With digital marketing, an eCommerce business can increase brand awareness and credibility, boost conversions, drive more sales, increase engagement, and boost its revenue.
Traffic is the count of the number of visits you have to your website, and setting the right digital marketing strategy is key to succeeding in attracting traffic.
Ways you can drive traffic to your store:
Organic search traffic - when a site pops up in search engine results such as on Google or Bing, below the first few search results which are paid ads.
Paid search traffic (Google Ads, Bing Ads) can be separated into 3 main buckets:
Text ads: The text search results are shown at the top of the search results page (SERP). Typically have a small icon (“ad”) next to them to indicate they are paid ads and not organic results.
Brand ads: Text ads are used to attract visitors who search for your brand name.
Shopping ads: The image ads are shown in the main SERP (and in the separate “shopping” tab in Google).
Paid Social traffic - traffic generated from ads run on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Direct traffic - when your store URL is directly entered into the browser URL field.
Referral traffic - when traffic comes from a 3rd party website, such as from a blog that references the site.
Organic social traffic - traffic directed from organic social media such as your own Instagram account/profile.
The most common ways to attract traffic for e-commerce sites are organic and paid traffic. While organic takes more time to start showing results, it is a cheaper option (sometimes free), and you can always use the engaging content you have already created.
Starting to run a paid advertising strategy can be challenging, here are some tips to get you started:
Know who is your audience, what language they speak, and where you can find them.
Select the channels and study them. Understanding how their algorithm works will help you run your ads strategy in a more cost-efficient way.
We recommend starting with one or two channels and making them work well before expanding further. Google and Facebook (including Instagram ads) are the largest platforms where most brands are always present. In case you have especially strong experience as a user of platforms such as Pinterest or TikTok, it may be a good idea to have one of these two be part of your initial marketing mix instead of Google ads or FB/IG ads.
Create 2-3 ads and spread the budget to run some A/B tests. The goal is to understand with what ads and content your audience engages the most. Start with a small budget, but a budget that is sizable enough to learn and for the bidding algorithms to function. Be willing to invest some time in obtaining learnings as to what ads and keywords work best for your store. -- Facebook is recommended for this practice.
It is advised to add testimonials and social proof in your ads for better results.
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