How paid advertising strategies can overflow your e-commerce store with customers
Hey there! Welcome back to my blog, and if you’re new then I’m glad to have you!
My goal is to help local businesses gain an unfair advantage over their competitors and level the playing field with big brands through the power of unlimited leverage that is websites. I strongly believe that websites have the power to transform your business… and your life!
Today, we’re going to be continuing our discussion on driving traffic to your e-commerce store in our two-part e-commerce blog series by leveraging paid advertising strategies. Last time, we talked about how to use free proven strategies like leveraging SEO, blogging, traffic swapping, and much more to build an organic following and get more traffic in the process. If you haven’t read that blog, read it now then come back to this one.
Now, we’re going to go over paid advertising strategies you can use to shortcut the lengthy process of building an organic audience. These include things like hacking SEO, running ads, and leveraging your “dream 100” to get a huge influx of lifelong customers visiting your e-commerce store. Without further ado, let’s jump in!
If you read the first part, then you remember one of the key strategies to driving traffic to your store was using SEO to rank high on Google so more people can find your site. Although this is a great strategy for the long term, SEO can take a while to get results. In fact, if you want to get on the first page of Google for a keyword, you need about three to six months of SEO work to achieve that, and even longer for the top 3 search results. This varies too depending on the difficulty of the keywords you’re targeting, and may not be the best for store owners on a time crunch who need to promote their offer fast.
An alternative? Bypassing SEO altogether! The truth is, even if you rank in the top 3, you still need to do a lot of SEO work to maintain that position. What if instead, you could just leverage the hard work of other websites that already rank consistently for the keyword you want to target? Well, you can! This is where hacking SEO comes in. Instead of competing for the top spots, you can contact non-competing companies with websites that are already in the top 10 of Google and in the same niche as you. You can ask to run ads on their website. If they agree, then you would negotiate on a pricing method like paying for each click or a fixed cost each month to place an ad. You both win because they make money from their website while you leverage their traffic and SEO efforts to advertise your store.
Once you agree on a price and can start running ads, you need to determine which ads to place and if you only want to have one ad or multiple. Depending on your offer, some placements will give you more leverage than others. For instance, if your offer is a webinar that requires people to register or you want more people in your newsletter list, then your ad should be an opt-in form. If you want to advertise a product or service, you can place a banner ad on the top or side of their pages or place an ad in their checkout and thank you pages. Whichever type of placement you choose, remember that you can have multiple of them as well as mix and match different placements to maximize your paid advertising efforts.
The Dream 100 is a very powerful concept and if used properly, can significantly boost your online traffic. I recently learned of this concept from legendary marketer Russell Brunson and it’s starting to change my thinking about how I leverage paid advertising strategies.
Whenever you look at a specific niche on social media, do you notice that there is always a handful of names with a big following that spearhead the topic? For example, in the gym niche, you have people like Neol Dyzel or in the YouTube vlogging niche, you have people like Mr Beast or PewdiePie in gaming. These are the influencers known as the Dream 100, people who have already congregated a large portion of your ideal customers. In the e-commerce space, this can be people like Neil Patel, Marsha Collier, and Ben Marks or anyone with a large following in your specific niche.
Now you’re probably thinking “Abel, how the heck do I find my dream 100?” Don’t worry, I got you covered! In order to identify the Dream 100, you first need to discover your ideal customer (aka Dream Avatar) by determining what problem your product/services solve and who needs that problem solved. Next, figure out what platform your Avatar is on the most and what influencers they follow. Finally, gather a list of 100 of those influencers, preferably with a slightly larger following than you. They will be your Drean 100.
Once you have identified and built a list of the Dream 100, you need to interact with their content as much as possible so they see you everywhere on a regular basis. The key is getting them to like you. Like, comment, subscribe, or even send positive messages to them to build rapport. After some time, reach out to them and ask if they can promote your store on their platform. All you need is one person to say yes and the results become exponential. If you get one yes then ask them for a referral to anyone else who might be interested in collaborating with you and you’d be surprised at how many other yesses you can get. The best part? Now a massive audience comprised of your Dream Avatar gets to see your product without you spending years building up that audience.
