Solving the Ad Creation Conundrum for Your E-Commerce Site – Why Two Types Are Better Than One

Creating ads for any site, let alone an ecommerce site, can be very difficult. Some people tend to focus on one medium or the other to avoid the confusion that comes with such a task. This, however, is a big mistake. If you want to rake in as much income as you can with your ecommerce portal, you need to reach as many people as you can. The only way you can do this is to find your target market, wherever they may be, and entice them to visit your site via your ads.

The most common avenue people take when it comes to creating ads for a shopping site is Facebook, and for good reason. For starters, there are approximately 2.74 billion people on this social media platform. This is one market you cannot pass up on. This doesn’t mean however that you should concentrate your ads solely on Facebook.

There are other avenues that you need to explore when it comes to advertising for your ecommerce site. Keep in mind that while 2.74 billion people are indeed on Facebook and can become potential customers, they only make up around 29% of the population. This is why you should not focus your advertising efforts solely on this particular portal.

Client: E-Commerce Sites and Niche Sites

Industry: Gift, Specialty, and Niche

Campaign Type: Site Optimization, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads

Project Background

This study focuses not only on one particular ecommerce site but a number of sites that we handle and that all have the same need. For all our clients, we take into consideration whether or not their site is optimized, whether they already have social media accounts or not, and other similar online concerns. If and when these are non-existent, we have to allocate time, money, and effort into the creation of these much needed resources, and that is where specific projects become more challenging than others. The same goes for sites that already had work done on them but were handled by agencies or people who didn’t really know how to do the work the right way.

Project Objective

With ecommerce sites, the objective is always to increase targeted traffic and revenue. You can add to this the need to appear more relevant for your niche than your competitors and to get to a better position on organic as well as in your ads. Added to the objectives for most of our ecommerce site clients is to appear more trustworthy than others just like them.

With a huge number of people going online to sell and buy, it’s pretty easy for people to get scammed by bogus sellers and those who don’t deliver on what they promise. This is an added objective that we aim to achieve in order to get the kind of revenues that our clients want. This is due to the fact that return customers bring in quite a bit of income for our clients. They also tend to recommend sites that deliver on what they promise to friends and family who are also looking to purchase items online.

Project Challenges

Since we are talking about a number of different ecommerce sites here, we will outline all of the challenges that are shared by most, if not all, of the sites that we are using for this particular study. One of the biggest challenges that we face with most of the ecommerce sites we handle is the lack of optimization. Majority of the sites that we are tasked to work on aren’t optimized for search and are in dire need of help in that department.

Aside from lack of SEO, these sites also need some help in the structuring department. When you have an ecommerce site, it has to be easy to navigate, or else your customers will leave and find somewhere else to buy what they are looking for. Also part of the challenges that we faced with these shopping sites include the lack of enticing product descriptions that used relevant keywords, images that did not have alt tags, slow loading times, and many more.

Also part of our challenges in handling selling sites is the lack of social media platforms and interaction. These are those sites that relied heavily on a Facebook page but did not have ads or other social media portals that can be used for customer interaction. If you want to succeed in the ecommerce game, you need to have all the tools and tricks necessary for it. This means you need to have a proactive customer service arm, which you can have via your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and a sterling reputation for delivering on what you are supposed to deliver.

Another challenge that we face with multiple clients is the budget that they set for their advertising needs. While we do have packages that state what they can expect when they choose a lower-priced ad and site care package, some of them still expect maximum results for these. This is probably one of our biggest challenges since a limited budget can only achieve so much.

The Solutions

Since we are talking about multiple ecommerce sites here, we will also outline the various solutions that we used on them. Not all of these solutions were used on all of the sites that we handled, but we do make allowances to give most of our sites the best possible care that we can with what we are given. We allocate funds for ads to show on more than just one portal and to make sure that these show at times when the target market is actively looking for what these sites have to offer.

Also part of our solutions for these sites is the recommendation that optimization should be done on the pages that the site has. Each site has to have pages that are properly optimized in order for them to appear relevant not only when ads are created for them but also for organic search. We believe that when a site shows up on organic alongside its paid ad, it gives a person more incentive to click through since the site shows up twice for a particular search term.

To find out more about the kind of work that we do for our ecommerce sites, here is a small outline of what we get into before we can say that we did what we could for a client’s ecommerce site.

