The newcomers on the field of ecommerce often tend to have problems with gaining enough traffic to their websites. It is quite difficult to attract customers if nobody even knows about your existence. Since making a profit online requires a lot of time, investments, planning, and management, you have to be patient and consistent to get your website out of the Google search abyss and increase your website traffic. In this chapter, I’ll shed light on the most effective ways of sales generation in the context of a successful marketing campaign.
Evaluate Your Marketing Campaign
With the ecommerce industry exceeding $294 billion of profit in 2014, it is not surprising that digital commerce is worth being called a competitive market. This, however, must call for more actions, because retailers, who think that their marketing strategy can bring money steadily for years, are going to lose everything just within several months. Ecommerce marketing nowadays is a tough job requiring a lot of effort.
The most effective way of maintaining your business on the highest level is a constant control over the success of your current strategies, and if they fail in fulfilling a plan—the invention of better ones. Therefore, get ready for an intensive study of planning, implementing, and evaluating your marketing campaigns.
Understand Your Goals
If you’re not really sure what you want to reach with your marketing campaign, you will not succeed in it anyway. Even if you spend a great amount of money on numerous ads, believing that this is a successful campaign, you’re wrong. Thus, it’s important to make a clear plan of what you want to achieve by your strategy—for instance :
Reach 1,000 orders per month
Obtain 500 new customers
Increase growth in revenues by 30%
Identify Metrics for Measuring Your Campaign
At the end of the first period, you can start measuring the results of a current strategy. For each aim established at the beginning, you will have to utilize appropriate metrics to calculate their value. For instance, if your aim was to gain more sales to your website, the following rates must be considered:
Average number of product page views
Percentage ratio of users that purchased your products to all users that viewed your website during a certain period
Sum of total revenue
Implement Comfortable Metrics Tracking
Active ads allows you to easily monitor the number of visitors coming to your website and mostly all the activities performed by these visitors through the toolkit of your particular ad campaign. Thus, you’re open to control all stages of a potential purchase from the very first view of a page to a complete product purchase. In fact, by using your ad stats, you will get the exact rates for performing final calculations. For example, to calculate an overall conversion rate of a particular product, you may simply divide the number of its purchases by the number of product page views for a given period .
Be Original with All Media Representation on Your Site
For each ad campaign, you should use different visual solutions to perfectly suit the social environment that you want to integrate your website with. For instance, if you create an ad on Facebook, make sure to use an unusual color scheme or imagery that is likely to attract the major audience of the network to your website. Sometimes you will even have to be minimalistic if you don’t want to spoil your customers’ impressions.
Use UTM Links to Direct Users to the Most Suitable Page
If you create ads on several websites or platforms, it would be nice if you could see which of them brings the greatest amount of customers. Thus, you can utilize UTM links, which are basically specific parameters assigned to the main link. They can help you with tracking the number of clicks performed on every ad, as well as analyzing their efficiency in your primary campaign.
There are numerous tools for creating UTM links, such as Google URL Builder and Terminus, but while the former is considered to be relatively easy to use, the latter contains a set of more advanced settings for experienced retailers.
The following are the main UTM parameters for adjusting to an ad link:
Source (website at which your ad is located, e.g., Facebook)
Medium (variation of your banner, e.g., banner variation 1)
Campaign (name of your ad campaign, e.g., autumn collection)
The result should look like what’s shown on the following web page:
http://yoursite.com/blog-post-fall-collection/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=bannerverisio campaign=autumncollection
Add such link to all of your ads and publish it only if you’re sure that it works properly.
Run Some Tests Before Publishing Your Ads
It is important to test how UTM links work and whether they direct users to the right place. Try to produce all the actions of a potential customer, starting with clicking ads, browsing various product pages, and ending with checkout. Then, go to your tracking page and see whether the metrics change their values. If everything is fine, proceed to the next step.
See the Results
In order to provide yourself with a convenient way of tracking your metrics, you can use several handy tools that will help you understand whether your goals are achievable. The following are the best solutions :
KISSmetrics: A flexible medium for effective tracking of major campaign rates.
Google Analytics: Good at dealing with UTM links.
Converto: A more advanced tool that offers the ability to analyze the efficiency of all of your ads and redirect your resources to more profitable channels.
Keep in mind that even if your campaign fails, with these analytical add-ons at hand, you should identify which rates appear to be insufficient and calculate current losses. Using official ad tools on your advertising channels is also possible, but it often happens that rate values are different from what you might expect.
Make a Conclusion and Prepare for Further Campaigns
However, getting results is not your final destination. In addition to evaluating your campaign achievements, you should analyze each of your advertising channels to define which of them gained the biggest audience. For instance, you may discover that Facebook gave you 500 page views, among which 50 were purchases. Thus, I can suggest that Facebook is likely to be effective for attracting customers, but certain modifications to your ad campaign on this platform are required. If your Twitter ad campaign brought you just 200 page views, but 150 of those ones still ended up completing an order, this ad source is worth investing in. Those ad sources that brought you nothing but a few page views for the whole period should be discarded.
Finally, learn all of your achievements and failures from the current marketing strategy, so that the next time you can apply this knowledge to getting your business to the top positions in the ecommerce market.
The Main Traffic Sources
As a retailer, you might be curious about what traffic sources can bring you the desired number of customers. In fact, everything depends on the size of your business. For instance, it is not profitable for a small store to rely on direct traffic, so you have to look for other alternatives to achieve your marketing goals. Let’s look at some traffic sources and define their pros and cons.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is a flow of users who come to your website by typing in the direct URL address in their browsers. To make this source valuable for you, it is important to become a popular brand offline and provide people with the ability to engage with you and your products by actually going to your brick-and-mortar stores. In this case, all the investments must be made for a high-quality PR scheme and the opening of an offline store chain. The principle disadvantage of this source is that it can only bring 10% to 15% of visitors. Besides, if you’re generally doing well with your offline business, you can look for more advanced ways of driving extra traffic to your online store .
