Learn about Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Native Advertising and much more. Best practices + tips + tools you need to succeed.
Paid ads remain the best acquisition channel for any eCommerce brand.
This is how all the world’s most successful brands acquire customers. Of course, there are other marketing channels that are work together with ads such as - email marketing, CRO, influencers, UGC - but paid remains the most powerful.
43% of the most visited eCommerce sites spent more than $5K per month on social advertising. 78% of American consumers say that they’ve discovered products on Facebook, and with organic engagement dropping rapidly this mostly comes from ads. The average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads per month.
So ads are here to stay and it’s essential that you master every aspect of them to scale your brand.
In this chapter, we cover everything you need to know.
Let’s dive in.
Ecommerce advertising is the practice of displaying paid messages on social media, search engines, and online publishing sites to sell a product online. The brand is the advertiser and pays for placement, impressions, and clicks to a publisher like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Google.
When we say advertising most people probably think of PPC or Facebook ads, but the truth is that there are a whole bunch of other types of advertising that can be just as profitable and help scale your eCommerce brand.
Pro tip: if you’ve been successful with one type of advertising you might want to test expanding to other types of advertising. Use the rich keyword and audience data that you have from your existing campaigns on other platforms.
Here are all the different types of advertising and we are going to dive deep into each one later on in this guide.
Paid search advertising is also known as pay-per-click (PPC). It’s when a brand pays for a sponsored listing on a search engine (like Google) or an online marketplace (like Amazon).
These are ads on social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube). They have the most versatility in terms of the ad type, format, content, visuals, and targeted audiences.
This is a form of paid content found on publisher sites. These can be articles, infographics, videos that look like native pieces of content on the platform.
Display advertising is when a brand advertises its product on a publisher’s site or app using a display. These can be text, images, video, and even audio files. It can be done through Google’s Ad platform or manually through affiliate partnerships.
Print advertising is a form of marketing that uses physically printed media to reach customers on a broad scale. These can be printed in different types of publications such as newspapers, magazines, brochures, or direct mail.
Here’s an example of an IKEA print ad:
This is where a brand pays for a sponsored ad on an email newsletter from a publisher, influencer, or industry site.
It can be programmatic audio is placed within audio content on podcasts, music streaming apps, and online radio or a segment made by the podcast host describing the product(s) that are being advertised.
This is any advertising that is displayed outdoors such as billboards, bus benches, interiors and exteriors of buses, taxis, business vehicles, and signs posted outside.
CPC - stands for Cost per Click and it’s the price that the advertiser pays the publisher for a single click on an ad.
CPM - stands for cost per thousand impressions and is another measure of the efficiency of an ad.
CTR - stands for click-through rate and is a metric that measures the number of clicks that your ad receives per number of impressions.
Impressions - this refers to the number your ad was seen. So if your ad was seen 300 times then that’s 300 impressions.
Media cost - the total price that it costs to run your ads on a specific channel.
ROAS - stands for return on advertising spend. It’s a marketing metric that measures the revenue your business earns for each dollar that it spends on advertising. It helps a brand understand if they are making money or not at the end of the day.
ACOS - stands for the advertising cost of sale and represents the ratio of ad spend to ad revenue (in %). So for example, if you spent $15 on ads and made $100 in sales your ACOS is 15%.
Google advertising is one of the most powerful marketing channels for eCommerce brands. There has been some talk of brands leaving Google behind and moving on to social media ads but Google continues to innovate and create new avenues and ad formats that can help brands scale their campaigns.
Google ads are any ad that appears on Google. This can include ads that appear when a user searches for something, at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It could also appear on an app or on YouTube (owned by Google). There are also display ads that appear on online publisher sites that can be set up via the Google Display Network (GDN).
Google ads can be divided into 5 types - search, display, shopping, video, and universal app ads.
This is the most common form of advertising on Google. Ads are displayed when a person searches for something on Google. If they are searching for something related to a product, then the search ads will appear second, after the Google shopping ads.
Display ads are those banners you see on various websites. They look like this:
They are served on the Google Display Network. It’s a network of over 2 million websites and apps that are rumored to reach ~90% of all internet users. With such great reach comes great responsibility.
If you’re not careful, display ads can cost you a lot of money and not yield a return, because you might not be targeting the right people.
