If you’re selling products online, your business won’t survive without advertising. Sounds dramatic, but it’s true. But how do you master the art of advertising your e-commerce business or retail brand?
This guide will give you all the answers you need with nine impactful e-commerce advertising ideas. We’ve also thrown in some successful e-commerce ads from well-established brands and examples of how your ads might look when they’re online.
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What is advertising for e-commerce?
Advertising an e-commerce business is how you generate interest in your brand, boost traffic to your product pages, and increase profit. Advertising, as opposed to marketing, is how you do all of these things with paid tools on third-party platforms.
9 ideas for e-commerce advertising
Advertising is crucial for any retail business but knowing where to start can be difficult. So, let’s look at some e-commerce advertising examples you can try.
1. PPC campaigns
PPC is a form of advertising where you pay every time your ad is clicked, and you bid to have your product ads displayed when someone searches for your product. PPC (pay-per-click) is massive in eCommerce, with 23.6% of global traffic in the industry coming from paid search.
You can run PPC campaigns on various platforms, but Google is the most popular with a market share of 28%.
What a PPC ad looks like on Google
Let’s say you’re an e-commerce business selling hiking boots. You run some keyword research and find that “Brown hiking boots for men” is a suitable term to target with some Google Ads.
Upload a product feed of your hiking boot products, optimised with detailed titles and descriptions to Google Merchant Center, and link it to a Performance Max (PMax) campaign in Google Ads. Google then determines when to show your ads based on relevance, user intent, and campaign settings.
Any PPC ad will have “Sponsored ads” written in the corner of the image. They’ll also show positive reviews underneath each product. These help to show your brand as reputable, which is essential for improving click-through and conversion rates.
2. Social media ads
Social media ads give your posts and/or page a boost and are very popular with e-commerce and retail businesses. You can run targeted ads aimed at specific groups of potential customers, identifying people of different age groups, areas of the country, and more.
There are different forms of social media ads from singular image and video posts to carousels, as well as to story ads that appear for a limited time in people’s feeds. Dynamic ads are also popular with retailers, and they’re interactive and change depending on the engagement they receive.
Choosing the right social media platform will depend on your industry, but the likes of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube offer paid advertising in one form or another.
To choose yours, consider your demographic and the content you want to produce. For example, if your target demographic is younger and your products are visual, snappy video content on TikTok and Snapchat can help you target more customers. The same goes for Instagram, although the demographics are shifting away from younger consumers.
YouTube is ideal for longer-form content such as explainers and how-to-videos, making it more suitable for complex products that require tutorials and additional information. Facebook is similar and a good place to share customer feedback and other user-generated content.
What social media ads look like on Facebook
Social media ads appear as posts in your feed but will have a “sponsored” label on the post. On Facebook, they tend to appear every 3-5 posts as you scroll, but this will vary from person to person and there’s no definitive number.
Here’s a Facebook Ad from Puma advertising trainers in Europe. Note the discount code for Black Friday and clear messaging.
3. Influencer partnerships
Influencers are huge brands in themselves and often have large swathes of dedicated followers. Having a relevant influencer onboard is a great form of advertising for e-commerce businesses and can help you reach new customers.
TikTok is the obvious place for influencers, but Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Twitch are also incredibly effective for retailers. As well as expanding your reach, you can analyse the success of each influencer campaign and have a better understanding of your customers for future advertising efforts.
Influencer marketing done right
Gymshark is a business that gets influencer marketing pitch perfect. One of the leading gym-wear brands on the planet, they use different influencers for different campaigns and each individual is well-suited to the campaign and its audience.
Take their 66 Days: Change Your Life Challenge, which took place over Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Not only did they have multiple athletes and sports stars take part, but they engaged their community with a challenge to improve their habits with workouts and well-being activities over 66 days. The company combined fun videos from influencers with resources to help people complete the challenge, thus improving participation and engagement.
The results speak for themselves and the video promoting Gymshark clothing they were advertising reached over 252 million views, 751k likes and almost 5,000 shares on TikTok and over 785,000 posts on Instagram.
#GYMSHARK66 is still running today and has become a staple for the brand, with continuous engagement leading to more reach and sales.
4. Email marketing
Email marketing is big business for e-commerce brands and offers the benefit of speaking directly to customers via their inboxes. Not only is it relatively affordable, but it helps you stick in customers’ minds and build relationships with them.
A regular newsletter with information about your business, industry, and promotions may help you nurture customer relationships and sales emails can help you target them with specific products and deals.
You can send out mass emails with email automation software such as Mailchimp and Klaviyo, with most providers having free or affordable product plans.
5. Retargeting
Instead of targeting new customers, retargeting or return customer marketing is the process of reaching out to people who’ve shown curiosity in your business before. This is a savvy move for retailers and e-commerce businesses because you know your targeted customers are interested in your products.
Retargeting reduces the trial and error of finding the right audience, but you’ll have to be creative. You can target people who’ve purchased from you before, have visited product pages on your website, or have abandoned items in their carts, to name a few.
Each will require a unique message, such as upselling somebody who’s bought a product in the past or discount codes for people who’ve abandoned their cart. You might also want to alert certain people to upcoming promotions you’re running, such as seasonal sales.
