There are a huge number of tools for advertising an online store nowadays. These are contextual or media advertising, targeting and remarketing, price aggregators and SEO-promotion, as well as video marketing.
But which of the above options are the most productive? How to properly prioritize the allocation of funds for each of them? We will answer these questions in this article.
What tools are available to promote an online store?
At the very beginning, it is rational to throw forces on the least expensive and the fastest to launch advertising channels and analyze their performance.
Important: Continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of each channel is mandatory. Productivity is assessed based on data on customers attracted and money spent.
Contextual advertising
This is one of the most effective ways to attract an audience and increase sales for an online store. Unlike other types of online advertising, contextual advertising is shown only to those people who have already shown interest in your goods or services by performing a query on the relevant words.
Its main advantages:
Quickly attracting potential customers. This allows you to quickly get the first leads and sales.
Showing ads to a “warm” audience. These people are more likely to make a purchase than random visitors.
Below we will tell you about the main varieties of contextual advertising, which are usually used to promote stores on the Internet.
At the request of a potential client, the system displays several ads and, if there are many of them, ranks them according to several indicators. The best ads are shown at the top, while the worst ones are shown at the bottom or are not shown at all. The highest rating is given to ads that:
Best match the user’s characteristics and queries;
Lead to a quality site;
Have the highest cost per click in the settings.
At the same time, there is no need to spend unthinkable funds and try to compete with the giants to get to the top. It is necessary to approach the issue more rationally – to use low-frequency, to adjust the ads for their own characteristics: territorial, price, etc..
Information! Search advertising allows you to get a “warm” audience, the request for the product of which has already been formed. But it should be remembered that it is impossible to guarantee a 100% hit even in a paid issue.
You should also improve the quality of your Internet resource. The system highlights sites with a clear interface, fast loading, regular updates and, all other things being equal, ranks them higher.
Media advertising
All non-text formats of contextual ads are united by the category of media advertising: static or animated banners, which can include text or be shown without it, videos and other formats that are customized for a particular site.
These ads are displayed on sites participating in Google’s contextual media network, adjusted for audience behavioral factors and targeted according to social and demographic criteria: territory, income, gender, occupation, interests, age. The audience of media advertising is “cold” visitors.
Remarketing
The tool is used by online stores to return customers who have already visited them. As such, remarketing is not contextual advertising, but it is set up in the same systems.
The key point in running such advertising is the formation of a list of users to whom it is intended, and for this purpose it is necessary to track visitors to the web resource. You can solve the problem by using a certain tag.
Information! A special code fragment or “tag” marks each user with a unique label and saves data about him/her in the account or analytics system. The same tag is recorded in the user’s browser cookies, which makes it possible to subsequently identify the consumer and show ads targeted specifically to him or her.
The type of advertising shown using the remarketing tool can be anything from a banner on a CMMS member site to an ad block in a user’s social media feed.
Once the audience is selected, the ads are set up in the same way as for the usual search or advertising network. The only difference is the restriction of the list of target visitors.
Dynamic remarketing
This tool shows personalized ads to people who have already visited your online store and viewed certain offers. The system takes into account the visitor’s behavior and automatically generates a relevant ad.
Dynamic remarketing banners are placed on a huge number of Google partner sites, including popular news portals, forums and blogs. A person sees ads for the product he is interested in even when browsing third-party web resources that are not related to your topic.
Google Shopping
The Google Merchant Center ad format allows you to make your ads stand out from your competitors by including the price of the product and its image in the message. Such an ad can be displayed in search, on YouTube, applications for mobile devices, in CMC.
In order for an online store to start working in this system, it is necessary to:
Bring the site into compliance with the rules of placement;
Register the site in your Google Merchant account;
Create a data feed (a file with information about the product) and send it for moderation;
Launch a “product” campaign in the previously created Google Ads account.
Google Performance Max
Google Performance Max is a new platform for automated promotion launched in 2021. It allows advertisers to create campaigns across multiple ad networks at once – search, YouTube video hosting, contextual media network and Google Discovery platform.
Performance Max automatically allocates budget between advertising channels and optimizes impressions to maximize audience reach and conversions, allowing for comprehensive promotion of an online store through a single tool.