Here’s an example of a display ad from Allbirds.
Shopping ads are by far the best ads to use if you’re an eCommerce brand because they are visual and show up on top of the search results page. All you need is to upload a product feed to your Google Merchant Center and all your products go live.
These ads are a little more complex than search ads.
You can’t just upload a list of keywords and hope your products get displayed. Google uses a variety of other factors to determine whether to display your ads or not.
Here are the factors that Google uses to rank your ads:
Google Shopping ads are really easy to set up if you have a Shopify store. Just download the official Shopify app and set up your product feed in minutes.
Pro tip: the price is a huge factor for Google Shopping ads. Make sure that your price consistently stays below your competitors, highlight any sales and discounts that you might have, and make sure that your reviews are showing.
Look at this example.
The product on the left got the first spot because of the relatively low price and because it’s the only one showing customer reviews.
Video ads appear before or during YouTube videos. A lot of marketers have come out against using these because they disrupt the user experience (watching the video) and everyone just skips them.
However, if you have a catchy enough video and an interesting brand then you should test them out and see the kind of engagement that you get. The best tip to crush with video ads is to make the first 3-5 seconds super memorable, get to the point fast, and hook the viewer.
Here’s an example of an ad by Grammarly where they show a video and a banner on the top right corner of the screen.
By the way, a much better way of advertising on YouTube is to use influencers to promote your product. Read our Ultimate Guide on Influencer Marketing to learn more.
Look at the user’s search intent.
Search terms like “best place to buy shoes” or “cheap running shoes Brooklyn” have a very high search intent, these customers are ready to buy (bottom of the funnel). Bring them straight to your product page or landing pages.
“Nike vs Adidas shoes” is more middle of the funnel. The user started comparison shopping and they are in the middle of the funnel. You should bring them to a collection page or a high-quality blog post that discusses this comparison at length and presents your product CTA’s throughout the page.
“Shoe reviews” is a top of the funnel search, that’s where you really have to work hard to educate the user on why your product is the best.
To learn more, check out Neil Patel’s super comprehensive post on how to pick the right keywords for each stage of the marketing funnel.
You should create separate campaigns for each part of the funnel, and each of them should have a different list of keywords that they target.
One of the major drawbacks of search ads is that Google is notorious for showing your ad for unrelated keywords or ones that are too broad. So you really have to make sure that you tell Google which keywords you don’t want them to use.
These are called negative keywords.
A negative keyword is a type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Your ads are not shown to anyone who is searching for that phrase.
Here’s an example of a shoe brand that would want to exclude the term “running shoes” as a negative keyword.
The reason you should keep these separate comes down to user intent.
The difference between search and display is:
So you should separate your Search Network and Display Network campaigns into two, and keep them that way. It will give you more clarity and help you improve your ROAS over time.
Remarketing ads are shown to users that have previously visited your site. So it’s a completely different stop along the customer journey.
Keep these two separate to make sure that there’s no overlap and to have a better handle on budgets, bids, ads, and appropriate landing pages.
It’s also going to give you better data on what works and what doesn’t and help you grow your sales.
Social media advertising is the most popular way to scale eCommerce brands. People go on social media to find new products to buy, that’s why it’s so powerful. In fact, platforms like Instagram and Pinterest have the highest buyer intent and that’s where brands go to advertise their products.
92% of Instagram users say that they’ve followed a brand, clicked on their site, or made a purchase after seeing their product on the platform. And 98% of all Pinterest users say that they’ve tried new things that they found on Pinterest.
In this post, we go over each social media platform and discuss some of the best advertising strategies to help scale your brand.
Let’s dive in.
Facebook ads are by far the most popular ads
The most basic form of advertising on Facebook is done through boosting organic posts. This lets you expose your existing posts to a wider audience. For example, Buffer spent $100 to boost this post and received 3,712 clicks.
This is going to work for a brand that is very active on Facebook. So if you’re not heavily involved in your organic content, here are the type of ads you can run on Facebook:
1. Image ads - regular plain old images.
2. Video ads - you can place them in the news feed and they autoplay with no sound.
3. Carousel ads - showcase up to 10 images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link.
4. Instant experience ads - a fullscreen experience that opens up after someone taps on your ad on their mobile device. These are super powerful for eCommerce brands (previously known as Facebook Canvas).
