In this guest post, ChannelAdvisor’s APAC Marketing Manager, Helen de Souza, offers her insight into the advertising strategies retailers can leverage today

The impact of the COVID-19 crisis affects brands and retailers across the e-commerce industry.

This is why advertising has never been more important, and it’s no longer enough to simply set up campaigns. You need to launch the right campaigns — ones that get your products in front of more potential buyers while squeezing as much ROI as possible from your ad spend.

While the core principles remain the same, our advertising strategy today should look different from your game plan three months ago. From marketplaces to social media marketing here are some top tips that can help you succeed not only today but well into the future:

Laying the Foundations on Facebook

Before you can begin to leverage advanced strategies with your Facebook ads, you’ll need to address the essentials. First, ensure your Facebook pixel is working correctly and verify you’re sending the correct product data. The next step is to target consumers at various stages of the buying process from inspiration to purchase. To start, you’ll need a retargeting strategy that uses your remarketing pixel to drive existing customers further along their shopping journeys. You can do this by displaying ads to shoppers who have:

• Viewed a product detail page without making a purchase.
  • Retarget Strategy: Select a seven- to 14-day time frame, since people tend to buy within two weeks.
• Added items to the shopping cart before ultimately abandoning.
  • Retarget Strategy: You’ll want to select a shorter time frame here — seven days max — to move the purchase along.
• Bought from you before and may be interested in other items.
  • Retarget Strategy: Here, you’ll use your ads to cross-sell products based on previous purchases — a tactic that can work as long as 60 to 80 days after an initial purchase.

AUTOMATED BIDDING STRATEGIES ON GOOGLE SHOPPING

Traditionally, Google Ads has relied on fixed bids to determine how much you’re willing to pay for a click. This can be a real challenge in e-commerce, where frequent changes in buying behaviours and shopping seasons necessitate frequent bid adjustments. Thankfully, the rise of machine learning has opened the door to new capabilities for advertisers. Automated bidding can be particularly helpful within the realm of e-commerce in two key areas:

Enhanced CPC (eCPC): Traditional bids are still set, but Google will make real-time adjustments based on buying signals.

Target ROAS (tROAS): Set a high-level return goal, and Google will bid as high or low as you desire in pursuit of that goal.

AMAZON SEARCH TERM MINING

One of the best ways to increase visibility and ROI on Amazon is to find the right keywords. If your account is in the same shape as many others we see, there’s a very good chance it’s overpopulated with low-performing keywords. Thankfully, there is a way to clean up campaigns and replace those low-value keywords with high-performing ones — without having to invest a lot of time and resources.

First, determine how you want to break out your campaign structure. With the right structure in place, you can then take advantage of automatic campaigns. The idea here is to collect data automatically in your search term report, and then use that data to structure your manual campaigns. Next, use Amazon’s advanced features to make manual bid adjustments at the targeting level:

Use a loose match and close match to get your ad in the search results page for shoppers whose queries are either loosely or closely related to your products and then use substitutes and complements to show your ad to shoppers who view the detail pages of products that are either similar to yours or that complement your own listings.

These strategies apply in non-crisis times, of course, but they should stay top of mind for advertisers in the coming weeks. It has never been more important for brands and retailers to ensure their advertising strategy is evolving.

To find out more about how to leverage your strategy during COVID-19 and beyond, download ChannelAdvisor’s free eBook The Big 3: Advanced Advertising Strategies for Amazon, Facebook & Google.