Advertisers only need to set goals in the system – such as getting leads or selling certain products – and Google’s algorithms will find the best opportunities to achieve them on their own.
Setting up and using Performance Max helps online retailers:
Expand the reach of the target audience, thanks to the involvement of different platforms (search engine, YouTube, affiliate sites) in the promotion process. This will help attract new customers who do not yet know about your store, as well as increase brand awareness.
Identify audiences with the highest potential to buy. Due to compiled user data from different sources, the platform allows you to show personalized ads to specific audience segments and thus increase conversion rates.
Save time of a PPC specialist or marketer. Since advertising on different platforms is managed from a single user-friendly interface, a contextologist can devote more time to analyzing and optimizing the campaign or connecting other traffic sources.
YouTube video advertising
YouTube is used by marketers most often to:
Increase consumer loyalty to a brand. Such an advertising message does not contain a call to action or information about selling anything in particular. Instead, the commercial builds strong connections between the brand and something nice or beautiful in the minds of potential customers;
Informing the audience about sales or promotions. Promotion of an online store is carried out with the help of short saturated videos containing a message about the name of the store, product, cost or discount;
Demonstrations of goods in action. It has its own peculiarities – it is used only by unique manufacturers or sellers. Otherwise, competing companies also benefit from such video advertising.
The unit rates for showing a video on YouTube are generally low. But to achieve good rates, substantial costs are required:
On the production of a high-quality video;
On a highly qualified specialist to customize the advertising – without it, you can easily choose the entire budget of the campaign untargeted shows;
On the high frequency of repetition – showing ads 1-2 times for each user has no effect, the video must be remembered, and for this it must be repeated many times.
Targeted advertising
Such advertising is launched mainly in social networks through a special cabinet. The principle of its operation resembles the algorithm of KMS ads. In this case, advertising is shown only in the selected network and has a slightly different format – a video or photo accompanied by a short text.
The most popular platforms for placing targeted advertising are Facebook and Instagram. Here you can limit the audience by several criteria: geographical affiliation, marital status, device used, interests. It is also possible to specify gender and age.
But the most popular is the selection of consumers who have previously visited the website, or similar to them by behavioral characteristics. Such an audience is formed on the basis of a remarketing list or a list of e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
Important! It is ineffective to sell everyday goods at a standard cost with the help of such advertising. Users at the moment of visiting a social network are not motivated to make a purchase.
Productive here:
Announcements about promotions and discounts;
Dynamic remarketing – displaying items that the user has already been interested in on the site;
Ads for unique or inexpensive products intended for a large audience;
Indirect advertising – informative introductory texts about a product that do not directly encourage the user to buy it.
Price aggregators
To use this type of advertising, you need to create a profile of an online store in product aggregators and catalogs. Many such sites have a special interface for downloading the product base from the original information system of the store with the preservation of the structure, descriptions, photos and product parameters.
Information! In Ukraine the most popular aggregators are ek.ua, hotline.ua, price.ua, sravni.ua.
The principle of work in all aggregators is similar: registration, contract conclusion, loading the base of goods. The peculiarity of working with price aggregators is their low efficiency when promoting exclusive products. They work better when selling goods designed for mass demand.
SEO promotion
SEO (search engine optimization) is a tool that allows you to attract targeted traffic from the organic rendition of Google and other search engines. Competent optimization of the site makes it possible to occupy high positions on key queries related to your products and receive a constant flow of interested visitors.
Statistics show that more than 60% of the traffic of online stores that have been operating for more than a year comes from organic search. In this case, unlike contextual advertising, you do not have to pay for clicks – you get free targeted traffic.
The main task of SEO – to bring your online store in the top 10 rendition of the most relevant phrases. This plays an essential role in marketing, because 9 out of 10 users are limited to the first page of search results and very rarely go to the second and subsequent pages.
However, SEO promotion of an online store has its own challenges. The key one is that it can take a long period of time to get results. It takes up to two months for a young web resource to be indexed before it starts to appear in the output. After that, it will be in low positions, and to go higher, you need to fill it with content, optimize the technical part and work on external promotion.