Email Marketing
This traffic source is considered to be one of the cheapest ones. Furthermore, it can be used for all possible kinds of business. The main priority of email marketing is the ability to keep in touch with the existing customers and encourage them to make more purchases from your online store. This traffic source requires the following three factors.
Sufficient Database Volume
This means that you should have an adequate number of users to whom you will send your emails to. You can either buy data or build it yourself. Buying data can be fast and easy, but it does not guarantee that users will react—after all, they don’t know you, so you’re likely to be marked as spam. Building your own email list may seem more reasonable, but it usually takes a good deal of time to attract enough customers, especially if you’ve just started your business. However, you can use organic ways to encourage visitors to share their email addresses with you. This includes creating visual incentives, for instance, that offer bargains on your items to subscribed users.
Frequent eMail Delivery
Any type of email marketing campaign suggests that you should provide a regular email delivery to your contact list users. However, this regularity should not exceed three letters a month, because frequent emailing will cause people, as well as email services, to consider you as a spammer. When a smart email service, such as Gmail, identifies you as a spammer, your emails are automatically sent to a spam folder, which prevents a recipient from even noticing it. Thus, you should be consistent but unobtrusive while gaining traffic.
Appropriate Quality of eMail Content
When it comes to building up content for your emails, use information that can only be found on your website. Goods and prices that don’t exist on your Magento store will disappoint potential customers. Don’t make your emails too long—write only about the most relevant things that will make people interested in what you are doing. It’s often useful to combine textual content with catchy images to make it more user-friendly. For instance, you can write four or five sentences to describe your content and then support them with a relevant picture representing your offer. Apart from the things mentioned, I recommend adding corresponding links to your website .
Thus, you should manage email marketing during the first days of your website existence. Providing yourself with an opportunity to bring your customers back at any particular time can double your conversions and create friendly relationships between you and your customers. Although email marketing accounts for 10% to 30% of visitors, it won’t work for acquiring new customers, because you are unlikely to interest people who have never purchased your products.
Apart from independent research and testing opportunities of your email marketing campaigns, you can also utilize the services of specialized email marketing providers. They can consult you (often for free) and give useful advice on how to get along with this source of traffic. The price for paid services varies, depending on whether you want to save your time and make the whole process run automatically or manage everything yourself. MailChimp is a service that combines a set of valuable ecommerce features at a reasonable price.
MailChimp
For a minimum of $10 per month, you can get high-end email content that will be appealing to your customers. Moreover, you can also take advantage of regular analytics reports that inform you about the current progress of your email campaign. With MailChimp’s functionality, you will be able to easily improve your marketing performance by utilizing a set of its useful features, such as those described next.
Email Designer
Email Designer is an all-in-one editor that is based on drag-and-drop principle. It can be managed from a PC or a laptop, as well as from a tablet or a smartphone. Its built-in toolkit allows to do the following:
Edit and resize images.
Effectively interact with your team no matter where you are.
Conduct a testing campaign before actually launching it.
Store and retrieve your files in a specialized file manager.
Automatically verify every link you submit to emails.
Email templates.
MailChimp offers a smart collection of predesigned templates that you can use if you lack enough time or experience to create a good-looking design. So the only thing you have to do is submit the content and check how it looks with each particular template. If you intend to code your own email template, there is the Email Template Reference option that has a lot of useful information and recommendations on how to make a nice working template for a successful email marketing scheme.
Smart Reports
When your campaign is finally on the go, you can instantly start monitoring its performance through MailChimp’s smart reports, which provide you with detailed data, such as the number of newly subscribed users, URL visits, and impressions.
Integration with eCommerce Platforms
If you want to reach various categories of customers with equal efficiency, you need to import all user data to your MailChimp account. Take into consideration that the service supports integration with Google Analytics, Magento, and Shopify.
There are three plans available for acquisition on MailChimp: Entrepreneur, Growing Business, and High Volume Sender.
The Entrepreneur package is free of charge and has no expiration date. You can send a fixed number of 12,000 emails to 2,000 users each month. Also, you can sort your customer list to manage email delivery to target groups of customers. The plan supports ecommerce integration and the access to the pack of ready-to-use email templates. The downside of this plan is in the lack of support for analytical tools for monitoring website traffic. The Entrepreneur package is intended for small businesses that don’t have a large audience; this guarantees that every user will receive at least one email per month. If you acquire more than 2,000 users, you will need to subscribe for a paid plan, which widens the functionality of your account and allows you to send an unlimited number of messages. It will cost you only $10 per month.
The Growing Business plan supports unlimited monthly email delivery to 600,000 subscribers. You can use MailChimp1 for calculating an actual amount of money required for a given number of users per month. For instance, a plan for up to 5,000 users will cost you $50, while a plan for 10,000 costs $75. The same pricing works for the High Volume Sender package as well. The plan supports customer list segmentation and integration with ecommerce platforms. Additionally, you get an opportunity to manage your teamwork by using Email Designer and you have a regularly available consulting team of experts to help you adapt the MailChimp system within your ecommerce store.
The High Volume Seller package suits large corporations with wide audiences (600,000 customers). It offers the ability to send billions of emails per month. You can automatically adjust your delivery due to provider responses and protect data with a two-factor authentication process, SOC II, and PCI DSS certifications and security alerts. There is also access to a full API, provided with detailed documentation and user guides. In addition, the package features multi-user accounts for agencies to manage their cooperative engagement and interaction with clients .
