How to Master E-Commerce Advertising & 13 Must-Try Strategies

Learn how to take your e-commerce advertising to the next level with 13 proven strategies for increased sales and brand visibility.

Oct 19, 2024

Justin Gabriel

Founder of Shophunter & Brandwise

Table of Contents

How to Master E-Commerce Advertising & 13 Must-Try Strategies

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Imagine you're at the helm of a successful online business. You’ve built a fantastic e-commerce website that showcases your products beautifully. But it’s like you’re standing in the middle of a deserted island when it comes to attracting visitors. No one seems to care, and you have no idea how to get off. Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Many online business owners struggle to generate traffic to their stores. But what if I told you there was a way to boost your store’s visibility and do it quickly? E-commerce advertising helps you attract visitors to your site almost instantly. And the best part? You can fine-tune your campaigns to ensure you reach the right audience by tiktok ecommerce strategy and that your ads are profitable before you invest too much. In this post, we’ll explore effective e-commerce advertising strategies to help you maximize your online sales and business growth.

One way to boost your e-commerce advertising success is to utilize Shophunter's Shopify sales tracker. This handy tool helps you determine what products to promote based on their performance.

What is Ecommerce Advertising?

E-commerce advertising puts your products in front of potential customers as they browse online. This practice uses paid online ads to attract visitors to your e-commerce site or online marketplace. E-commerce advertising aims to drive sales from new customers and repeat buyers.

E-commerce advertising is a type of marketing that distributes paid content across digital channels to attract potential customers (and repeat buyers) to an e-commerce store. E-commerce advertising is a billion-dollar industry. According to the US Census, retail digital ad spending represents 25% of total digital spending, even though e-commerce sales are only 13% of total US retail sales. Even brick-and-mortar stores are investing in online advertising.

Blending Digital and Traditional Advertising Strategies for E-Commerce Success

Most e-commerce businesses and new DTC brands invest in online advertising since the internet is where you host your store and where many consumers like to shop. Online e-commerce advertising includes obvious forms of paid advertising, like Google ads, banner ads, dynamic product ads, and social media advertising.

But it also includes other digital marketing formats like content marketing, email marketing, newsletters, and user-generated content. When e-commerce brands have brick-and-mortar stores, they may opt for more traditional advertising like:

Radio

Direct mail campaigns

Billboards

Other physical display ads

Ecommerce Advertising vs. Ecommerce Marketing: What’s the Difference?

E-commerce advertising is just one kind of marketing. For example, an e-commerce marketing strategy includes preparing your products for the market, determining your target audience, defining your products’ value propositions, and designing your visual and written brand voice. E-commerce advertising is how you promote your products and brand through paid channels.

E-commerce advertising is essential in merchants’ digital marketing toolbox, especially with other e-commerce marketing tactics. G2 has found that brands using three or more marketing channels in their campaigns see a 250% higher engagement and purchase rate than brands using single channels.

Ecommerce Sales Strategy

Ecommerce Monitoring

Ecommerce Search Metrics

Competitive Product Analysis

Ecommerce Marketing Budget

Ecommerce Marketing Ideas

Why are Ecommerce Ads Good for Business?

Growing your business organically takes time. And considering the sheer number of online stores across the web, it’s easy to get lost amongst your competitors. Ads will help you gain visibility across search and social.

Get in Front of the Right Audience

Most (if not all) ad channels allow you to target specific audiences. Retargeting campaigns also mean you can serve ads to people interested in your products.

Boost Brand Awareness with Ecommerce Advertising

Customers need multiple brand touchpoints before they decide to buy. It’s no good to post a product pic on Instagram and hope someone will click on it. You need to give your potential customers time to trust your brand. A good mix of ad campaigns and content can help you do this.

Ecommerce Advertising Platforms

Analytics Tools for Ecommerce

Ecommerce Ads

Google Ads for Ecommerce

Ecommerce Video Ads

How to Make TikTok Ads

Facebook Ads for Ecommerce

E-Commerce Social Media Advertising

Ecommerce Ad Intelligence

PPC Competitor Analysis Tools

Competitor Ads

13 Effective Ecommerce Advertising Strategies

1. Create Cold Ads to Warm Up Your Audiences

Advertising helps warm up cold audiences who’ve never heard of your business. You can create cold ads to target these groups and get them to ‘warm up’ to your brand. You must create a buyer persona that outlines your target audience’s pain points and preferences. Most ad platforms like:

Meta

Google

Will allow you to create a target audience while setting up your campaigns. Then, you can create ads that speak directly to your audience’s interests. Retargeting ads to visitors who’ve already checked out your site can help bring them back to make a purchase.