5. Collection ads - features multiple products and opens as an Instant Experience when someone interacts with it.
Even though Instagram is part of Facebook and you can set up all your Instagram ads on Facebook’s ad dashboard, brands advertise on the platform in completely different ways. The ad formats are a little different, audiences are targeted differently, and often times it’s much more powerful than Facebook ads.
Studies show that Instagram’s engagement rate is 13.5x higher than Facebook posts and 27x higher than a Tweet (Rival IQ).
Instagram stories are a really great way to advertise your business. Studies show that almost 70% of Instagram users have swiped up to access links on branded stories (Mention). And 72% of Instagram users report having made a purchase after seeing the product on the platform (Business Insider).
Pinterest is a platform with some of the highest buyer intent, with 77% of its users discovering and buying products from the platform. Pinterest’s own research suggests that 90% of their users browse their platform to help them decide what they should purchase.
Snapchat is a more recent social media platform. Launched in 2011, it was almost acquired in 2013 by Facebook for a whopping $3B but the founders declined the offer. It acquired 10 million active users in less than a year, and by 2014 40% of all 18-year olds in the US were using the platform daily.
The platform is definitely geared towards younger users. It reaches more 13-24 year olds than Facebook, Instagram and Messenger combined. These guys are also much more price-sensitive and the products that do the best are usually <$30.
TikTok is the most recent social media to become successful globally. It’s a short-form video-sharing app that was created in China and officially launched in 2017. It later merged with Musical.ly in the US for nearly $1 billion. It was ranked as the third fastest-growing brand of 2020.
TikTok is the sixth most popular app in the world based on the number of monthly active users. It’s been downloaded 1.5 billion times so it’s a really powerful channel for eCommerce brands that are looking to advertise their products through video.
The platform has some really interesting ad formats.
There are 4 main types - brand takeovers, in-feed video, hashtag challenges, and branded lenses.
This is an ad that appears across the entire screen when the user opens TikTok. They are great for brands that want to get massive exposure but cost a pretty penny since the platform only shows one takeover ad to a user each day.
These are 60-second video ads that appear between user videos as you scroll through the “For You” page. The power of these ads is that they appear totally user-generated and can include multiple CTA’s.
This is a brilliant idea where a brand can create a hashtag campaign and run ads that lead to a special landing page. The page contains the brand’s logo, link to the site, a short description of the challenge, and the top videos using that hashtag. So it’s a way that brands can advertise their UGC campaigns.
The one drawback with TikTok advertising is that it’s still really expensive for small-medium brands. The minimum cost per campaign is $25,000. So it’s really built for larger brands that have succeeded with video content in the past and are targeting the millennial and gen Z population.
A native advertisement is when a brand promotes a piece of content on a publisher's site. This can be in the form of an article or a video that appears next to regular articles on that site, these can also be promoted listings on publisher sites or in-feed ads.
You can either power up these ads yourself on the Google Display Network or you can use a platform like Outbrain or Taboola to run your campaigns even more efficiently.
What’s the difference between these two?
Display ads look like regular banners on the site, they disrupt the user experience and quite a lot more than native ads. They stand out from the rest of the content and it’s clear that they are promoting something.
Native ads blend in much more. They look like an article that is posted on the site and disrupt the user experience much more.
Here’s an example from Hear.com:
Display ads also have a much lower click-through rate (CTR), at around 0.05%, than native ads. Studies show that native ads have a CTR that’s 8.8X higher than display ads.
Bombfell is a fashion subscription box that saw an increase of 960% in mobile conversions by using Native Ads through Taboola.
They first created ads that led visitors directly to their homepage. Then they started to create their own blog content super focused on the ideal customer persona. They also created interactive content like their questionnaire, a tactic which we discuss in our eCommerce Growth Playbook.
Sadly, the brand was shut down in 2019 when their largest supplier & brand partner JC Penny’s pulled the plug. This teaches an important lesson - don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Another example is the carmaker Nissan.
Nissan started using native ads with Outbrain where they would bring the user to a positive review of one of their cars. Over the course of a few months, they were able to optimize the campaign to drop the CPC (cost per click) by 28% and generate over 54,000 visits to these positive review pages.