Organic Search Engine Results
These are results displayed to a user after he enters a search request. The first results usually contain the most relevant information, which is more likely to meet search requirements. That’s why organic search results almost never include advertising links in the top results. Even Google tries to divide relevant result links from ads, putting the former in the first place and moving the latter down to the lower positions. This means that placing your website among the first positions requires high popularity among people, or original and rare products and services that won’t create excessive competitiveness on the Internet. In addition to the things mentioned, you need an effective SEO strategy.
In general, organic search results bring from 10% to 30% of visitors on a regular basis.
Paid Search Results
Paid search results, if used properly, can provide you with up to 50% of visitors, which is the highest rate among all traffic drivers. This source of customers usually requires a sufficient number of resources to be spent, since advertising tends to become more and more complicated in attracting people’s attention. In a perfect scenario, you should be able to invest in both offline and online stores to gain maximum profit from the paid search. Online marketing campaigns usually include the following methods: SEO, pay-per-click ads, and affiliate marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
This technique is considered to be the most popular for increasing website traffic because it cannot attain crazy numbers of visits. Please note that it usually takes months until SEO strategy shows its results, so you will need consistency and patience to gain the desired traffic flow to your website .
Although the main SEO optimizations are described in the first chapter of this book, I’d like to draw your attention to this complicated process once again. The main issue related to search engine optimization is content, which means that you have to work on the effectiveness of your texts and product listings. The whole procedure includes the following:
Check and improve your product categories. Make sure that every product contains a sufficient amount of keywords (words and word-phrases that users are likely to type in when they search for these products on Google or any other search engine). Then, include these keywords in the most noticeable places of your website: headers, item descriptions, image names, internal links, and the body text itself.
Make your text authentic. Work with professional writers that will make your descriptions, articles, and other text pieces readable and informative for potential customers. Your main aim is to put the most relevant information in the proper order.
Utilize landing pages. Primarily, a landing page is a single website page that contains relevant and crucial data for a viewer. For instance, you can create a customer-specific link that will direct a person from a search results page or an ad toward a certain product page containing a description, characteristics, and price. This is likely to motivate a user to make a purchase.
Ask bloggers and other retailers to mention your store on their websites. This part is the most difficult one, because further success of your marketing campaign becomes in some sense dependent on whether your website URL appears on other blogs or pages. It makes sense to be friendly in order to become successful.
Submit your website to various directories. Google, Bing, and Business.com must be your primary candidates.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The pay-per-click ads are really good at increasing your website traffic faster than any other alternative solution. This technology allows you to buy visitors on the websites where you place your ads. Once users click your ad, they are instantly redirected to your website. As an advertiser, you have to pay website owners for every single click.
The most popular pay-per-click management service is Google AdWords, which can bring you about 70% of paid search visitors. But before using it, you should learn all the opportunities related to this pay-per-click solution. Note that the service is full of other retailers—many of who occupy the top positions in search results.
Analyze the number of retailers that sell the same goods as you.
Make the most powerful set of keywords for your product ads.
Work on the appearance of your ads (design, colors, images, etc.)
Adjust retargeting ads for your website. Retargeting ads are basically the same old ads but their aim is to track your website visitors’ after they have left a website page. For instance, when a person goes to your website, nothing happens, but as soon as he or she proceeds to other websites, your ad will be displayed on each of these sites.
Note that cost-per-click, or CPC, options are always better than cost-per-mille, or CPM, options. Don’t pay for viewers—pay for their actions, especially if your goal is to capture leads .
Your ads should have URLs with a unique tracking token. Thus, you will be able to test them and evaluate their effectiveness. Without this information, you will never optimize your ROI.
The writing style of your landing page and an advertisement on social media should correspond to one another. At least, try to use the same language; otherwise, you’ll confuse your customers .
Provide high-quality content: avoid typos (if they are not a part of your creative campaign), make sure that every image has a proper size and check that every URL goes to the right landing pages.
Use A/B testing and try out different types of ads. This will help you choose better options and get the most out of your PPC campaign.
It is also worth mentioning that pay-per-click management works in social network environments, including Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Even more surprising is that you can use pay-per-click ads on mobile devices.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing includes interaction with third-party websites that will definitely come in handy when it comes to driving traffic to your store. Basically, these sites use the same methods about selling your products “on their territory,” but it will require extra expenditures (about 10%) from every sale they make. The most reliable affiliate websites are Affiliate Window, Linkshare, and Webgain.
Unfortunately, dealing with affiliates involves additional investments into the development of specific data feeds obtained from your product database. These data feeds will be integrated into the affiliate’s own database to enable ordering of your products on their website. Moreover, additional banners and newsletters that will be distinguishable from those you use on other advertising platforms are required. Keep in mind that you can track user activity on affiliate websites by using the Google Analytics platform.
The Best Magento Affiliate Modules
There is a set of Magento extensions aimed at simplifying the process of finding and cooperating with affiliates. Each affiliate module serves different purposes, so be sure to pick up the one that you really need. The full list is here: The Best Referral And Affiliate Marketing Magento Extensions2.
Affiliate by Magestore is an extension that offers standard and platinum editions . Standard edition incorporates six various methods of friend referrals, four ways for your affiliate owners to pay their commissions, and the ability to fix commission amounts in currency or percentage rates. Platinum edition allows you to create multiple affiliate programs with different rates, provides a coupon scheme for affiliate websites, and gives regular reports based on results of a current program. The price for Standard Edition is $99, while Platinum Edition costs $229.
Affiliate by aheadWorks specializes in automatic advertising campaigns that turn customers into promoters. The price charged by your affiliates depends on your current conversion rates. And, you shouldn’t forget that you have the right to pay only after you make sure that a purchase performed through their websites occurred according to previously defined rules. This pay-per-sale system seems to be quite reliable, especially if you cannot be sure about the loyalty of your companions. You can download this module for only $99.
The Auguria Sponsorship module is based on a sponsorship earning system that allows gaining special points that can be further sold or exchanged among your customers. The acquisition of points is possible through making purchases or after inviting a friend to your website. All the features of the module are easily adjustable, and you can get it for free.
