With millions of brands fighting for consumer attention online every day, customization is the only approach that stands out. PPC ads are the biggest sensation today and for a good reason. They answer directly to the shopper’s search query, lead to relevant results, and help with new product discovery on every online marketplace.
For this reason, big and small brands love PPC ads, and this survey shows that 45% of small businesses love pay-per-click advertising. You already know that eCommerce has no one-size-fits-all, so you have to personalize your ad strategies. Other than returning better sales revenue, it leads to achieving three things:
- Establishing your brand image
- Instilling confidence among shoppers
- Creating consumer loyalty
This blog will cover how paid search leads to better business results, the three types of PPC ads you should invest in, their common applications, and seven strategies that work on online retail platforms like Amazon today.
Paid Search for Better Results
Standing against organic search results, paid search has proven its viability since its inception. Leveraging PPC ads is a proven strategy for winning the market, and there are three types of ads you should already be investing in:
- Sponsored Products
- Sponsored Brands
- Sponsored Display
Alongside this is Amazon’s DSP, a solution to attracting off-platform shoppers to your digital storefront with one click. Amazon rebranded its AAP as DSP—a demand-side platform that gives you complete control of where you display your ads and has led to massive growth potential for brands.
Let’s take a closer look at all three ad types and their common applications:
Sponsored Products
In simple terms, Sponsored Products ads promote specific products from your inventory to improve their search visibility for relevant keywords in the category. You can choose hero products to advertise based on your shopper activity and product performance data.
This ad type is great for conversion generation, and Amazon data shows brands tend to allocate approximately 68% of their advertising budget to sponsored products alone. Placement of the sponsored product ad is also crucial, and one statistically outperforms all others. Top of Search placement attracts more than double the ad spend compared to other arrangements, including detail pages.
Pacvue’s Search Demand Curve is a great way to visualize the importance of choosing the right keywords when promoting Sponsored Products. Long tail keywords’ popularity is much lower, being niche and relatively obscure.
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Brands ads help shoppers on the marketplace discover your brand via high-engagement creatives. Today, we see the best results with the video format, and this ad type is excellent for brand building.
Amazon data shows that Sponsored Brands are the second-most-popular ad type for brands, just after Sponsored Products, with 16% of the budget allocated solely to them. Pacvue research shows a 200% increase in CTR by investing in a custom image for your Sponsored Brands ads. Short, info-packed videos are the consumer’s favorite way to engage and often lead to the best ad coverage.
Another subcategory within Sponsored Brands ad type is Store Spotlight Sponsored Brands ads. These help you drive shoppers directly to your Amazon Brand Page, where you have full control of the products and collections on display without any competitor products to divert attention.
Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display ad type leads to business growth because you can target shoppers based on their behavior analysis. These are great for conquest advertising defense, and your brand can use Sponsored Displays to attract potential consumers from competitor product pages.
With limited virtual real estate, your goal should be to highlight what’s important and focus on critical qualities your shoppers look for along their journey. Your custom creatives include an image, the product category, name, and showcased reviews, along with a one-click option for shoppers to “add to cart.”
7 Proven PPC Advertising Strategies
- Target the top competitors in your space, redirecting their consumers to your products.
- Target your own products as a way to protect your brand. Viewing similar products from the same brand instills confidence and increases purchase chances significantly.
- Target similar and complementary products in your category. For example, ads for socks under shoes’ product pages tend to perform well all year round.
- Target your own products to upsell them in the long run, giving shoppers different package and bulk purchase options.
- Target your own products for an effective cross-sell strategy, especially with complementary product combinations.
- Remarket to your existing audience to gain repeat shoppers and build brand loyalty for future-proofing your brand.
- Remarket to your competitor’s audience and attract new eyes to your products.
Your budget and goals for the brand dictate how and where you choose to allocate your funds when it comes to PPC ads. Each ad type offers unique returns, and you can segment your campaigns among Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Displays in any ratio you see fit.
Pacvue is an eCommerce growth software that offers a range of solutions based on your need, target marketplace, and role. Read more about the Pacvue Platform and book a demo here today.