Now this sounds great and all, but you might be wondering where the paid advertising comes in. The first thing to note is that not every person in your list will be keen to work with just anyone nor will they do it for free, and with good reason. They put in years of hard work to build the massive following they have and understand the leverage behind that. If you want to increase your chances of receiving a yes, you will need to show them that you are serious and this can be through one of the following paid methods:
The second thing is that you might be really unlucky and get all nos. If this happens, don’t worry, you can still leverage these influencers. Instead of having them directly promote your product, you can run ads on different platforms where your Dream 100 are and target their audience.
Google Ads, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is a popular and effective paid advertising strategy to drive targeted traffic to your e-commerce store since they work fast and provide precise metrics. When someone searches for a product or service that you offer, your ad will appear at the top of the search results page, increasing the chances of your Dream Avatars clicking on your ad. Depending on your business, some ads have more leverage than others. E-commerce stores can run the following ads to start getting traffic:
These are the top search results you come across when searching for something, usually marked with the word sponsored above the title. They are based on specific keywords you target or “bid” on which are relevant to your website and your niche. Essentially, it’s like paid SEO that shows your site at the top without having to organically rank for that keyword, as long as you keep funding the ad.
To get started with text ads, you'll need to choose relevant keywords that describe your products or services. These keywords will trigger your ads to appear in search results. You'll also set a budget and create compelling ad copy that showcases the benefits of your offering. With Google Ads, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, making it a cost-effective way to drive traffic and generate sales. You can also set a specified time duration for the ad to run (aka an ad campaign) and once the campaign is over, you can analyze how many leads were generated and then tweak your copy accordingly.
Keyword bidding is not the only ad campaign you can run, shopping ads were actually specifically designed for e-commerce stores to showcase their products at the top of the search results, similar to text ads. The difference here is that you don’t use keywords but instead rely on the properties of your products to be displayed at the top of Google. These properties are things like the name, price, availability, and description of your product. The costs function the same as text ads, you pay when someone clicks.
To run shopping ads, you'll need to create a product feed, a file containing all your products' properties. This product feed is uploaded to your Google Merchant Center account, which is linked to your Google Ads account. A big plus with shopping ads is that they can show up along with text ads on the same page to maximize the chances of someone clicking on an ad.
So far, we’ve covered the more expensive methods of leveraging paid advertising to increase your store’s traffic, but what if I told you there was a cheaper and potentially more effective way to run ads?
Whenever you look at a newspaper or magazine, they are always covered in ads! Now, these can be costly to purchase, especially in the front or back of printed material, however, there are usually small extra empty spaces in the pages between the covers. These empty spaces turn into unsold ads that are known as remnant ad space which sell at a huge discount. The downside though is that physical remnant ads have poor conversion rates since someone would have to stumble on a tiny ad hidden in several pages of print. Hence, digital remnant ad space! Essentially, this is the same concept as physical ads, extra unused spaces that can be bought for a low price, but now on platforms with more leverage.
Whenever you watch a YouTube video from your favorite YouTuber, they most likely say the iconic line that’s standard in every video, “check the links in the description…” While some may not realize this, the description area of YouTube videos is remnant ad space! A lot of YouTubers only have a few links in their description and that can be leveraged.
All you have to do is find non-competing YouTubers in the same niche and work out a deal where you pay a small price to have a link to your store placed in their video description. The best part about this, if you read part 1, is that YouTube videos never depreciate in value, in fact, they can go viral! You once again have a viral ticking time bomb with your ads glued to it. In addition, you basically get free promotions on each video when the creator says that iconic line. Over time, this can become a significantly effective paid advertising strategy.