Refer a Friend module by aheadWorks is also aimed at stimulating your customers to invite their friends to your Magento store. As a reward, they get discounts on further purchases, while you get additional traffic and better conversion rates. Unlike the previous module, this will cost you $99.
Reward Points by Magestore is a high-end reward-gaining alternative that allows your customers to earn in-store currency, not only for inviting friends, but for writing comments, using product hashtags, or subscribing to your social media blog. You can build your own loyalty program to effectively encourage customers to earn and spend their points. Although the extension’s price reaches $99, you are guaranteed to get free lifetime updates and support.
Reward Points by mirasvit3. This modulу gives points for mentioning your store in social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so forth. Another interesting feature concerns those customers that haven’t visited the website for a long period of time. Thus, the extension can automatically award them with free points; then you can send emails with an offer to spend these points on purchasing your products. You can also limit the possible amount of points that a customer may spend for purchasing a product. The module can be acquired for $149 on the developer’s official website .
Sweet Tooth Loyalty and Reward Points. With the help of this extension, you can develop a profound loyalty program that can turn your visitors into customers, who in turn, will bring you more clients. This extension differs from others since it requires a monthly subscription of $59 per month.
Figure 2-1. Sweet Tooth Loyalty and Reward Points
Affiliate Pro Extension by MageWorld is designed for those who would like to create an efficient affiliate network based on multi-level marketing. You can utilize an easy-to-use sign-up form for your affiliates and help them receive their commissions on time. The module supports multiple payment methods and allows tracking all affiliates’ transactions to evaluate the quality of their performance. The price of a full-featured module is $197.
Affiliate by Magegiant. The extension contains a set of useful options intended for various purposes, and you can choose which of them to include in your personal pack. Each option costs $50. You can even purchase an expert module installation ($49.99). The extension offers diverse commission payment methods, including percentage rates and clean amounts, fixed ones, and tiered ones. It is also possible to let affiliates withdraw commissions independently or use their in-store credits for paid orders on your website.
J2T Reward Points + Referral program. For only $49.99, you can make in-store point reward calculation faster. The J2T Reward Points + Referral program module also allows appointing a specific amount of points for each product; therefore, a customer could not purchase a product solely by using obtained points. Moreover, you can adjust discounts to be available for products including or excluding tax and shipping fees.
ReferralCandy extension provides you with an opportunity to make discounts for each new customer on your website without any additional costs to your budget. You can utilize multi-use coupons, charity donations, free items, personalized messages and notifications, and much more with this module. In addition, your customers may become referrals of your website since the extension offers them personal referral links. The cheapest package costs $25 per month, but if your store requires additional attention and maintenance, there are Medium, Large, and Enterprise packages for a monthly fee of $65, $195, and $885, respectively.
Referral Bonus and Reward System is aimed at converting your loyal customers into dynamic traffic driving sources. You just need to give them points necessary for purchasing your goods. As effective referrals, your customers can invite their friends to your Magento store through various sources: social media, email, and even direct link sharing. The full-featured module is available for $99.
The Ambassador Magento extension focuses on the fast and easy building of high-end referral campaigns involving customers, team-members, and even cooperative companies. With the help of this module, you can track and analyze your current affiliate program metrics, make instant changes, and improve your performance in real time. A customizable reward system allows you to motivate your customers by introducing the most appropriate types of incentives. The extension has three diverse plans: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise, where the Starter plan costs about $200 per month and the Professional one is $800.
Other Useful Traffic-Driving Techniques …
…to Use on Your Website
Simplified Checkout
Approximately 50% of all abandoned check-out processes are caused by complex and unfriendly shopping experiences. The lengthier and more complex this process is, the less inclined customers are to make a purchase. To increase sales, try to simplify the checkout experience :
Choose the most user-friendly template for your shopping cart options.
Simplify a sign-in process for returning customers.
Reduce overall checkout time by uniting closely related data in one checkout step.
Full Shipping Information
This concerns mostly information about shipping costs. When a customer literally bumps into a shipping price at the final step of his or her order completion, it often spoils a previously settled positive mood. The same happens when a shipping price is not exact, with a myriad of additional conditions and restrictions suggesting that the final sum is a subject to vary significantly. Therefore, complex shipping costs and conditions increase the number of failed checkout processes.
The most reliable solution in this case is to put shipping information at the first steps of your checkout procedure and make the price as low as possible to avoid discouraging positive expectations of customers.
Mobile-Friendly Environment
There is almost nobody who doesn’t have access to a mobile device these days, and there is a huge number of people that spend much more time surfing the Internet from their smartphones and tablets than laptops or computers. This must call you for adapting the universal trend and optimizing your website for smartphones and tablets. Providing your customers with an intuitive mobile shopping experience will greatly increase your traffic and sales.
Giveaways
Everybody likes getting things for free, and you can use this tendency to attract attention of potential customers. It can be anything ranging from supporting mobile apps and extensions to handy accessories and packaging services.
Feedback Opportunities
About 80% of all customers tend to make their purchasing decisions based on reviews they read on retail websites. The most important thing is that reviews and recommendations can be used by consumers in order to provide additional information about your products to their colleagues and friends, making them even more valuable for retailers. Moreover, having reviews available makes your website generally more reliable in comparison with those that don’t have this option. But in order to make it more effective, don’t hesitate to ask your customers for a feedback—not everyone is apt to leave it after purchasing a product.
Although reviews can be positive and negative, you must be ready to see both types on your website. It’s not always the case that your products or services must be bad, though. But the reason for bad feedback doesn’t matter—think of it like of a factor that can help you boost your market performance and increase overall traffic to your website .