That’s why at the initial stage it is a more winning strategy to combine SEO with other marketing tools. This will allow you to start attracting customers faster and make a profit while the online resource gradually builds up organic traffic.
The process of optimizing an online store is quite complex and includes several stages.
Collection of semantic kernel
Properly collected semantics allows you to cover the maximum of CA, attracting traffic not only for general queries like “buy a laptop”, but also for more specific ones like “Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 laptop”.
Start collecting semantics can be with the analysis of keywords, which are promoted by competitors. To do this, you can use specialized services, for example, Serpstat. Then it makes sense to expand the resulting list with the help of Google Keyword Planner, which will suggest additional relevant phrases.
The next stage is cleaning the semantic core from irrelevant queries and grouping the remaining keys into thematic clusters. After that, each cluster is distributed to the appropriate pages – product cards, categories, informational articles.
When collecting semantics, it is best to give priority attention to low- and medium-frequency queries. Long phrases are especially valuable – it is easier to take high positions in the output due to less competition.
Working out the structure
The structure of your site depends not only on the ease of navigation on it, but also the speed of its scanning by search robots, as well as the efficiency of link weight distribution. The key recommendations for forming the structure are as follows:
Be sure to distribute the goods into categories and subcategories. At the same time, a person should be able to navigate easily and quickly find the necessary sections. If you are in doubt when building the structure – look at your competitors.
Pages should have minimal nesting. Optimally, if the path from the main page to the landing page takes no more than 3 clicks.
The site should not have broken or cyclic links. These are technical errors that have a negative impact on indexing.
A tree structure is the most optimal for an online store. It looks like this – “main → categories → subcategories → product cards”. This scheme is familiar to everyone and allows you to find the necessary items in the catalog faster.
At the stage of working out the structure, it is necessary to logically distribute the collected semantics between pages (this process is called clustering). Each group of phrases should correspond to a specific category or subcategory. At the same time, you should regularly check the site for empty sections, duplicate pages.
Filling with content
Quality content influences ranking both directly (through keywords, uniqueness, etc.) and indirectly by improving behavioral factors.
Special attention should be paid to the content of product cards. Each of them should contain:
A detailed and informative description revealing all the features and benefits of the product;
High-quality photos of the product from different angles;
Current price and stock availability information.
An additional advantage will be the availability of video reviews, which will help customers to get maximum information about the subject of their interest.
When working with graphic content, it is necessary to take into account its impact on the loading speed of web pages. To optimize this parameter, it is better to use images in different sizes. For example, in the card you can immediately load thumbnail previews, and when you click on them you can load a photo with high resolution.
Working with meta tags
For each indexed page it is necessary to write unique meta tags:
Title. This is the title of the page, reflecting its main topic. It should include the main keyword query, but remain clear and attractive.
Description. This is a detailed description of the content of the web page, which is often displayed in the snippets of organic results. Its task is to give a person an idea of what information they will get by clicking on the link. The more useful and relevant the description is to the query, the higher the clickability rate and, as a result, the higher the search position.
Include micro markup
These are special tags embedded in HTML code that help robots better understand the structure and content of the site. The most popular micropartitioning standard is Schema.org. It allows you to create informative and attractive snippets that include additional elements – links to subsections, product rating, price range, etc. This increases the clickability of the snippet, which contributes to the growth of traffic to the site.
Another type of micro markup is OpenGraph. It is responsible for the correct display of links when reposting in social networks. Proper use of it increases the chances that people will share your content more often, generating additional conversions.
Remove duplicate pages
You should also take care to eliminate duplicate pages – the same or very similar pages under different URLs. They hinder indexing, dilute link weight, and can provoke sanctions from search engines.
You can find duplicates using both free tools and paid solutions like Screaming Frog SEO Spider. This program will analyze all URLs of the site and mark pages with repeating Title and Description tags.
External optimization
In addition to internal optimization, effective work with external factors is necessary for successful promotion in Google search results. First of all, it is building up the link mass. Backlinks from authoritative web portals transfer the so-called trust to the site, increasing its authority in the eyes of search engines.
When working on the link profile, consider the following points:
The number of referring domains. The more of them, the better, but only if the donors are of high quality.
