Should You Use Paid Advertising for Your eCommerce Store?

So, you’ve built and launched your eCommerce store. Your products are ready for sale, but there’s just one problem:

You have no idea how to reach your audience.

Each day, you refresh your website analytics. But besides a few people trickling through, you’re gaining little to no traction. When looking for solutions to this issue, you discover paid advertising.

Though tempting to go all-in immediately, understanding how it works – and whether it’s even worth using – is important. Once you have this information, you’re in a better position to run them more effectively.

Keep reading to discover the pros and cons of using paid advertising for your eCommerce store.

You can use paid ads for your eCommerce store in multiple places, such as:

• Social media
• Search engines
• Blogs and websites
• Amazon

Once you set your ads, users will click through to your domain if you’re interested. Then, if they like what they see, they’ll potentially make a purchase. Let’s quickly run through each of these.

Social Media

You can advertise on almost every social media platform, with Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok being some of the most popular. You can use static images or video content, depending on what resonates the most with your audience.

On each platform, you can also advertise in numerous places. For example, Instagram lets you boost paid posts. However, you can also run ads in Instagram Stories. If you’re very social media-heavy, optimizing your eCommerce store for mobile is even more important.

Advertising costs will vary depending on the platform and where you want to advertise. Some eCommerce brands also advertise on YouTube videos.

Search Engines

eCommerce brands often promote their products in search engines. This can be particularly helpful if you’re running a sale since this often captures your target audience’s attention.

Search engine advertising is more difficult because you often can’t use visual content. So, you’ll need to think about whether this meets your needs.

Blogs and Websites

One option that many eCommerce brands opt for is to advertise their services on blogs and similar websites. These are often based on a PPC model; you can place your ads in multiple areas. Sidebars and in-article are two common options.

You can promote your products to people who might be interested in what you offer. If someone has interacted with you in the past, you can also consider retargeted ads.

Another idea is to pay for ad space on websites within your niche, such as fashion magazines.

Amazon

Amazon also sells sponsored slots for you to boost visibility. When doing so, your products will appear at the top of relevant search queries. This is ideal if your brand is relatively new or you’re in an ultra-competitive space. If you’ve released something new or have not yet fully learned how to optimize for search on Amazon, you might also want to consider running ads there.

Consider also boosting your Amazon ads at times of peak eCommerce seasonality.

Now that you know where to promote your ads, let’s dive deeper into the pros and cons. First, we’ll identify the benefits of paid advertising for your eCommerce store.

Better Brand Awareness

It’s easy to think that paid advertising is just about getting sales, but this is not true. Many brands use this form of marketing to enhance their brand awareness. The 7-11-4 rule is commonly accepted in the world of marketing, and it involves:

• 7 hours of engagement with your brand
• 11 engagements
• 4 different touchpoints/platforms

If you achieve this, someone is more likely to trust you and buy. You will increase your exposure to a potential buyer by running paid ads. Furthermore, you’ll get more data to build a better eCommerce brand.

Faster Traffic Acquisition

Starting an online clothing store or other eCommerce brand typically doesn’t get instant results in terms of site traffic. While SEO and organic social media are key considerations, you often have to wait months to build momentum.

Paid ads, on the other hand, are a superb way to build traffic more quickly. Once you’ve launched your ads, you can acquire customers immediately. If your targeting is right, you should see sales more quickly than would otherwise be the case. This rings true if you advertise with Google Ads or another platform.

Target Your Products

The more specific you are, the better you’ll serve your target audience. Paid ads are an excellent way to do this because they provide all the tools you need to segment your audience.

Many advertising platforms let you target based on location, age, interests, etc. As a result, you can get incredibly granular and find the specific people you want to reach. Once you have more data, you can finetune these parameters even further.

Multiple Data Points

Paid advertising can have an indirect benefit on your organic campaigns. You’ll get huge amounts of data when you run ads, such as insights on what users are interested in. Although these don’t always directly cross over, you can at least use them for inspiration and ideas.

Besides using these data points for inspiration, you can cross-reference with your organic information. Doing this gives you a much better overall picture of what you should optimize for.

Potential Return on Investment

Although paid advertising does require an upfront investment, you can get significant returns if you run effective campaigns. Each user that clicks through is a potential customer, and you only need a few of them daily to pay back the amount you make on ads.