These techniques are also important when estimating the conversion rate of your website. Abandoned shopping carts, zero returns from email campaigns, and absence of feedback from your customers are the main factors affecting your conversion rate. Because this value plays the main part in determining how good your relationships with existing customers are, you will also have to be ready to take steps toward a conversion rate optimization strategy.
…to Use Outside of Your Website
Don’t Give up on Traditional Advertising
Although we live in the age of computers, it doesn’t mean that we cannot use old-school methods anymore. It also concerns advertising, however controversial this sphere may be. Traditional advertising is still actualized through magazines, newspapers, direct mail marketing, radio stations, TV, and even billboards. Moreover, it can also increase your website traffic!
Consider such giants as Zappos, Diapers.com, Bonobos, and Amazon. Although they are hugely popular on the Internet, these companies still rely on traditional advertising to keep their sales and website views high.
Entertain Your Customers
Using entertainment as a source of new traffic may seem an odd thing, but it really works. Try to turn on your imagination and think of content that could bring you more customers because it is funny. One of the most commonly used entertaining elements in the sphere of ecommerce is a viral video. Viral videos are made by many world-famous brands, and their efficiency is considered proven due to the enormous success they achieve afterward. Some brands even adjust themselves to YouTube and create official channels where they promote their products by introducing them in a row of funny or creative video series.
Take Part in Offline Events
This might be especially useful if you have only an online store that has been recently launched. Apart from using traditional ways of ecommerce marketing, you can simply attend various offline fairs and other sales events to get people acquainted with your products and services. Accompany your attendance with original and colorful leaflets and product samples—use all possible ways to make people visit your online store.
Expose Your Business to Other eCommerce Platforms
If you don’t feel yet stable enough with traffic, don’t hesitate to promote your products on bigger ecommerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay. Millions of people visit these sites every day, so it’s likely that they will stumble upon your products for being original, cheap, or both.
Use Banner Ads
This is another efficient technique for driving traffic to your Magento website. Since it is quite complicated, I’ve decided to devote a separate part of this chapter to banner ads. You can read about it next.
Banner Ads
This type of advertisement must be familiar to every ecommerce retailer, but many of them do not consider it as effective as previously thought. First, because modern users are highly knowledgeable about computers and specifically the Internet, it’s not that easy to attract their attention anymore. The only reaction people experience when seeing an ad is utter irritation, because their presence on a website is dictated by the need to read/watch something interesting or to communicate with somebody, not to click some crazy-colored suspicious banners. As a result, retailers develop more original approaches and switch to more complicated banners, but the strategy still crashes due to ad blocking software that is popular among users all over the world. In spite of these unpleasant facts about banner ads, there is still a green light for retailers to use them for driving traffic to their websites. Next, I tell you how to use them properly.
How to Use
Considering current problems related to banner ads, you will come to a conclusion that it’s almost impossible to make a profit from using them. But here are the key conditions observe to make your banner ads work:
Define a list of websites relevant to your audience. If you think that having an ad everywhere can improve your situation, you’re highly mistaken.
Spend more time making your ads creative. Creativity still attracts attention, as it can be beautiful, entertaining, smart, and eye-catching.
Conduct some tests before submitting your banner ad. If it does not work properly or it cannot be monitored from tracking services, it’s better to fix all these problems before investing in it .
Contact potential banner ad publishers directly. Being able to communicate with website owners is a useful skill that provides the most favorable advertising conditions. You should sound natural and generous. These owners are basically the influencers of your products, so the more contacts you have, the more successful your banner ad campaign.
Be aware of the F-shaped view pattern. This is a general page view pattern and a common feature for everyone browsing the Internet. According to it, users tend to look at the top of a page first, then explore the content itself starting from a left side, proceeding to a right side and then back, then go to the middle, do the same left-right manipulations, and so on. You can use the knowledge of the F-shaped pattern to find the best place for your banner ads. Accordingly, it will be either the top of the page or its left side. Unfortunately, when dealing with ad publishers, you will only have to rely on their own ad placement priorities.
Enhance your landing pages, since they are important for all kinds of online ads due to the ability to direct users to the most desirable places of your website, either already existing or newly created ones. The main purpose of a landing page is to incline users to buy your goods. Thus, it’s up to you where you place the landing page on your Magento store.
Where to Buy
Basically, you have to choose among two kinds of banner ads sources—individual publishers or ad networks.
Individual Publishers
If you already have a list of potential banner ad publishers dealing with a similar market segment, contact with their owners or advertising operators. Learn their prices and subscription conditions, and decide how long you are going to work with them. Keep in mind that if you advertise on a particular website for a long time, you may become easily recognizable by its audience and therefore more trustful. Therefore, you can obtain a stable number of loyal customers. But it does not mean that you don’t have to update your ads and their design regularly.
Ad Networks
Ad networks are not niche-specific banner ad resources, but can be considered as a competitive alternative to direct ad publishers. Ad networks are usually a third party that chooses the websites to publish your banner ads on. Thus, they can save you time by performing all the work instead of you. As for the down side, it is harder to drive traffic to your store, and you are not able to communicate with publishers directly. The most popular ad network is AdWords.
AdWords
AdWords is Google’s official advertising program that is commonly used by businesses all over the world. It’s the first thing you’re advised to try in your never-ceasing attempts to get more traffic to your website. With the help of this program, you can manage your ads and choose the most appealing websites to place them on. The main advantage of the service is its relatively low cost and easy break-up procedure. In addition, you can adjust the program so that your ads are seen only by local users, especially when you tend to attract more customers to your physical store. You also can place your ad right on a Google results page; thus, users can go directly to the product page that they are interested in.
How It Functions
Keyword is a basic element of the AdWords toolkit that allows you to place your website ads near the first positions of a Google search results list. You should simply create a range of the most relevant keywords based on your business activity or products. Be specific when choosing the most important keywords and give priority to two-to-three word phrases rather than simple words.