Another great platform is email because it’s standard for most digital businesses to have some sort of mailing list or newsletter to promote their services/products or give news updates to their customers. Although this was a pro tip in part 1, I figured I would mention it here too, but the P.S. section is a great space to leverage. A lot of newsletters don’t use the P.S. section at the bottom of an email and as a result, it’s easier to negotiate a great price to use that area for your own ads. If they have a huge list, then this becomes a great strategy because most people often read or click the P.S. section.
Do you ever get the feeling that companies are stocking you online? Like every time you look up a specific product on Google, you see an ad for it when you scroll on Facebook or Instagram. Well if you do, you technically wouldn’t be wrong. These very specific ads are a result of tracking pixels, a tiny transparent 1x1 pixel on different pages of a website designed to track your every move.
Tracking pixels can track various types of user data for the purposes of providing metrics to companies which can be things like the performance and conversion rates of ads, the pages that get clicked the most, as well as user information like their IP address and the device they’re using to view the site. These pixels are also available on various platforms like Google Analytics or Facebook.
I bet you’re starting to see how these tiny pixels can be of use to you huh? If you run ads for your e-commerce store, then you can use them to see what improvements you need to make to the ad in order to maximize conversion rates, or you can use them to retarget people who visited your store. This can look something like a user abandoning their cart and you showing them ads on Facebook for that product or if they make a purchase, you can show them ads for similar products/upsells.
We can, however, take this a step further. Remember how we talked about hacking SEO earlier? Well, you can combine that strategy with tracking pixels. Along with negotiating for ad space with webmasters, you can also negotiate the idea of adding a pixel to their site and collecting all of their users’ data without having to do the hard work of ranking on Google! I do want to give a warning though. Tracking pixels is great for collecting data, but not everyone is a fan of them, especially data protection agencies due to the fact that they collect data without the awareness and sometimes consent of the user. To be safe, make sure you notify your users if you have tracking pixels and give them the option to opt in or out of tracking their data. Also, let them know what type of data you are collecting.
If you want to learn more about how these pixels work and how to track different types of metrics, then feel free to read this article for more details.
Our final paid advertising strategy is a simple one but a personal favorite because who doesn’t love winning free stuff?! If you have a decent following on your socials and newsletter, you can run contests and raffle out giveaways of your product to increase engagement. This is one of the best ways to get leads and boost conversion rates since giveaways have close to a 34% conversion rate.
This strategy costs you only a few units of your product but can have so many benefits like better engagement, an increase in your following on different platforms, and of course, more traffic to your store! Like other strategies, this can be taken a step further too! In part 1, we discussed collaborating with other non-competing store owners and creating a bundle with both of your products/services. You can turn that bundle into a big giveaway and leverage both of your audiences to increase engagement and traffic drastically. In addition to that, you can work with your Dream 100 to make the giveaway even more massive and promote it to a wider audience.
Pro tip: Keep the time of giveaways short, typically a few days to a week, otherwise people lose interest and forget about it.
We definitely covered a lot of information in this blog and if you made it all the way here, congratulations! Let’s recap everything though to make it easier to digest. We talked about how paid advertising strategies can shortcut the process of building up organic traffic.
We covered strategies like hacking SEO to place ads on high-ranking, non-competing websites. We explained how leveraging influencers, or the Dream 100, allows you to tap into large, engaged audiences in your niche, how running targeted Google Ads, ensures your products are seen by potential customers actively searching for what you offer, and even how utilizing affordable remnant ad space can provide cost-effective exposure. We went over tracking pixels and how they help you gather valuable user data for retargeting and ad optimization, and finally, how engaging online giveaways can significantly boost traffic and conversions by encouraging audience participation and spreading brand awareness. Here are the key takeaways of everything we covered:
Hacking SEO: By partnering with non-competitor websites that already rank highly on Google, you can leverage their SEO efforts to advertise your store. This strategy can provide faster results compared to traditional SEO techniques.
With these strategies, both free and paid, driving traffic should now be a walk in the park!