Top 15 eCommerce Ads Experts Reveal Their Secret Strategies for 2020
Why does marketing and PPC come so difficult for eCommerce brands? For some teams, even if they invest the money and the time into a PPC strategy it may still fail.
It’s a frustrating reality but it’s true.
Every marketing campaign takes the right approach, enough patience, and enough A/B tests and tweaks to bring it to fruition.
And when all of that is said and done, there is one last element that is missing — the insights and experience of a seasoned ads expert.
There are a ton of free resources out there that teach advertising and PPC strategy but sometimes a single tip from an expert could literally save you 3–6 months of optimizing.
It could be a quick shortcut for targeting the right audience for your business or a negative keywords list that they set up in a few minutes.
Experience is super valuable and this is especially true in PPC where algorithms and platforms are constantly changing.
And if you are an ecommerce brand and you’re stuck, facing a brick wall in your PPC campaigns, we know how you feel.
It could be really frustrating.
So we decided to make it easier for you.
In this post, we’ve interviewed some of our top marketing experts from the Mayple community to bring you some incredible insights and shortcuts that will help you scale your campaigns and hit your ROI goals.
Let’s dive in.
A must-have tool for scaling eCommerce business
Going beyond your immediate audience is necessary in order to scale and build a sustainable eCommerce business. Prospecting is a tool that allows you to expand your customer base and reach users that have not engaged with your brand yet. With the help of analytics tools such as look-a-like modelling, brands can leverage the existing data that they already own about their audiences to find new users that share their same traits and behavior, thus reducing the waste and maximizing performance.
A recommended (not-so-obvious!) paid-media technique to drive the highest ROI possible
Programmatic advertising is often associated with branding, but it’s increasingly used to drive performance. Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) give eCommerce brands the opportunity to reach the intended audience across a variety of channels (Banner, Native, Video or Audio) while allowing for granular targeting strategies. Programmatic advertising is not just fueled by data, it also generates insights that can be leveraged across other channels and create synergies with other marketing activities. Thus, adding programmatic advertising to your mix can help improve ROI on search and social for example.
What makes a killer ad-copy?
The time for standardized ad-copy is definitely over, a creative in order to be effective needs to be relevant and timely. Moment marketing is an effective way to engage with your customers and capture their attention by creating a connection between the online and offline world. Using tools such as Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), brands can in real-time customize their ad-copy to take advantage of a social trend (hashtag), location or if relevant also weather!
An eCommerce brand you promoted you are particularly proud of the results achieved
Fast Fashion eCommerce brands present a particular challenge as they have an extensive range of products and categories on their site. In order to deliver the highest ROI, you can’t just focus on the best-selling categories but help the brand to sell the widest range of products so that they can dispose quickly of their inventory. By feeding the DSP with a customized algorithm for each category and the help of Big-Data techniques such as look-a-like modelling and optimization of basket value we managed to efficiently reduce the cost of acquiring new users while delivering positive results across all the products and categories.
A must-have tool for scaling eCommerce business
I think Facebook ads are one of the best tools for eCommerce businesses. There are a lot of different suppliers and companies that are here to help eCommerce businesses on a logistical basis, but the most important is of course the bottom line. It’s why companies who are able to truly leverage Facebook & Instagram ads to grow their sales will survive the longest.
A recommended (not-so-obvious!) paid-media technique to drive the highest ROI possible
Trust Facebook’s optimization. I see a lot of people wanting to control everything when it comes to their Facebook ads, but Facebook can really be your ally. We’ve been using Campaign Budget Optimization, Automatic Placements and Dynamic Creative and it really helped us generate way better results for all our clients.
What makes a killer ad-copy?
Ad copy is about clarity and impact. You want to have a message that is not too fancy but also not too direct. It’s really hard to say what your brand does and how you sell it in under 5–10 words but it’s necessary. We usually like to use words that compare your brand to another to make sure people understand.
An eCommerce brand you promoted you are particularly proud of the results achieved
We helped Mozart Supplies generate 3.22X ROI. We were able to leverage our experience with Facebook ads to direct their ad creative and Facebook’s optimization to drive really good results. As we got more and more purchases, we created a lookalike audience of their buyers which allowed us to have an amazing CPA on the acquisition side!