Thematic relevance. Place links on websites that are close to your topic and have the same target audience. Otherwise, the effect will be minimal, and the risk of sanctions – high.
Dynamics of link mass growth. It should be gradual and natural. Abrupt jumps in the number of referring domains can be perceived by search engines as an attempt to manipulate and lead to the imposition of filters.
Attendance of donor sites. Priority is given to backlinks from resources with high organic traffic.
Distribution of link weight. It is important to make sure that the bulk of links lead to the sections prioritized for promotion. If necessary, you can adjust the linking for more optimal weight distribution.
Teaser advertising
Teaser advertising includes text-graphic ads on the sites of participants of the teaser network. Images to them, as well as titles and descriptions, as a rule, are selected quite catchy, sometimes even provocative.
Among the advantages of such advertising to promote an online store:
Low cost. Costs for clicks on ads here are incomparably lower than in other advertising formats.
Impressive reach. Teaser networks currently provide multi-million monthly impressions.
Quite loyal requirements to the content. There are significantly fewer bans here than, for example, in Google Ads.
But there are some disadvantages. The main one is the “cold” attitude of users to this type of advertising. “The disease will disappear in three days. You only need to do this…” or “Attention! New Mayan predictions have been deciphered. Find out what’s in store for the planet in 2023!” – such headlines have already become commonplace. Active web users mostly ignore them.
In addition, it is quite difficult to reach the target audience with teaser ads. A significant share is cold traffic and bots. And this is only additional costs and no benefit.
Also, teasers do not work in all subjects. For example, such advertising is not suitable for complex services, B2B, expensive goods. With the help of such advertising can sell well inexpensive goods with a WOW-effect, copies of famous brands, jewelry.
Use teaser advertising should be used in cases where you need inexpensive or free options for promoting an online store. Supplementing the main campaign, such ads can shoot. But it is still not worth putting high hopes on them and making the main bet.
Promotion in social networks
Social networks can be a great help in the promotion of an online store. The main task of SMM is positive reputation dynamics and expanding the reach of the target audience. According to statistics, with the help of this tool is unlikely to be able to attract more customers to the site than when using SEO. But social networks will definitely help to form a loyal to your company, a permanent audience, and this is no less important in the long term.
When promoting an online store, it is necessary to designate a priority task for yourself and determine the tools for its realization. That social network, where your potential buyers are the most, will become key. When working in commerce, website owners usually choose:
Instagram. The platform is one of the most popular for promoting online stores. The youngest audience is gathered here. When creating publications, you should use bright and interesting photos.
Facebook. This social network surpasses all others in its popularity. The average age of its users is about 30 years old. Emphasis is placed on the textual component of posts. Facebook is more often promoted by companies working in the service sector, but it is also an excellent option for increasing the recognition of an online store.
YouTube. The content of this platform is represented by videos. It takes more time and money to produce a quality video ad, but its effectiveness is much higher. Video content has the highest engagement rate. This is the best option for native advertising of products. For example, you can record a review or crash test of your product.
E-mail newsletters
Mailing list helps to build a base of loyal customers at the stage of promotion of the online store website. In addition, it:
positively affects the level of consumer trust in the company;
increases the share of productive sessions that end with a purchase;
ensures repeat transactions;
keeps the attention of the target audience.
It is convenient to use the mailing list to inform customers about current events, new product positions, discounts and special offers, loyalty program conditions, etc.
Information! If you have a blog, e-mail marketing can help to increase audience engagement and increase loyalty to the company.
But it is unlikely that you will be able to promote yourself with this tool alone. Mailing makes sense to use only after a sufficient base of customer contacts will be formed, but to attract them will have to use other channels.
Message boards
Among the largest sites for placing ads in Ukraine can be separately distinguished OLX, which collects the majority of search and direct traffic from our country. In addition, izi.ua, ogolosha.com, besplatka.ua are popular.
Millions of Ukrainians visit these sites every month in search of necessary goods and services. Placing ads allows you not only to reach a significant share of this audience and attract potential customers of the online store, but also often get a link to your site, which will help in organic promotion.
To increase the effectiveness of the placement:
Create a separate ad for each product. The user will not open an irrelevant ad and search the text for information about your other assortment.
