In addition, limit color changes for animated formats; this will maintain the fluidity.
And finally, reduce the weight of your images as much as possible to ensure fast loading. A web image should be at most 100 KB. Loading time is a very big factor in the loss of internet users on the web. It shouldn’t be taken lightly! To give you an example, according to Google, a page with 500 ms more loading time results in 20% less traffic. And this is why Google has developed the AMP format.
From consistency to performance
Let’s go back to the CTA. It’s one of the key elements of your advertising campaign. It’s thanks to it that you’ll improve the conversion of your online store. You must therefore optimize it as much as possible. Think about its visibility. Your CTA should not be inside your text. It must be detached.
Then, be consistent. The destination URL must be consistent with your offer. For example, for a newsletter registration, the user must directly understand what it’s about via the CTA.
And finally, pay attention to its color. Depending on the color of the CTA, the meaning is different. For example, red is a symbol of urgency. Orange is a good deal. Lastly, green will bring confidence, etc. Keep in mind that advertising with a CTA increases the click rate by 83 to 180%! An asset to create a profitable advertisement.
Here’s an example!
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Do you want the best for your advertising campaign to boost your marketing efforts and promote your business? Here are the final tips! Test, test, and retest your ads in order to keep the most effective one and highlight the ad that’ll have the most impact and the best conversion rate.
Apply a “cap” to your ad. This allows you to limit the number of displays for a prospect. This technique makes it possible for you to optimize your campaigns and avoid being too intrusive. It’s an option you can choose directly when creating your online ad.
Look for the right timing! You’re more likely to increase your click-through rate on the weekend than during the week. Advertisers find that on average, weekend click-through rates are almost 23% higher than Monday click-through rates. But this may depend on the people in your target audience. Some companies will, for example, have more interest in running their ad campaign during the week.
And finally, cross-reference your campaign data. Your advertising must be finely tuned according to precise targeting criteria (user profile, geolocation, etc.). Take advantage of the audience that was reactive to your ad to set up remarketing on Google, for example.
There you have it! Whether you’re going to handle your business’s advertising yourself or hire advertisers to take care of it for you, use the information in this article to aid in optimizing your marketing strategy and to inspire you for your future campaigns!