A must-have tool for scaling eCommerce business
One of my favorite tools for eCommerce brands is Smartly. It’s a platform that allows us to automate many of the workflows needed to launch ads at scale. It also helps us optimize our ads to achieve better KPIs. Smartly’s high level of automation and optimization options allow us to manage a large advertising pipeline with relative ease, along with dynamic ads, bid multipliers, automated and predictive budget allocation. In short, this tool helps marketers focus on each step of the funnel, and scale operations effectively with cross-account campaigns and asset management.
A recommended (not-so-obvious!) paid-media technique to drive the highest ROI possible
A super important principle that I use every day is the Pareto marketing principle (also known as the 80/20 rule). The secret is to use this principle when you structure your budget. This means spending 80% of your media budget on your “good customers” while spending the other 20% on specific prospecting audiences using qualitative research. This will help you focus on retention and increase your customer LTV. I like to combine the 80/20 rule with the strategy of using marketing campaigns like gift guides, deals and discounts, urgency, seasonal changes of behavior and RTM to drive even more revenue.
What makes a killer ad-copy?
Make your copy and creative dance together; use visual metaphors to focus on the user value and most importantly — keep it simple. If you are doing a good job with your targeting which I assume you are if you are using mayple ☺ your ads need to get great attention and high intent from the users you are targeting. Try to be assertive but not aggressive. Sometimes your potential customers need clearer guidelines to go to the next step in your pipeline.
An eCommerce brand you promoted you are particularly proud of the results achieved
Shufersal Online — The biggest grocery retail player in Israel and one of the biggest ecommerce players in the Middle East. The results achieved were incredible: ROAS increased by 475% and cart abandonment rate decreased by 67%. Many marketers put a lot of thought into building a pipeline for prospecting audiences, which is great and true. Then they usually give less attention to their remarketing and retention pipeline. These customers need to get the respect they deserve, test and learn your customer’s behavior along with the right customized message for each target audience and this will improve your results.
A must-have tool for scaling eCommerce business
In this current fast-paced world, your customers are surrounded by so much information every single day. There is a huge choice of products and websites to look at and shoppers often browse the internet, remain undecided and forget about your product. In the ecommerce world, a good retargeting tool such as Criteo, for example, will go a long way to help you to scale your business. And what can be easier than to bring back somebody who already purchased from you and offer him a complimentary product or repurchase of his favourite products after some interval.
A lot of people put the products to the cart and then abandon just because somebody called, they did not have a credit card on hand or something else came up. Showing your customers their most favourite products again at the right time will bring them back to your website, drive you more conversions and thus scale your business.
A recommended (not-so-obvious!) paid-media technique to drive the highest ROI possible
A lot of ecommerce owners nowadays scale their business by exporting to different countries. They have their websites and campaigns translated and they start delivering products across the EU for example. Quite often, a client comes to me with a question — my English Adwords campaign is performing so well, so why are my German and French ones doing so poorly?
The secret lies in a good localisation of the campaign. Never have the campaigns just translated for your export market by a translator. Have them localised by an Adwords expert speaking that language. With simple translation, you lose important keywords and synonyms for your products. Also sometimes the translator may translate something incorrectly because in the original language the particular keyword may have dual meaning, and that’s where you are losing on performance and ROI.
What makes a killer ad-copy?
A killer ad copy is the most targeted one. Show your customer the products that he/she liked the most on your website, i.e. spend the most time looking at them in your website or offer your client complimentary products to the product he/she just purchased.
But that’s not all.
Go even further and show Dynamic Ads that consider shopper’s overall habits. Use Criteo’s product recommendations tool, which will serve your client the best and most targeted dynamic Ad based on the shopper overall habits and thus reaches him/her with most targeted personalized product recommendations.
An eCommerce brand you promoted you are particularly proud of the results achieved
I was managing retargeting campaigns for the Mall Group, the biggest e-commerce Group in Central and Eastern Europe. I started with the Czech brand http://mall.cz/ and as the performance of retargeting campaigns exceeded clients expectations I took over their other brands such as Czech Vivantis, Slovenian Mimovrste or Slovakian Mall.
Another client I am proud of is http://webnode.cz/. They are offering website and ecommerce templates for small businesses. It was a small Czech startup and I and my team helped them with their export campaigns. Their website is currently available in 16 languages and they have happy customers from over 40 countries.
Discover the rest of the expert strategies on our blog — here. ✌️
Originally published at https://www.mayple.com.