Audit and Optimization

While this isn’t something that most online ad agencies offer their clients off-the-bat, this is something we do. The main reason for this is that we want all our accounts to perform well and we want them to succeed. In short, their success is our success. We do what we can with the budget we are given but without going overboard. We do have our own budgets to take care of, so going overboard with what we can stretch for our clients is a big no-no.

So, we audit a site, optimize it with basic optimization tactics, and start with the rest of the work we usually do with all sites we create ads for. In the audit, we usually check URLs, keyword saturation, and keyword focus. We conduct a keyword search to determine which keywords are best for the site’s ads and optimization needs.

Aside from these, we also check for image sizes, image alt tags, and other elements that make for a well-optimized site. Once optimization is done, we then begin to focus on the ads and campaigns that we plan to create for the site.

Facebook and Google Ad Creation

The creation of ads begins with, as you guessed it, keyword research. This will involve the input of the client since we do need to know what they want to rank for and what their customers use to find them. We also integrate keywords and keyword variations based on the products that they normally sell (if they’re an ecommerce site) or what services they offer.

Next will be the planning stage of the ads that we will be running in the various campaigns that we will put up for the site. In this instance, we take into account a number of factors, and these include the location or the geographic reach of the company, the demographics they are targeting, and of course, the budget. These factors are important because it will shape the decisions we make for a lot of the work that needs to be done.

These decisions include what types of ads we will make, where we will focus most of our attention on, and how often these ads will appear. This will also help us decide when these ads will run, what their triggers will be, and a lot of other factors. We will also decide where our Google Ads should appear, for instance, if it’s an ad for a product, we can have it appear on Google Shopping. If, however, we are making an ad for a service, Search might be our best bet for this.

As you can see, the creation of ads for any site involves more than just the putting together of keywords and phrases to drive traffic to a site. It also involves decisions like what time these should show according to the target demographic, geographical reach of the client, and other similar factors. The one thing that remains constant in our decisions however is the fact that we use both Facebook Ads and Google to get the reach that we want for our clients.

What Influences Our Ad Creation Decisions

When deciding on where the bulk of your ads go, there are a few questions that you need to ask before launching your campaigns. The first question involves the target market of the client. Is the majority of their market on Facebook or do they use Google more to find what they need? The next question involves what stage of the funnel the client should target. Should the ads aim at those who are ready to buy or are we still at the convincing stage?

These two questions, along with others that we ask as we put together campaigns and ad copy, will drive what we do. Now, we can’t divulge all of the things that we do to get things done and to get our clients the traffic as well as revenue that they need. Suffice it to say that we do get the job done and we try to do it with a set pattern that has worked for us over and over again.

One of the biggest deciding factors for where to focus our attention on when it comes to choosing which side of the ad creation conundrum we should lean heavily on is the budget. Sure, Facebook ads are cheaper and can reach a lot of people but there are factors there that have to be looked into before we pour a lot of our effort in that arena. The demographic that we need to reach is one factor and the rather restrictive guidelines that Facebook places on the ads that you create are another factor.

This is why we opt to use both advertising mediums when we present our plans and outlines to our prospective clients during a consultation. Not only do we show them that using both is a good idea, but we convince them that it is what will bring them the most traffic and revenue, bar none.

Other Work We Do on Both Platforms

There are a lot of other things that we do when we create the ads for our clients on these two very different ad platforms. For one, we review all the search terms we use on a daily basis to see which ones are the most effective. We also do split testing of ads to see which ones bring in more traffic and revenue. We even make sure to exclude irrelevant queries to ensure that our ads don’t show for anything that our clients don’t sell or do.

All in all, the work is pretty extensive and is aimed at bringing the client the kind of traffic that they want and need to their site. The use of both platforms for advertising, along with smart bidding strategies, strategic timing of ads, and thorough research, we often find that our efforts are rewarded with an increase of at least 1,000% traffic from the time we take over the site’s ad work to a few months down the line.

What This Says About What We Do

So, what does this say about what we can do for our clients here at Bright Strategies? It shows that we do what we can in order to bring in the results that a client wants and needs. We know what we are all about and what to do with what we have in front of us.

If you want to bring in relevant and targeted traffic to your site, all you have to do is to contact us. We can begin with an audit of your site, a carefully formulated plan for your site’s marketing needs, and months of work that will bring about results you are sure to be happy with.

Note: Our case studies don’t come with the usual screenshots of our analytics and ad backend pages due to existing NDAs with the clients being mentioned in them.