It is also important to mention that AdWords can show your ads on other websites sharing Google-owned properties (like YouTube), as well as Google’s partner sites (like NYTimes.com or Families.com). The place on the website used for showing your ad is called placement.
AdRank is an additional value of AdWords that is used to determine your ad’s position on a website or among search results. It also determines whether your ad will be displayed at all. You should remember, though, that the main factors defining ad’s location are the amount of bids you offer (the sum you’re ready to spend) and the quality of your ad. As a result, the first and the most prominent positions in the list are given to the ads with highest bids and quality. What’s even more interesting about AdRank is its ability to recalculate processing data and update positions of ads according to their current value.
As for bids and ad/website quality, their value varies depending on the kinds of ads you use, as well as the kind of website you have. Note that your actual bid is closely connected to your maximum cost-per-click bid, which is the maximum amount you could pay per one click. However, usually you’re charged less—everything depends on the quality of your ad that is calculated according to the expected number of potential clicks, ad relevance, and landing page availability. An ad auction determines the maximum cost-per-click bid, which is required to keep your ad at a given position.
How to Fit into Your Budget
One of the main drawbacks of AdWords lies in its competitiveness—that is, the constant competition among retailers for getting the best ad positions. The more money you offer, the more chances you get to appear among the first positions, and accordingly, get more clicks to your website. Thus, a steadily developing retailer has to be able to invest at least $2,000 to $5,000 a month in an ordinary AdWords campaign. Nonetheless, buying website traffic consists of more than clicks. The better retailer that you are, the more bids you’re required to offer. So before starting your cooperation with AdWords, take the following into account:
How much money are you willing to spend on a single day of your advertising campaign? Days are more relevant than weeks or months because you cannot predict how long your ad will bring you enough profit.
Will you vary your daily bid into parts by bidding in specific times of a day? This ad scheduling is very useful and cost-saving if you know when your website experiences its best-selling hours.
Is your quality score high enough to be worth risking? If you’re not sure about the relevancy of your keywords and the quality of your ad and landing page, it’s better to invest into their improvement first.
How to Structure Your Ad Campaign
Depending on the kind of ads you have, your approaches to an AdWords campaign will vary. Product ads usually tend to work out, provided they are divided into definite categories; for instance, furniture products are better structured when categorized into beds, chairs, tables, and so on. Furthermore, you can specify each category by introducing single-size beds and double-size beds. That will make your ads more specific for potential customers and will clarify which products are more popular than others.
How to Manage Your Resources
Working with AdWords requires certain time expenditures as well. The more developed retailer that you are, the more profound ad campaign planning you should do. To buy Internet traffic simply by putting some money into it is never enough. Using text ads is indeed easier, but it’s evident that for a range of products, you should work on its proper listing in AdWords webpages, manage regular updates of assortment and price, and automate submissions to Google Merchant Center. These hard tasks often require hiring corresponding specialists, but the results are definitely worth it.
How to Launch an AdWords Campaign
Next, I shed light on launching an ordinary AdWords campaign for your Magento website. Let’s start with some basic aspects, such as your AdWords account.
Create an Account in AdWords
Take the following steps to create an AdWords account .
First, visit AdWords’ main page and choose Try AdWords Now.
If you already have a Google account, then you can simply sign in with the existing login and password; otherwise, tick I do not use these services and enter your email address and a relatively strong password. Then solve a captcha and create an account.
Select your country, time zone, and the currency you’d like to deal with. Google’s billing will highly depend on this information. Remember that after submitting this data, you will not be able to change it.
Click Continue and verify your account through the link sent to your email address.
Choose Your Ad Campaign
Each campaign can be run on the same or various AdWords settings—it’s up to your tastes and the possibilities. There are three basic settings areas:
Budget and bid amount
Optional elements that can be adjusted to the main ad structure through ad extensions
Specification of places where you want your ads to appear
Now, it’s time to look through settings:
Campaign name. This name will only be visible to you, but it would be great if you specify it according to your actual business goals. It’s not recommended to use default Google names to find a particular campaign afterward .
Type. Here you can specify what kind of ads you’re going to create. For novices in advertising it’s reasonable to select the “Search Network with Display Select” type of a campaign that allows you to gain access to the most popular ad placements. You can also choose a subtype of your campaign, which determines the range of settings you will use for making an ad. The Standard subtype is preferred when you’re a newbie.
Networks. You can choose either Google Search Network or Google Display Network to manage the appearance of your ad on other websites. The first option implies that your ads will be shown on Google-related websites, including YouTube and AOL. The second option enables your ads to be shown on other websites that have a partnership with Google.
Devices. You can work on this option later when you decide to optimize your ads for tablets and mobile devices.
Locations and Languages. Here you can choose an appropriate language for your ads, as well as a location that will provide only targeted location users with the ability to see your ads.
Bidding and budget. You can insert bids manually or delegate them with the help of this option. Remember that your default bid represents the maximum amount you’re ready to pay for your ads placement, while budget shows how much you really intend to spend for every day of your campaign.
Ad extensions. This category contains additional settings, including the placement of links to your website, your local store address, or phone number .
Advanced Settings. Here you will find optional settings aimed at displaying your ads on your customers’ screens at the most appropriate time. This category features different schedules, such as your campaign program or the times that ads appear each day.
Create a New Campaign
Take the following steps to create a new campaign.
Click Create your first campaign.
You’ll be directed to the Select Campaign Settings page, where you can set up all the previously mentioned categories.
At the end, don’t forget to click Save and Continue. Later you’ll be able to edit most of the settings.
Ad Groups
After you’re done with settings, you will be automatically introduced to the “Create ad and keywords ” page. It is possible to create an ad group here and use it as part of a more general ad campaign.
