The must-have checklist for your eCommerce media
2021 is here and it’s time to make sure you’re going to make the most of your ecommerce media.
Here’s a list that will help you do that!
(1) Touch points (ads, ads ads)
Are you utilizing all of your potential ad space?
Are you serving Sponsored Product Ads in the search results pages, category pages and product pages? Do they appear in the top position? How many ads do you have on each page? What about your mobile web and app? To make the most of your media you must make sure you enable ads to serve in all the relevant touch points. Yes, this is a chicken and egg thing and you can add more touch points when you have more demand, but to get more demand the advertisers expect to see their product listing ads on the top shelves.
Placing an ad in the 1st position (of the search result page) can get up to X2 more clicks than when it’s in the 2nd position and X4 more clicks if it’s in the 4th position. Ads in product pages can generate more than 50% of the total ad impressions but their CTR and conversion rates are much lower.
(2) Keyword bidding
Trivial, right?
Your top advertisers are used to running campaigns that target specific keywords that they select (Google, Amazon etc.). They’re also used to having ad groups within a campaign, setting budget (total or daily), duration etc.
To engage these advertisers with Sponsored Product Ads you need to offer a platform with similar capabilities, including bidding and keyword options.
Here’s a post by Thomas Lammers (from the agency Newcraft) about Bol.com’s new platform and how they recommend using it: Bol.com renews Sponsored Products.
Unfortunately for the advertisers, long tail keywords are responsible for less than 1% of the ad impressions. Read more
(3) Automatic campaigns
Despite what we just said, some sellers and advertisers don’t have the time or expertise to manually mange their campaigns and bids. To engage them with Sponsored Product Ads you need to offer simple one-click campaigns (aka Automatic campaigns).
Automatic bidding and keywords
Automatic campaigns offer an easy to create and manage option and are very popular among advertisers and sellers. The bidding is done automatically (targeting the desired ACoS) and the Keyword are selected automatically as well.
Our data scientists recently collected data from 40,000 campaigns (that were running in the last month on several ecommerce sites) and analyzed the contribution of the automatic campaigns to the stores’ advertising revenue. The results are here.
Autonomous campaigns
Autonomous campaigns make it even easier to create and manage campaigns and does everything automatically including selecting the products.
The algorithm selects the products with the highest chance to perform and adds them to the campaign automatically.
Also it monitors the campaign on a daily basis and optimizes it, adding and removing products, based on the performance. The results are here
Read more
(4) Communication
Once you have your own sponsored product ads service you need to get the sellers and brand partners to use it.
You need to build a plan for on-boarding them: Communication, special promotions, landing pages, webinars, automatic emails, tutorials, case studies etc. If you do it right, at the end of the 1st year you could have 25%-35% engagement.
(5) 100% self-service campaign management console
Make sure your advertisers and sellers can easily access your sponsored product ads platform, create and manage their campaigns. If they need to go through an account manager or talk to someone to make it work, if it’s not intuitive and self explanatory, you might lose many of them.
When it is 100% self service you should see a quick adoption of the service. This is also the best way to scale up without increasing your overhead.
(6) Superb Algorithm
Features are important, simple intuitive UI is a must , scalability and transparency, but in the heart of every Realtime bidding advertising technology there are algorithms that can make a huge impact on your revenue and on your shoppers’ experience. Make sure you’re serving the right ad to the right shopper for the right advertiser at the right time.
(7) Sponsored Brand Ads (aka Headline ads)
While Sponsored Product Ads enable placing one product on the right shelf, Sponsored Brand ads offer an entire shelf at the best position in the store and more holistic full coverage for the brand or seller to showcase themselves and their products. This is a must have!
Read about our 2021 Sponsored Brand Ads collection here.
On Amazon, 80% of the ad revenue derives from Sponsored Product Ads & 18% derives from Sponsored Brand Ads. Read more
(8) Transparency, real time reports and dashboards
Trust between you and your sellers and advertisers is important. Provide them with real time feedback on their campaign performance so they feel secure. Show them the actual orders that were triggered by the ads, search term reports etc.
About Mabaya
Mabaya offers a white-label self-service Sponsored Products Ads platform for online retailers and marketplaces that enables sellers and brands to bid in order to ensure their products are listed in premium locations in the online store.
The platform is integrated in more than 50 ecommerce sites around the globes, serving more than 50,000 advertisers and sellers.
