Get More Sales On Your eCommerce Site With Shopping Ads

eCommerce has become a Billion Dollar industry in a short space of time especially considering the fact that it had to deal with the dot com crash. Shopping online has become second nature in developed markets while in developing markets it continues to grow and eat into traditional retail sales. Having an eCommerce site has been a revolutionary business practice for many business owners who wanted to start a retail business but could not afford prime real estate or wanted to scale their business to reach a broader audience. 

eCommerce enabled websites are becoming standard practice so much so that users even insist on it, from big wholesale retailers to the tiniest niche boutique stores, eCommerce is becoming an internet standard for any retailer online. While having an eCommerce enabled site that allows users to service their own needs is excellent and one part of the battle, the other is getting your products in front of those who would be interested in purchasing them.

Large third-party platforms like search engines and social media sites realise this and have started to integrate shopping ads and improved check out processes to streamline the process and improve conversion rates for advertisers. These ads are commonly known as "Shopping Ads" and there a variety of shopping ads available for online retailers.

What are Shopping ads?

A shopping ad is a type of ad that features detailed information about specific products a consumer is looking to purchase. Shopping ads come in a variety of options and can refer to

• Product Shopping ads, which feature just one product,
• or Showcase Shopping ads, which feature several related products.

Basically shopping ads display the product, brand, details and pricing with a click through to the directly to the product 

Why are shopping ads attractive

Shopping ads provide a few distinct features that other ad formats cannot. Such as a visual display of the product, providing instant pricing, brand and variant options and instant click through to specific product for check out. All these features are aimed at impulse buying and reducing time to purchase as well as steps to checkout and thus improves conversion rate.

Now that you know what shopping ads are and why they are an attractive prospect for advertisers and retailers, let's dive into which platforms offer shopping ads.

Google Shopping

Google Shopping as quickly become the holy grail for retailers who practice eCommerce advertising. Formerly known as Product Listing Ads, Google Shopping allows customers to search for, view and compare products. These products are displayed when a customer uses Google to search for a product. Depending on the bids, popularity and type of search query your shopping feed ads can appear in the main search engine results page or under the shopping tab.

Bing Shopping

Shopping feeds have been the natural progression for search engines as eCommerce queries are highly profitable and encouraging advertisers to spend more to unlock sales is how these sites make money. So naturally, Bing would also start to offer the service. Bing Shopping Campaigns are a simple way for you to organize, manage, bid and report on Product Ads.

Their traffic may not be as good as Google's but their placements are much larger especially on Desktop and with less competition for queries and larger real estate above the fold it can be an attractive proposition to replicate your Google shopping ads with Bing.

Facebook Shopping

Facebook allows you to also dynamically advertise products in newsfeeds. These dynamic catalogue ads show your products with an image, price and description pulled directly from your website. Advertisers will need to create A catalogue as a container that stores all of your product information. A catalogue allows Facebook to generate dynamic ads for your products and show personalised recommendations to people who view your ad.

For more on Facebook shopping check out this post:

• How To Build A Facebook Shop

Instagram Shopping

Instagram Shopping, or “Shopping on Instagram” is a feature which was created to enable e-commerce brands to create an “immersive storefront for people to explore your best products with a single tap.” The core functionality of this new feature allows brands to highlight specific posts from their Instagram feeds and then tag the products that are present with links to the product or even checking out within Instagram. These rich markups make can turn your brands Instagram account to a shopping feed that displays products in a lifestyle setting and give users a better view of how the product suits their look or even their homes. 

For more on Instagram shopping check out these posts:

• Instagram Shopping Coming Soon
• Instagram To Launch In-App Check Out Process

Pinterest Shopping

You can leverage Pinterest Shopping Ads to engage with your customers early, while Pinners are looking for inspiration. Once your product Pins are created through Catalogs, you can promote the product Pins using Shopping Ads to gain increased distribution.

No separate targeting setup (keywords, interests) are required for Shopping Ads, as Pinterest uses the product data provided in the data source to dynamically map relevant products to Pinner intent, surfacing Shopping ads on all surfaces within Pinterest.

Shopping ads are only available in English-speaking markets at this time: US, CA, UK, IR, AU, NZ.

YouTube Shopping Ads

YouTube is the worlds second biggest search engine with product content all over the place, this could be from brands creating content or users creating content and that means plenty of real estate to push ads. YouTube currently offers 3 types of shopping ad placements and namely:

1. Shopping Ads on YouTube
2. TrueView for Shopping
3. Channel Cards vs. Shopping Cards

YouTube's advertising is a bit fragmented and each shopping ad format has its own method of use. If you would like more detail on YouTube shopping ads, then check out this post.

Tell us your eCommerce story

Are you an online retailer? Have you been using shopping ads? How has it worked for you? Would you consider using shopping ads in the future? Let us know in the comments down below. 

Contact us

If you want to know more about eCommerce and shopping ads for your business, don’t be shy we’re happy to assist. Simply contact us

List your local business for FREE

Get more leads to your eCommerce site with nichemarket. Create your free business listing on nichemarket. The more information you provide about your business, the easier it will be for your customers to find you online. If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile
• How to create a nichemarket business listing

Recommended reading

If you want to know more about growing your eCommerce brand and have time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, then we suggest you check out the following articles:

• 10 Powerful Words to increase your Sales!
• How To Bootstrap Your eCommerce Businesses
• 10 Emails Every eCommerce Site Should Have
• 10 Easy Marketing Ideas For eCommerce Sites
• Facebook Launches eCommerce Action Buttons
• How To Set Up GA Enhanced eCommerce Tracking
• How eCommerce Sites Sabotage Their SEO

Tags: shopping ads, retail