2. Retarget People Who’ve Visited Your Website

Once people visit your website, you can retarget them with ads across different online channels. At this point, you know your visitors are at least a little curious about your brand or products.

Now that your audience knows who you are, retargeting ads will provide more information and pull them further down the sales funnel. You could also use retargeting to encourage loyal customers to buy from you again or remind people they’ve abandoned their shopping cart.

3. Jump on Pinterest Trends

If your brand has products that lend themselves to gorgeous imagery, then Pinterest could be your social platform. Pinterest allows you to create top-level campaigns and segmented ad groups.

You can also target people with particular interests and demographics. When choosing what type of content to show in your ad creatives, look at Pinterest trends to see what people are searching for.

4. Add User-Generated Content Into Your Ads

Social proof is a huge driver for buyers. 79% say user-generated content (UGC) impacts their purchase decisions. Being able to show real customers using your products will help build trust with potential buyers. It’s basically like virtual word-of-mouth marketing. If you mix UGC into your ads, you’ll be on to a winner.

5. Hire Influencers to Promote Your Products

Like UGC, influencers are a great way to build trust with your audience. The difference here is you’ll need to pay people to promote your products (rather than UGC, which is usually free). Partnering with an influencer means your brand will get exposure to its audience, so it’s worth finding people whose audience matches your buyer personas.

6. Find Your Best-Performing Evergreen Content

You won’t always know what ads will resonate with your audience. Finding the assets and copy combinations that work may take some experimentation and tweaking. But when you do, you can reuse them over and over again.

7. Promote Products Through Shopping Ads

Shopping ads are ideal for ecommerce businesses. They help customers compare your products against competitors and are super visually ideal for quickly showing off your wares. Channels like Google and Amazon offer shopping ads. They’re often tailored to a person’s shopping history and can appear in search results and recommendations (think of the recommended products section on Amazon).

8. Get Involved with Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate program (affiliate marketing) is when another company or publication receives a commission for featuring your product on its website. You can feature in a newsletter, blog post, or through a big media site like Amazon Associates.

9. Experiment with a Variety of Assets on Meta

Instagram and Facebook (both owned by Meta) are super-popular with e-commerce brands that want to run social media advertising campaigns. Facebook ads have the potential to reach 2.8 billion people. All this user data means Meta can efficiently serve up ads based on a person’s interests and browsing history.

Social media ads complement an organic social media strategy by investing money to boost visibility and reach a broader audience. Native advertising is a type of advertising that mimics the look and feel of other non-sponsored content. For example, Instagram ads are made to look like organic content found elsewhere on the site.

11. SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can boost an ecommerce website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). By optimizing on-page content, website structure, and backlinks using industry-aligned keywords, businesses can increase organic (non-paid) traffic.

Organic social media content is compelling and shareable. The goal is to garner views and engagement from the quality of the content alone, without spending money on targeted advertising or boosting post visibility.

13. Email and SMS Marketing

Email marketing is highly effective because businesses can reach audiences directly in their inbox, making it a cost-effective way to nurture leads and maintain customer relationships.

How to Build a Winning Ecommerce Advertising Strategy

Understand Your Goals

Before launching loads of campaigns across multiple platforms, make sure you understand what you want to achieve. This will make it easier to track how well your ads are performing. Perhaps you want to promote a particular product line in this case you could track the number of sales you get from your ads over a certain period. You may want to raise brand awareness. In this case, you could track how many mentions my brand gets on social or Google searches.

Laying the Foundation for an Omnichannel eCommerce Experience

To really compete in your niche, you need to consider your overall marketing strategy as a collection of eCommerce ads, with each channel campaign optimized to specific objectives and all channels working together to reach your overall goal: sales.

But it doesn’t stop with eCommerce advertising. Every aspect of your online store customer experience must be adapted for multiple channel journeys. This means your entire cross-channel eCommerce strategy could need an overhaul. Why? Because of the quick change in consumer behavior over the last few years. Here are three essential stats from key eCommerce consumer studies that back this up:

According to UC Today, nine out of every 10 consumers want omnichannel service, where they can seamlessly move between various online channels.

44% of all companies have adopted a ‘digital-first approach’ when it comes to customer experience.

According to Google, up to 85% of consumers start their purchasing journey on one device but finish the final transaction on another.

A simple example of this in practice is the rise of BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) initiatives, which dramatically increased during COVID lockdowns last year.

