More and more, eCommerce companies and online shops are tapping digital marketing agencies to help them advertise their products online – on not just one, but multiple marketplaces. Whether you are adding eCommerce clients to the agency portfolio for the first time or working with these clients – there is a need to break through the noise by advertising on marketplaces.
Successful ad campaigns for eCommerce call for high-quality PPC ads, banner ads, text ads (expanded and simple), and keywords. However, there is one important thing to consider when creating, changing, and optimizing these campaigns – how it will be executed. As you need to advertise many products on multiple marketplaces, a manual approach can be complicated and time consuming. This is when automation comes into play. So you need the right digital marketing technology to provide automation and analytics to provide you with smart segmentation and hyper-personalisation capabilities to ensure the growth and success of your eCommerce clients.
So which technologies can you use to execute comprehensive eCommerce campaigns quickly, optimize when needed and obtain the data you need to ensure their success? This article will uncover some new tools for your arsenal.
Why automation is key with eCommerce clients
eCommerce clients often have large product inventories. Imagine manually handling every ad for each individual product– sounds paralyzing. Additionally, a manual approach can lower your return on advertising spend, provide a disappointing CTR and you will not have the necessary data you need to optimize your campaign around response rates. All in all, you will waste time.
So which technologies can you use to create comprehensive ad campaigns (PPC, banner, and text) around individual products that provide the analytics you need to ensure your ad campaigns are performing well? There are two technologies to consider utilizing for your eCommerce clients: product feed management and text and shopping ad tools.
Product feed management – the new marketing automation tool
Product feeds are XML, CSV, or data files that provide an overview of products or items that you want to advertise online. They include product characteristics such as title, colour, size, EAN/GTIN number and more. With online shops built on eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce, it is easy to extract this data file.
When you start advertising through third parties, such as price comparison sites, marketplaces, or affiliate networks, they require product information in a specific format. Exporting your product catalog to different channels for various purposes means that you will need to create your product feed in customized formats. Marketplace information requirements for products can easily become overwhelming and difficult to manage. Especially if you are advertising on multiple marketplaces at the same time. This is where product feed management tools make it easier.
Product feed management tools enable you to upload the original data file and optimize it in a format required by each marketplace. Modifying the product information each time to meet the marketplace is easier because there is no need to touch the original source. It is simple to add data to your feed, enrich product information and easily filter content based on the technology’s ‘rules’.
Role of text and shopping ad tools
To take your text and shopping ads to the next level, text and shopping ad tools can automatically generate thousands of campaigns, ad groups, ads (e.g., PPC, banner, text), and keywords based on your product data feed. What is really convenient is that you can set up Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising campaigns on products within seconds. This works through your product feed. Through the feed, you can generate search, display, and shopping campaign templates/structures. These can be updated based on your ever-changing product feed – automatically. You can even create hyper-relevant ads and handle a large inventory with a built-in, ad copy generator. Text and shopping ad tools can combine static and dynamic data from the product feed, which will increase your ad’s relevance and reduce your ad spend.
You can also utilize the product feed’s data to quickly generate long-tail keywords for all of your ads. This eliminates almost all manual work. By connecting your data feed to your text add generator, you can utilize the ´rules´ to take full control of your ads and enjoy real-time updates for all of your ads including sales price, stock information or shipping cost, etc.
Why add these tools to your arsenal?
Here are some benefits:
- With everything centralized, digital marketers can optimize, enrich, and maintain product data, even for a large variety of marketplaces and products
- Feed management is open so it is compatible and flexible with any online strategy. You can create an export feed for various price comparison sites, affiliates, or marketplaces while defining your channel portfolio
- You have control. Product feed management is a form of marketing automation that enables agencies to monitor data and ‘adjust the screws’ when needed. The risk of error messages and low-quality exports is low and there is no need to tap an IT department to handle
- Product feed management is agile. Data optimization is only one piece of the puzzle for a successful online marketing experience. All-in-one product feed management platforms offer additional features such as PPC automation, order syncs with marketplaces, and even the ability to integrate with Google Analytics to manage and evaluate your ads’ online performance
Automation and eCommerce go hand in hand. With that, large inventories and increasing amounts of data require product feed management and ad tools to help agencies get ahead of ever-changing product catalogs and sales channels. With these tools, you can increase your CTR and return on marketing spend, while decreasing your cost per action. All in all, these tools help save both time and money, creating happy clients.
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Thank you for this amazing article.