Test paid placements. Some packages on the same OLX (promotion to the top, VIP status, placement on the main page of the service, etc.) work well, while others are practically useless.
Use real photos of good quality. This way the potential buyer will immediately see exactly what they are buying. This will reduce the number of bounce rates on the post and increase conversion to purchase.
Place links to other sites in your account. Be sure to include links to the company’s website, Instagram, Telegram channel, etc. in your profile or in the text of your ad. This way you can not only increase the potential client’s trust in the brand, but also give him the opportunity to use the platform that is most convenient for him for ordering.
Don’t forget to update your ads regularly and respond to user queries. Most message board users will write to you in the built-in chat box rather than call you. It’s important to stay in touch and update your postings regularly.
Advertising with bloggers
Popular bloggers have a huge loyal audience, comparable to the reach of some media outlets, and the level of trust subscribers have in their opinions is often much higher. This makes working with bloggers one of the best ways to promote an online store.
Among the advantages of cooperation with bloggers are:
Large coverage of potential buyers. Advertising with an opinion leader with an audience of many thousands of people allows you to attract significant traffic and increase sales in a short period of time.
A high degree of trust. Recommendations from a well-known blogger are perceived as advice from a friend, not as intrusive advertising. This triggers the “word of mouth” effect, when subscribers themselves share information about the advertised product.
Individual presentation style. Unlike traditional formats, bloggers present advertising information in their own unique style, adapting it to the interests and preferences of their audience.
The possibility of barter cooperation. Advertising with opinion leaders does not always require monetary investment. It is often possible to negotiate free placement in exchange for your product or service.
When choosing bloggers, focus on the relevance of their content and audience to your topic. They can be both owners of personal websites and promoted accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other social networks.
Promotion on forums
Today it is an underestimated platform that allows you to attract CA with minimal costs. Users of forums, as a rule, are interested in a certain topic and are looking for answers to their questions, which opens up opportunities for point impact on potential buyers.
There are two main ways of advertising on forums:
Discreet. You can create posts in threads with mentioning your store and suggestions in the context of discussion. The main thing is to do it unobtrusively and within the rules of the forum, so as not to be blocked by moderators.
Official placement by agreement with the administration. It can be a banner, a teaser or a fixed advertising post in the profile section. This option, as a rule, is more effective due to high visibility, user confidence in the advertising “approved” by the administration and low price. And, importantly, it can attract the attention of users for a long time.
Focus on sites with a live community, where real people communicate, not bots or random visitors. Be sure to study the rules of advertising and make sure that your offer and the format of its submission do not contradict the forum policy.
What mistakes in online store promotion are important to avoid?
Owners of online stores often make several standard mistakes that negatively affect promotion. Let’s dwell on the main ones.
Lack of a unified strategy
Forming a plan to promote an online store is a significant process that affects the effectiveness of all subsequent stages. In the absence of clearly defined goals and a list of actions for their realization, it will be difficult to promote a commercial web resource comprehensively.
The right approach is to form an annual marketing strategy:
outline key objectives;
form a list of actions for their realization;
analyze the main indicators and adjust the strategy according to the results of each month.
This approach allows you to competently build all stages of promotion, gives an understanding of what marketing tool to work with at any given time is most effective.
Mistake when choosing a specialist
Practice shows that there is always not enough time to promote an online store. In this situation, a good solution is to engage specialists responsible for promotion. But it is not always possible to find a reliable contractor.
There are several options for cooperation:
Freelance specialist
It is advantageous to work with freelancers because of the low cost of their services. But you should always bear in mind the risks – the work may not be done well enough or not done at all.
Many of these specialists have a habit of disappearing at the most inopportune moment, sometimes together with the customer’s money. Although there are among them decent conscientious performers who work without weekends and holidays.
In-house marketer
The work of a PPC-specialist in the staff can be controlled directly. This format of cooperation looks quite reliable, but one person is unlikely to pull the whole complex of tasks for promotion, and to maintain a large department at first with unstable dynamics of profit indicators is often unaffordable.
Advertising Agency
Here it is important to choose a reliable partner. We recommend evaluating a potential contractor according to the following criteria:
Core Competencies. Analyze the list of services to be provided. Weed out those who will not be able to perform the entire list of work required.