Building a Seamless Multi-Channel Experience for E-Commerce Shoppers

eCommerce stores that offer offline pickup. Even if you don’t have offline brick-and-mortar locations, you should still create a multi-channel experience for your shoppers through various online channels.

This will ensure your entire customer journey is multi-dimensional and seamless at every touchpoint, allowing shoppers to move between channels and devices easily. To lay a good foundation for a multi-channel selling strategy, you should be diving deep into your store data to answer these key questions:

Which channels are bringing in the most traffic, and what percentage of that traffic converts?

How many steps do my shoppers take before they complete a sale?

Which channels bring the most inquiries and requests (customer service)?

Are the devices potential shoppers use to find your store the same as those they use to purchase?

Which social media platforms do my shoppers engage with most?

Let’s say you have a growing online clothing boutique. When you look at my store data, you find that a Google or Facebook ad brings the most traffic, but that traffic takes longer to convert (more steps to purchase). You also find that while Twitter doesn’t bring any store traffic, it’s the top channel my customers use to engage with my customer service. you could then use this data:

To spot gaps in your eCommerce ads for those channels like Dynamic product ads or Google Shopping remarketing, which you can fill with touchpoint-specific campaigns and improved personalization and targeting.

Move ad spend from Twitter to other more lucrative channels such as Google Shopping, and move Twitter out of marketing and into your customer support management systems.

Choose Your Core eCommerce Ads Marketing Channels

We now know the importance of creating an omnichannel customer experience across your entire eCommerce sales funnel. Choosing the right eCommerce ad channels that work seamlessly together will be vital in building the right conversion strategy.

You or your marketing team must invest in PPC management software and tools to manage and optimize your overall strategy and keep it seamless. If you want a more hands-on alternative to WordStream, check out Traffic Booster. When it comes to eCommerce ads, there are seven core eCommerce digital marketing channels every online store should consider.

Pro Tip: As your eCommerce ads strategy gets more involved, the number of core channels and advertising campaign types will increase.

Set Up Your Tools

If you’re creating campaigns across multiple channels, things can get pretty chaotic. You’ll want to set up tools to help you create, manage, and report on your ads. Here are some to get you started:

Shophunter

ShopHunter's Shopify sales tracker is essential for e-commerce founders, particularly those within the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, this tool uses a custom algorithm to estimate sales for entire stores and individual products, helping users quickly validate product potential.

Key features include:

Sales estimates for both stores and products, offering insights into market opportunities.

Ad spy tool to track advertising activity across multiple stores, allowing you to spot trending products and winning marketing strategies.

Whether you're a dropshipper, a Shopify store owner, or a newcomer to e-commerce, ShopHunter simplifies product research and minimizes the risk of investing in low-performing items.

Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.

Dash

think about all the visual content you’ll need for your ads. Every channel has different image requirements and prefers different types of content.

Dash is a place for you to store, organise, and share all that content with your team and agencies. You can resize your images for social media and sync up with design tools like Canva to help you get your campaigns up and running quickly.

Canva

If you’re designing ads myself (and I’m not a designer), Canva is the perfect tool to help me create eye-catching images and video content. Read my post to discover tips on improving your Canva design skills.

Google Ads

if you want to advertise on Google Shopping or Google Search, you must set up a Google ad account.

Google Analytics

Discover which channels perform best and see how well visitors are converting on your website.

Pencil AI

Use AI to create effective ads across your campaigns. Pencil AI uses $1bn worth of ad data to predict which creative assets and copy work best for your brand.

Triple Whale

Deep dive into your ad data and discover the highest-performing ads across your entire campaign. Triple Whale leans into first-party data to help you better grasp your ROAS and do some conversion rate optimization.

Install Ad Pixels

It’s worth setting up pixels to track your ads' effectiveness. These short bits of code can be placed on your website to collect ad conversions.

When someone clicks on your Facebook ad and is taken to your website, a meta pixel returns that information to Facebook to track how people engage with your ad. Most social channels, as well as Google, will have pixels that you can code into your website. The more data I can collect, the easier it will be to optimize future campaigns.

Select the Right eCommerce Ad for Key Shopping Journey Touchpoints

The next step in creating a successful eCommerce ad strategy is determining which campaigns and ads you should run to ensure every shopping journey touchpoint is covered. This means creating a multi-channel digital marketing strategy that targets these four key buying stages:

Awareness

Consideration

Purchase

Repurchase

Each of these stages and the campaigns associated with them have their objectives and KPIs. To achieve these goals, using the best channels, eCommerce ad types, targeting, and messaging is vital.