Each ad campaign includes one or multiple ad groups, depending on the type selected in Campaign Settings. Each group consists of an ad, a specialized keyword set, and bids for its placement. With certain keywords for every ad group, you enhance the relevance of your ads in a list of search results. Therefore, an ad group should correspond to a particular type of product you offer. After creating an ad group, you can proceed to managing the ads themselves.
Ads
There are different formats of ads available for your ad campaigns. Regardless of the format, it is required to create a separate range of keywords for each of them. The available ad formats vary from text and image ads to video and mobile ads.
Let’s have a look at the simplest text ad.
Choose Create an ad and click Text ad.
Fill in the spaces by writing your headline, description, display URL (your homepage), and landing page. Note that both links have to belong to the same domain.
Type in your keywords in the appropriate section. The recommended minimum number of keywords is 10 to 20.
Click Save and Continue to billing to activate your campaign.
Billing Information
After you’ve created your first ad, you will be asked to fill in billing information. Follow these steps:
Select the country of your billing address. Then you will see additional settings available for your country. Input any additional information.
Choose your payment method: backup credit card for automated payments (after your ads have been displayed) or a manual payment method (before your ads have been displayed). Please note that there are some restrictions related to certain countries.
If you chose backup credit card payment, you don’t have to perform any additional actions. Otherwise, you can pay for your first bid in Settings ➤ Billing by choosing Make a payment. Don’t forget to choose the amount of a bid.
Now, you should provide additional payment information.
Save the input data.
Creating a Shopping Campaign
The format of an ad campaign is valuable when you have a store with various product items. Ads of such format usually include an image, name, description, price, and a landing page leading toward a product page on your website. To enable shopping campaigns for your AdWords account, submit your product information in Google Merchant Center. Consider that a shopping campaign is especially useful when you are targeting specific users.
Setup
Take the following steps to set up your campaign.
Click Campaigns and then Campaign ➤ Shopping.
You will be forwarded to the Campaign Settings page. Type the name of your campaign.
Select your country and add Merchant ID information.
In the Country of Sale field, select the country where your products are sold.
Then you can manage optional settings in Shopping Settings (advanced):
Choose a Campaign priority value when there are several shopping campaigns promoting the same product.
Inventory filter allows you to limit the number of product items you’d like to advertise.
You can also activate Local Inventory Ads for your Local Products feed to Merchant Center.
In Locations you can choose countries to display your ads in.
Bid strategy allows you to adjust bidding options. If you set bids manually, use default parameters. For conversion tracking, choose enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) .
Save these settings.
AdWords Conversion Pixel
AdWords provides its users with an opportunity to track their conversion rates based on customers’ interaction with your Magento website. This includes the number of ad clicks, product page views, app downloads, order check-outs, and so forth. Conversion tracking also features all the necessary tools for maximizing profit from your ad campaigns and reducing overall expenses. In addition, it sheds light on how good your ads are. The key element of AdWords conversion tracking is the conversion pixel tool, which is basically a 1×1-pixel image placed on one or several website pages through a piece of code that you can copy and paste as a part of your primary ad campaign. This pixel effectively reacts on every activity on your website, including:
Ad clicks from affiliate websites
Checkout button clicks on a checkout confirmation page
Clicks referral URL’s leading from your store, which allows you tracking visitors even when they leave your page
Despite the fact that Magento does not support out-of-the-box AdWords conversion tracking, there are a lot of third-party possibilities for effective integration. For instance, here you can find a handy module written in JavaScript. Its primary role is tracking conversions from a checkout/success page of Magento stores. Alternatively, you can make use of the extensions described next.
Google AdWords and Facebook Ads Conversion Tracking and Remarketing
This Magento extension provides double-sided integration with Google AdWords and Facebook advertising campaigns. As a result, you get a high-end experience of conversion tracking process. The module is easy to set up, and after launch, its conversion tracking code is automatically stored on the Checkout Success page of your website. There is also a useful feature called Remarketing Integration, which enables ecommerce owners to capture data about what particular products your visitors are interested in. Thus, you will be able to follow your customers on other Internet resources with the aim to show them the most appropriate ads. Therefore, there will be more chances to see these customers on your store again. You can get the latest version of the extension for only $49.
Kulmage Google AdWords
This is another useful Magento extension for tracking your AdWords conversion rates. The extension’s code is placed on the Magento Success page without any additional adjustments. Later on, you can easily manage its performance through your admin panel. The module is free and easy to use.
LUKA Google AdWords Conversion Tracking
This is a free-of-charge module for AdWords conversion tracking integration. The great advantage of this extension is that you can place conversion tracking pixels on any page of your website. If you find any bugs or inaccuracies with the module’s performance, you can always inform its developers, and they will help you solve your problem. You should note that this module is compatible with Magento 1.5+.
Google AdWords Conversion Tracking
For only $31.45, you can easily connect your Magento website to AdWords conversion tracking. The module features the ability to update your stock information, manage conversion-related configurations from your Magento admin panel, supports both sub-domain and multi-domain pages, and can be effortlessly turned on and off at any particular moment.
Here is a list of other useful guides and articles that could help you boost your AdWords experience:
Official Google AdWords Guide
Pay for Google AdWords
5 Ecommerce AdWords Tips from an ex-Googler
Search Advertising 101 - Your Guide to Google AdWords
How to Start Your AdWords Well
12 Rules For Maximizing conversions from AdWords
Alternatives to Google AdWords
Many retailers are accustomed to think that Google AdWords is the most effective pay-per-click management service for driving more traffic to websites. However, it may not be that efficient, or it may be even harmful to your business, especially if you’re a new entrepreneur. The problem is that you cannot realize the consequences until you invest in AdWords campaign. Thus, you are facing the following:
Rivalry. Being especially popular among large and highly developed companies, the AdWords platform makes it impossible for small businesses to be competitive. You have to invest more and more just to be able to provide your ads with the best working keywords. With such cost-intensity, you’re likely to burn out at the very beginning of your campaign.
