5 Tips for Targeting the Modern Customer with E-Commerce Campaigns

The popularity of e-commerce is continuing to rise with no end in sight for its ascent.

With billions of people around the world shopping online, performance marketers and brand representatives need to be putting considerable effort into maximizing e-commerce reach.

Discover how and why you should target the e-commerce sector with Zeropark solutions

Why is it important to focus on e-Commerce?. 

In Q2 2022, e-commerce accounted for 14.6% of total retail sales in the US. In other words, for every $100 spent by a US citizen, $14.60 was spent on online products. .

What this says about modern shoppers is that they are looking for opportunities to buy online.

YoY the mentioned retail sales share rose by 0.6 pp, and more than 9 pp since 2015. It’s expected that these numbers will continue to increase with new technologies enabling faster and safer payments.

1. Make sure your campaign is interesting

Your campaign will not perform well if it doesn’t spark your audience’s curiosity . You can spend countless hours optimizing it but if it doesn’t give people a reason to care it won’t convert.

That is why in order to launch the most efficient advertising, see what the demand is, and where exactly these audiences are to be found. Part of this data will come to you during the testing phase, so bear that in mind. A good idea is a kickstarter of a great e-commerce advertising journey, but it surely is not the only factor behind its success and your ROIs.

2. Find new audiences

All marketers should be on a constant lookout for incremental performance drivers and revenue growth opportunities. These are not only provided by better optimization, but also by accessing new audiences that would be unreachable with mainstream solutions.

Do not get us wrong – we still do recommend sticking to legacy social media paid advertising or search engine endeavors. These are still mainstream for a reason, as they accommodate most users. But the scale, paradoxically, makes it harder to reach KPIs.

Marketers should be well aware that a smaller audience does not necessarily mean a worse audience. Investing in scalable and incremental placements outside of traditional search engines does allow your campaign to reach new people. And what is important, it all happens at the right moment when the shopping intent is the highest.

Modern customers very rarely use the traditional search bar to find specific products that they are already looking for. When they need a specific product or an offer for it, these users purposely omit the SERP part and move directly to vertical search engines – like Booking.com or Klarna.

These allow you to directly respond to the searches inside vertical apps. Presenting an e-commerce offer right when the shopper is looking to complete the purchase can help boost conversions.

For many, this is a heavily underexplored opportunity to widen reach while simultaneous outdoing your competitors. Additional placements presented to scalable audiences are a way to navigate the market without fighting for a SERP position.

3. Never forget filtering and targeting

With your advertising endeavors, you should have constant control over all live campaigns. Optimization of targeted audiences is the key feature to look for when searching for a trustworthy marketing performance platform. Multiple choices allow granulation and finding only the right visitors.

Advanced targeting brings filtering to the next level with multiple ways of combining more-or-less fine filtering. Today’s online advertising rules are based on users’ expectations, and as audiences become more focused on privacy, major changes like User Agent header reduction are and will be implemented.

Standard targeting options available for all advertisers within ad performance platforms like Zeropark include:

• Geotargeting
• Language
• Device
• Operating System
• Time
• Keywords
• Frequency filtering
• Day-parting
• Adult filtering
• And more

As every campaign is unique and there is no universal recipe for success in performance marketing. Experience suggests that in order to find the best strategy for your e-commerce campaign, you will need to understand the characteristics of your ideal customer.

Then, after choosing the most appropriate advertising solution, you can start to narrow your campaigns down to the most optimal point. This is where the offer is being displayed to the relevant users, and in the most suitable placements – which brings us to the next point.

4. Use context and intent

With modern tools and keyword targeting advertising has become increasingly efficient. This allows you to capture relevant shoppers even before they finish their queries.

The audiences present in alternative placements will be more likely to convert, as your offer will directly answer their needs. With the use of cookie-less solutions, performance marketing platforms like Zeropark become a way to find modern online buyers that are already looking for your product – they only need some help with finding your offer.

5. Less is more

Many marketers tend to think of their advertising as “the broader, the better”. There is a common misconception that scale in advertising is always crucial – but this is really not the case. What you will want to achieve is boosting visits and conversions (sales).

Through optimization and conscious analysis, you can find consumers right where they are, and where they expect you to be. With e-commerce, this is often outside of mainstream search engines.

Join Zeropark to start your e-commerce incremental campaigns