Pro Tip: Let’s Talk eCommerce Ads KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Brand Awareness and Conversion Campaigns

As we know, the KPIs you monitor for awareness or brand recognition are different to how you measure a conversion campaign. Where your brand awareness campaigns are focused on CTRs and impressions, your conversion campaigns will be focused on increasing your CVRs while keeping my CPA (cost per acquisition) down.

This means continuously assessing and monitoring your KPI for each objective is vital in ensuring your overall eCommerce ads strategy is properly optimized for the best ROAS.

You will also need a set of KPIs to measure each digital marketing channel. For example, with Google Ads, I will want to check these specific KPIs:

Budget attainment

CPAs

CPCs

Quality Score

CVRs

Impression share

CTRs

LTVs

Keyword performance

Tailoring Your Google Ads Strategy for Different Campaign Goals

You can read more about important Google Ads KPIs here. Each campaign should be working to feed potential customers and shoppers into the next stage. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. Retail brand marketers must tweak and optimize their channels and campaigns to ensure their overall eCommerce ads strategy is symbiotically.

For example, let’s say you’re marketing an online clothing store and am using Facebook and Google Ads for eCommerce. A snippet of your overall eCommerce ads strategy could look a little something like this:

Awareness: Facebook video ad with Lookalike Audiences

Consideration: Google Search, with RSLs and brand name as a keyword

Repurchase: Smart Google Shopping and Facebook Dynamic Product ads with retargeting/remarketing audiences

Use Management and Optimization Real-Time Automation to Drive Conversions

If all of this feels like hard work, you’re not alone. While continuously monitoring and optimizing your campaigns and overall store brand KPIs is vital to the success of your eCommerce ad strategy, many marketers also struggle with this.

At some point, as your business and eCommerce ads portfolio grows, you can only do this successfully with real-time optimization and management. This is where pro-eCommerce ad tools like Traffic Booster come in.

Traffic Booster

Traffic Booster is an all-in-one PPC management and automation tool and service that combines unique machine learning and AI technology with marketing expertise to create, manage, and optimize Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads in real time. This ensures I’m getting the best results for the lowest possible ad spend. Here is a list of some of the channels and eCommerce campaigns included:

Best Ads for eCommerce

Google Shopping and Smart Shopping ads

Dynamic remarketing ads

Search & Dynamic Search Ads

YouTube Shopping & action ads

Smart display campaigns ads

Dynamic retargeting ads

Instagram & Facebook acquisition ads

Bing

TikTok for eCommerce

Pinterest Ads

Go All-In on Personalization

Last but not least, let’s talk about personalization. In today’s market, segmenting your audiences into groups is insufficient. You need to ensure you personalize the shopping experience for each person who engages with your brand, products, and marketing. Here are some personalization stats from Forbes to drive home its importance:

Over 42% of consumers get annoyed with impersonal or generic content.

71% of consumers experience frustration with impersonal shopping experiences.

According to Statista, 90% of U.S. consumers find personalized marketing very or somewhat appealing.

91% of shoppers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide product recommendations or promotions that are relevant specifically to them.

The Shopify sales tracker from ShopHunter takes a unique approach to estimating sales for online stores and products. At its core, the tool uses a custom algorithm to provide sales estimates for Shopify stores and products. This helps eCommerce entrepreneurs quickly validate product potential and make informed business decisions.

Beyond basic sales tracking, ShopHunter's sales tracker features an ad spy tool that monitors store advertising activity. This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on. ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items whether you're a:

Dropshipper

Shopify store owner

Someone looking to enter the eCommerce space,

How ShopHunter's Sales Tracker Works

To use ShopHunter's sales tracker, eCommerce entrepreneurs first enter a Shopify store or product page into the tool. The dashboard then populates an overview of the estimated sales, including total sales over time and sales by the last month.

For even more detail, users can click through the dashboard to access information on:

Sales over time

Sales by the last month

Additional ads running for the store or product

This allows users to quickly validate product potential and uncover existing marketing strategies to help inform their own.

Benefits of Using ShopHunter's Sales Tracker

ShopHunter's sales tracker helps eCommerce entrepreneurs validate product potential before investing time and money into a new business venture. By providing detailed estimates of store and product sales, the tool helps users make informed decisions about what to sell in their Shopify stores. The additional data on existing advertising strategies can also help jumpstart a new store's marketing efforts.