The methods of contacting people vary from personalised emails to keyword-targeted advertisements on Google and social media platforms like Facebook, and video retargeting on YouTube.
Email retargeting – an example from Amazon
Amazon is a world leader in e-commerce and its impact on traditional retail has been immense. One of the key reasons for their success, alongside their quick delivery and product range, is their email retargeting.
Recently, I bought a book from Amazon. Within a few days of buying it, they emailed me recommendations based on the one I read, with the subject of: “Book recommendations for you”. It then featured a bunch of front covers with brief descriptions and links to buy them.
This is simple, effective, and an example practically any e-commerce brand can implement. Just pick groups of people who’ve bought something from your website and email them with products they’ll probably like based on previous purchases.
If you don’t get a bite, revisit them in a few days with a reminder and maybe a discount code to sweeten the deal.
6. Content marketing
Content marketing is an effective retail marketing tactic and a broad term that covers blogs, podcasts, videos, social media posts, and more.
Not only are most of these methods free, but they can be an incredibly effective way to reach new customers. You can even write guest blogs for prominent retail industry websites or websites your target demographic might visit. You can also share user-generated content such as customer reviews to demonstrate trust and social proof.
7. Referral and affiliate programs
Reward customers with discount codes and unique offers for referring your brand to other people. Doing so helps you tap into a wider group of people and can raise the profile of your brand.
You can also consider affiliate programs where people earn a commission for referring your products. Some of the biggest e-commerce brands take affiliate programs very seriously, like IKEA.
A prime example of affiliate marketing
Just a Girl and Her Blog is Abby Lawson’s brainchild and a platform for her to speak about DIY and interior design. She’s a prime example of affiliate marketing as she, like many influential bloggers, uses blog posts and newsletters to recommend products.
She only recommends products she likes, like an IKEA storage unit she has in her home, but when she advertises to her followers, she makes money from every purchase. This is known as an affiliate commission and the more she successfully advertises, the more she makes.
When picking your affiliate, it’s important to pick someone authentic and relevant to your industry. Abby Lawson is an ideal candidate for IKEA as she’s influential in the DIY and home interior space. She comes across as honest and the fact that she has the items she advertises in her home means she’s authentic.
As a result, her followers trust her recommendations and it doesn’t come across as salesy or fake. She also replies to all blog comments which adds another layer of trust.
8. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a combination of search engine optimisation (SEO) practices and paid ads. Together, they can help you promote your online store and help your product pages rank highly on search engines like Google.
SEO practices for advertising e-commerce include:
- Optimise your website for mobile to reach people who buy products on their phones.
- Invest in a backlinking strategy so reputable websites link to yours.
- Carry out keyword research and use relevant terms in product descriptions, meta titles and descriptions, and other important pages.
- Ensuring pages load quickly for a better customer journey.
Combine these with PPC campaigns for the best results and increase the chances of your brand being seen by more people.
Booking.com – the king of SEM?
If you’ve ever searched for a hotel, you’ll know how much Booking.com dominates the search rankings. This is largely because their SEO and PPC methods are extremely strong, and they often combine the two approaches to great effect.
Booking.com also has a fast, well-designed website and high domain authority, both of which help Google crawl the website more easily and index it more often. The traffic it receives from broad terms like “hotel in x area” is staggering, and the website often outranks the hotels it’s advertising, in many cases for the hotel’s own brand name.
These strong SEO practices, combined with PPC ads on all major social platforms and Google, mean that Booking.com is a prime example of SEM in action for an e-commerce brand.
9. Local customer targeting
Promoting your business locally shouldn’t be overlooked for e-commerce and retail businesses. Ensuring you rank locally helps build your reputation which is particularly helpful if you have a physical shop in the area.
You can also run target ads to people who live close to your warehouse or storage facilities, offering discounted or free delivery. These products will be easier to deliver in a timely fashion and help you promote your business in a specific area. You can also promote your local inventory and provide a live record of your stock, so people can see “Collect today” on the ad and click and collect the item.
The importance of a multichannel approach
Choosing one of the above approaches might work out for your brand, but multichannel is the way to go for most retail businesses. For those who don’t know, multichannel marketing is employing multiple different methods to target different people. is employing multiple different methods to target different people.
You can integrate multiple e-commerce advertising examples such as PPC, influencer partnerships, Etsy, and email marketing to create a consistent, interconnected experience for customers. This provides more points of contact between you and potential customers, but make sure they’re relevant or you’ll turn people off and won’t have much success.
Final thoughts
Hopefully, this guide has provided some helpful information regarding advertising your e-commerce business. Remember that not every method will work for every business, so try different advertising to learn what works best. It’s also worth trying more than one method at a time and employing a multichannel approach to achieve better results.
Alternatively, you can hand it over to the digital marketing and advertising experts at beefound.agency. Taking away the headache of handling it yourself, we have a track record of helping e-commerce and retail businesses improve their advertising campaigns and can do the same for you, no matter your industry.
Ready to take your e-commerce ads to the next level? Give us a ‘buzz’ on 01904 373 069 or email hello@beefound.agency.