The drawback with native ads is that often users don’t know that it’s an ad. If you lead them to a salesy landing page you’ll see really low conversions. So set the user expectation correctly. Add things like price, or content format -> “watch” or “video” to the title of your ad.
Here’s a great graphic that explains it all visually:
We’ve spent the last few months talking to the top eCommerce experts in the world and looking at hundreds of brands to find out what makes the most successful ad.
The most successful brands aren’t devoting all their time to try and come up with that one-hit wonder, that viral ad that will take the internet by storm. They are rigorously A/B testing best practices and then optimizing their creatives, audiences, and ad formats as they go.
We’ve gathered some of the best eCommerce ads we found across multiple industries - home decor, fashion, electronics, apparel, beauty, and more - and put them all into a free resource for you to use.
Here’s the free slide deck we made - Top 250 eCommerce Ad Creatives [Free Deck].
And in this post, we are going to go through some of the top best practices that work for the world’s top eCommerce brands.
Let’s dive in.
Studies show that 75% of the effectiveness of the ad is attributed to the creative.
If you nail your creative then you are 75% there.
Why?
Because visuals are more noticeable than text.
And with more than half of today’s consumers using mobile devices brands have even less time to grab their attention.
So what really makes a good creative?
What is the one defining factor that helps eCommerce brands succeed with their creatives?
When marketing teams huddle together and try to come up with a winning ad the conversation shifts to “creativity” and how to create that virality seen on the Super Bowl. Of course, it’s very hard to measure the ROI of a TV ad, so that’s all measured in social shares and impressions.
But here at Mayple, we see eCommerce brands winning every day on various social media platforms, and we think it comes down to one thing: best practices.
Assuming that the audience targeting, tracking, and landing pages are set up correctly, using the right best practices will make or break an ad.
We looked at over 250+ ad creatives of some of the top eCommerce brands across several industries and here are the best practices that we have found that help these brands absolutely crush it.
Here they are.
Here are the top best practices that we’ve found, in visual form.
Let’s go over each one of them.
If you’re going to use a visual ad, you should use it correctly. Don’t just re-state your value proposition or your product’s features, actually show them to the consumer.
Here’s a great example from Hydrow, a rowing machine with live on-demand training by professional athletes. In this video, they have a customer speak about the benefits of their rowing machine and they show you how they use it. It’s simple, well done, and could easily be used as a Facebook video ad.
Sometimes it’s hard to show how to use your product in one image. So brands automatically fall back to making videos, forgetting to test out different ad formats. Remember, it’s ok to use multiple images per ad. That’s why Facebook created carousel ads.
Here’s an example from GymShark:
Another way to display more than one image is by using dividing your standard image into several blocks.
Here’s an example from TOMS where they 4 images in 1 ad. They manage to showcase their Bonsai Green show from 2 different angles, showcase the packaging, and show us that beautiful sole.
Ecommerce brands started using more videos to try to showcase their products better. And often they fall to this erroneous notion that videos should be several minutes long. If you want to create a good video ad, it needs to be under a minute, preferably either 15 or 30 seconds max.
Here’s a great 30-second video ad from Corkcicle, the beverage container brand. This video shows the colors that are available, 3 different features, and the bottle from many angles, all in 30 seconds.
Here’s another example from Hydrant, the vitamin supplement company. In this 30-second video, they show how the benefits of the product and how to use it. It’s as simple as it gets.
Curious to see more actual video ads from brands? Check out our slide on the top 250 eCommerce Creatives for 2021.
Did your brand get picked up or rated by a large online publication? Mention it!
Are your customers leaving 5-star reviews? Show it in your ad.
Social proof is a super-powerful marketing technique that you can use on your site, but eCommerce brands have been including PR mentions and reviews in their social media ads.
Here’s an example from Leesa, the DTC mattress company. Notice how they put an image of someone using their mattress, on top of that a discount offer, and front and center they have the blue Wirecutter Pick 2020 badge.
Image of someone using the product + discount offer + PR mention = GOLD 💰.
Another best practice is to display the text from product reviews and combine it with high-quality images. This is a really powerful form of social proof because you are enhancing your product image with an authentic customer review.
Here’s an example from Bespoke:
An even more powerful way to display social proof is by using the actual images that your customers created. This is what’s called user-generated content or UGC.