Work experience. Evaluate the results achieved by the professionals in other projects. This will help you understand their level of competence.
Age of the company. As a rule, the longer the agency exists, the more efficiently its work is organized.
Awards for participation and victories in professional competitions and ratings. Reflects the agency’s position in comparison with competing companies working in the same niche.
If in the process of analyzing the work experience of a potential contractor you saw the case of your competitors, this is a good sign. The specialists of such an agency already have experience and understanding of your subject matter.
Working with one advertising tool
You should not throw all your efforts into only the channel that shows the highest performance. No tool is perfect. Each has both advantages and disadvantages, which are bound to remind you of themselves after a while.
Important! The best result in promoting an online store can be achieved if you use all the available tools in combination.
For example, you will not be able to see the results of SEO at once, it will take time. And while you’re waiting, traffic channels with quick returns will help you attract customers to your online store.
Orientation on market leaders
When promoting your store, you should not “blindly” focus on the market leaders and try to compete with them “head-on”. The big players have considerable resources and opportunities to strengthen their positions. They have established links with suppliers, built up a loyal client base, and fine-tuned business processes. Trying to outdo them in their own field is a deliberately losing strategy for a young business.
Instead, it is better to focus on finding your own unique niche that will distinguish you from your competitors. This could be a specific assortment, a focus on a certain target audience, a special format of service or additional services.
Often, large players consider such niches inappropriate for themselves due to the scale of their business or do not pay enough attention to them. This opens up opportunities for smaller online stores to gain a foothold in this segment and build up a loyal audience.
What should be done before promoting an online store?
It is important to prepare properly for the launch of an advertising campaign and not to make the mistakes that so many marketers so often make. Follow the recommendations:
Use analytics tools. Setting up e-commerce in Google analytics, as well as a bundle of coltrecking, price blocks of advertising accounts and CRM-system allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of channels. When ordering a service to promote an online store, some try to save on the analytical part. However, such a principle turns into an increase in costs – a rare business owner manages to assess the productivity of different sources intuitively;
Improve the usability of the web resource. It’s hard to argue with the fact that sales are boosted by good traffic and high conversion rates. But even simple actions can increase not only the conversion rate, but also the average check. The owners of a new online store are advised to read articles on relevant topics. To this issue can be attributed and the problem of reducing the number of abandoned baskets by visitors;
Analyze the technical state of the site. Make sure that the main tools and functions are working: working with the shopping cart, comparing items, filtering products and placing an order. Work on increasing the loading speed of the site – an important tool to influence the conversion rate;
Research your audience. You need to have a minimum understanding of the gender, age and interests of consumers. For example, when selling expensive status goods, you should not emphasize discounts and affordable prices. It is exclusivity that should be emphasized. And in case you know for sure that your client is an audience of 30+, you can save advertising funds by excluding from the target list all those who are younger.
Why is it better to order a comprehensive online store promotion service?
There are two strategies for attracting customers to an online store. The first is based on using the advertising budget for promotion in only one channel in order to maximize traffic. The second method involves the distribution of money between several directions, which allows as a result to obtain a synergy effect – a significant increase in attendance.
The best performance is shown by the complex promotion of an online store. The combination of effective sources is individual for each type of activity. They should be carefully selected on the basis of analyzing the peculiarities of the business.
Important! It is dangerous to rely on only one source, because there are no ideal advertising channels.
For those whose web resources consist of branched catalogs with a large number of product positions, it is better to order advertising for an online store, based on a combination of several strategies. Each of them is oriented not only to increase traffic, but also point impact on a particular segment of consumers. As a rule, three main segments are distinguished:
Undecideds;
Know exactly what product they need, but have not yet chosen a brand;
Have decided on a brand but are comparing the prices of competing companies.
Each ad is tailored to a specific product and a specific request, which attracts the target audience and increases conversion rates. At the same time, to achieve a significant increase in sales, it is necessary to create hundreds of such ads.
The same approach is implemented when optimizing the site of an online store, when all efforts are directed to low-frequency. A multiple increase in the effectiveness of a web resource is achieved in the work of web company specialists who provide professional promotion services and use several channels at once to advertise an online store.