Over enough time, you should hopefully make more money than you pay for advertising space. Once your profits increase, you can decide how to allocate those resources – learning to better business growth.

Useful for All Kinds of eCommerce Brands

Whether you sell clothes, art, or digital products, paid advertising has a place in all eCommerce marketing strategies. It’s very diverse, and you can simultaneously advertise across multiple platforms at the same time if you wish to.

Though there will be some nuances depending on your specialty and business goals, you can at least use the main principles in your strategy. Thanks to this, you have more free resources available to help you learn.

Despite the many benefits of paid advertising in eCommerce, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. You’ll need to consider the various disadvantages to better understand whether this is the best avenue for you.

Highly Competitive

Paid advertising is fiercely competitive, which can drive up the cost for key advertising areas and search terms. You’ll also need to ensure that your ads are click-worthy to viewers.

Besides competing with other paid ads, you’re also in competition with organic search results. Therefore, both your copy and visuals need to be on point.

Can Get Expensive

Paid advertising can be effective, but costs also add up. Even if you only spend $5 per day, you’ll still need to allocate $150 monthly. And for advertising to be really effective, you’ll need to go higher than this.

Before investing in paid advertising, be honest about how much you can dedicate to this form of marketing. Maximize your resources where possible, and if necessary, focus first on organic promotion.

Users May Have Ad-Blockers

Advertising is not evil in and of itself, but unfortunately, some websites have taken things too far with intrusive practices. Because of this, many users are tired of seeing ads. Some of these have resorted to using ad-blockers.

Ad-blockers can seriously impact your brand visibility, and you’ll need to keep this in mind when running ads on different platforms. Blockers tend to be more effective on blogs and other websites than they do on social media, so you should keep this in mind.

Clickthroughs Don’t Always Equal Sales

Most of the time, users click through on your ads because they’re interested. So, a high clickthrough rate (CTR) is often a good sign. However, not every person who clicks on your ad will buy from you.

Each time someone clicks on an ad but doesn’t make a purchase, you’ve spent money without getting a return. Expecting a 100% conversion rate is unrealistic, but getting as close to this as possible is a good idea. Set clear goals before running ads so that you know how to maximize them.

Requires Constant Long-Term Investment

Instant results can be a positive aspect of paid advertising for your eCommerce store, but it’s also sometimes a negative. The instant nature of this marketing method means that you always need to invest more money into ads to continue delivering results.

Rather than trying to get one-off results, allocate a monthly budget to paid ads and plan to get involved in the long run. You should still try to turn viewers into long-time customers, but you have to spend more to keep acquiring new ones.

Paid advertising is a great idea for your eCommerce brand in each of the following circumstances:

• You’re a new brand: Building awareness takes time, and you can exacerbate the process by getting yourself in front of more people through paid means. Be sure, however, to mix your efforts with organic marketing outputs.

• You have a bigger budget: If you’ve got some money to spend on paid advertising, spending some of this is a good idea. Doing so can potentially give you a high return on investment.

• You have a specific customer in mind: If you know precisely who you want to target with your ads, paid advertising is an excellent choice. Use the tools in your advertising platform’s backend to segment as needed.

Despite paid ads having many benefits for eCommerce brands, you might still want to look at organic marketing and other alternatives. If you fall into these categories, consider holding off on your paid advertising.

• You haven’t yet optimized your website: Your conversion rates will suffer if you don’t have a well-optimized eCommerce website when users click through. Focus on getting this right; ensure your site is responsive and secure. Optimize your product pages, too, with engaging visuals and copy.

• You don’t have a big budget: Paid advertising requires some capital to optimize more effectively, and you should ensure that you can spend this money wisely. If you have a smaller budget, hold off on paid ads and use organic SEO/social media until you’ve grown an audience.

• You don’t know where to promote yourself: While you will need to experiment with different platforms at first, you shouldn’t allocate huge amounts of money until you know where you want to promote your eCommerce store. Do a couple of test runs first before going deeper when needed.

Paid advertising can be a very helpful tool for eCommerce stores; it’s valuable for generating sales and building brand awareness. However, you must understand the pros and cons before dedicating significant resources. Weigh both sides before choosing; ideally, you’ll mix paid and organic marketing.