Most brands use models or photos made at staged photoshoots to display their products. What’s even more authentic is to display the customers themselves using the product. This is most common in the home decor electronics, and food industries.
Here’s an example of an Instagram ad from Aerie, where they used an image that was made by a customer.
Now, let’s talk about the best practices of displaying the product itself.
Packaging has become a really unique feature among fashion and apparel brands in the last few years. We’ve seen this with the Allbirds, and how the entire unboxing experience becomes part of their value proposition.
Unboxing is a great way to show the product, and you can use an image or the actual unboxing video in your ad.
Here’s a Facebook video ad featuring an unboxing from ThreadBeast.
Another best practice that we are seeing is the focus on sustainable practices and highlighting the eco-friendliness of eCommerce products. Consumers care about buying products that are made out of recyclable organic materials and are manufactured sustainably.
So if this is one of the major selling points of your brand or product you should create ads that highlight it.
Here’s a great video ad from the Grove Collective that highlights the sustainability of the product but also shows me how to use it.
One of the greatest marketing principles of all time is this idea of focusing on the value of your product, not its features. And this is certainly true in advertising.
One of the hardest things to do is to focus on the value of your eCommerce product rather than highlighting all the bells and whistles 🔔.
Here are several ways to do that.
First, you can focus on your fast or convenient delivery. Here’s an example of an ad from Warby Parker that shows how easy it is to renew your contacts prescription and order new glasses.
Here’s a video ad from Tula, the skincare company, that shows how to apply their skincare products and the results.
Here’s an example from the electronic accessories space. Rhinoshield makes mobile phone cases, among other things. One of their main features is letting users make their own designs using their own photos.
Here are a few examples. Look how incredible they look, and they didn’t even have to tell me what or how to design them, they just showed me the result.
Last but not least, let’s talk about influencers.
This is by far one of the more powerful best practices, so brace yourself.
Combine everything we just talked about - show me don’t tell me, show the result & benefit to the customer, focus on short videos, etc. - and add an influencer to the mix and you get a high-converting advertisement.
Here’s a great example from Corkcicle.
Instead of focusing on making that one viral creative image or video for your next ad campaign you should pick some of these best practices and test them on your audience. See how they respond, see which ones get more engagement and higher conversions, and then develop more ads around those same principles.
And if you want to see more examples of some fantastic ad creatives check out our Top eCommerce Ad Creatives slide deck.
Paid advertising is super powerful for any eCommerce brand and there are a few central lessons that we’ve learned from generating $20M+ from ads for the brands we work with.
You need to make sure that your landing pages and product pages make sense, that the content actually converts the traffic that you’re paying for with your ads. Conversion rate optimization is super important for every part of the marketing funnel.
It’s important to be the least disruptive to your customers when you’re serving them your ads. You should know exactly which ads you display to first-time visitors, to returning visitors, to abandoned cart users, etc. If you’re using native ads make sure that your ad doesn’t disrupt the user experience on the publisher site.
We can not state this enough. Test out every best practice in the book to get optimal conversions. Do your research, see which trends perform the best for your industry. Check out our 250 Ad Creatives slide deck for more inspiration and ideas.
Avoid ad fatigue by constantly testing new ad formats, CTA’s, and messaging. This is what big brands like Amazon do until they become world-class. And you can too! We believe in you. And as always, if you ever need any help running your ads, just reach out!
Paid advertising for eCommerce brands involves promoting their products by displaying banners, advertisements, and/or paid content on social media, search engines and online publisher sites.
Paid social media advertising involves displaying ads or sponsored messages on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Examples of paid social ads include pay-per-click advertising, branded or influencer-generated content, and brand promotions.
Yes! Paid advertising (especially PPC and Facebook ads) has become one of the main acquisition channels for eCommerce brands. Paid ads are effective because they provide a lot of data, help brands optimize, and have a variety of ad types and formats that the brand can test out.
Native advertising is the use of paid ads that match the look and feel of the media format in which they appear. Native ads often look like articles on the sides or bottom of actual articles or are found on social media feeds.
If you're an eCommerce business you should test out different advertising channels. You should try Facebook ads and Google ads. You should also advertise on the online marketplaces that you sell on (Amazon, eBay) and you should launch native ads.
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