Time-wasting. As an ecommerce newcomer, you won’t be really knowledgeable in all the specifics of AdWords, so you have to spend some time on getting acquainted with the toolkit. But such experiments are risky, because again, you spend your money on them and you don’t know any end results.
Vague bidding system. AdWords has a very intricate system of money distribution. Although you can control the amount of bids you submit for you campaign, and even invest as little or as much as you want, you will spend much time trying to find out where your money eventually goes. Moreover, if you fail to be attentive and forget to set a proper management over your bids, you’re likely to lose everything.
This appears to be an uneven game where big corporations get the best advertising results and small businesses struggle uselessly for a more or less satisfying position in Google search results because they have a tighter budget.
In this situation, you have to think of other ad sources that could be more loyal and suitable for such a small business as yours.
ExactSeek
ExactSeek is a flexible advertising platform that allows retailers to attract many visitors to their online stores. It offers various programs from which you can choose the most appealing one .
Traffic Program. This program requires a quarterly subscription update and seems to be very profitable due to the relatively low cost of advertising services. All ads provided by this program can bring you up to 3,000 visitors during every subscription period. ExactSeek’s exclusive traffic gaining program targets users specifically from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia .
Featured Listings. The program includes the Traffic Program combined with simple sidebar ads implemented in search engine result lists and directories. The Featured Listings tool offers low-cost investments and prevents you from tracking your ad performance, making additional bids, and inventing too complex advertising schemes.
Facebook Paid Ads
Facebook has its own advertising platform that helps new entrepreneurs address certain demographics and audiences within a billion-member social community. The principal aim here is to create a separate Facebook profile that represents your website inside the social media environment. From there, you can try various advertising schemes to gain the maximum website viewing results. The main advantage of Facebook Paid Ads is its simplicity and high efficiency.
Clicksor
Clicksor is another alternative to AdWords that targets certain market segments. It has extremely cheap bidding offers; therefore, you can start investing at just 5 cents a month. Clicksor relies on time and contextual and geo targeting to achieve the best advertising results.
Yahoo! Bing
The Yahoo! Bing advertising platform is the second most popular service after Google AdWords, which has a lot more to offer. If you decide to cooperate with Bing, you can forget about investing in other platforms, since apart from being advertised in Yahoo! Search results, you get an opportunity to access the service’s ad partnership, which includes such giants as Amazon and Facebook. Bing is very popular in the United States, so you may already know what audience to target there. Moreover, bidding prices are significantly lower on Bing than AdWords .
Yahoo! Gemini Ads
This is an additional advertising tool in the Yahoo! search engine that helps you effectively encourage people to visit your website. Even if conversions remain low, you can be sure that your brand will become more popular than it is now. Gemini Ads works simply: you create an ad and then choose the most appropriate target audience. As always, add a couple of the most relevant keywords and bid for publishing your ad at specific resources.
BuySellAds
BuySellAds is not as popular as the ones already described, however, it is none the less effective. It has recently reached the milestone of selling over 6 billion ads a month; consequently, there are no reasons to omit it. First, BuySellAds is aimed at small businesses. It provides convenient ad monitoring conditions, as well as simple and transparent reports that show how your investments are spent. With BuySellAds, you can easily monitor your current advertising performance and even pause regular investments in the event of an unexpected money shortage.
BlogAds
The BlogAds service offers more suitable advertising conditions for certain segment retailers. In fact, with the help of this platform, you can advertise your products using a blog format with various types of ads, ranging from banners to custom skins. BlogAds actively cooperates with large blog websites and social networks that contain easily identifiable target audiences. You should note that monthly prices on BlogAds vary depending on ad placement—the lowest price is about $150 a month.
StumbleUpon Ads
The main advantage of this service is that you can advertise literally everything you want and still get nice visit rates. However, numerous visits won’t necessarily bring you numerous customers, and StumbleUpon Ads is a place where you can become certain of this statement. Thus, the platform is more likely to be used for getting people acquainted with your brand rather than convert them into buyers.
Partner Promotion
Cooperation among individuals and companies can significantly influence your market presence. Thus, it is often enough to be mentioned in somebody’s blog to receive a huge feedback and increase the amount of your sales. That’s why you should always be sociable and head toward friendship with companies sharing your interest.
Social Media Advertising and SMM Campaigns
Social media is still widely used for advertising and sales boost, and it’s hard to deny its efficiency in terms of ecommerce retail promotion. With millions of people surfing social network websites, the traffic source is worth investing in. Since different platforms unite people with various tastes and interests, you have lots of opportunities to reach your target audience. Unfortunately, social advertising is no longer free of charge. Sometimes, you even have to pay as much as you would spend on an AdWords campaign, but there are still lots of opportunities related to this kind of advertising. Start your SMM campaign with the following steps:
Clarify your campaign’s objectives: increased traffic, engagement, clicks, and so forth.
Choose the right type for your campaign. You can use ads (boosted organic ads for everyone; specific promoted ads aimed at certain user group), share some brilliant content, or combine both approaches.
Define your target audience. Luckily, social media provides tons of information about users. Use this data wisely to find your customers and create an approach to uninterested ones.
Plan your budget. Set a total monthly budget and calculate a daily budget.
Design your ads. Note that different social networks have different requirements for the content of ads, such as image size and resolution, or the number of characters.
Always be on. Note that a quick response can turn your visitor into a buyer.
Work with shopping in mind. Socializing is the main reason for people to spend their time on social networks. Therefore, you should spend your attention on making shopping better with the help of these services. Sometimes it is enough to add social sharing buttons and enable customer reviews in order to gain maximum profit from social networks. At least, these are the core requirements for every ecommerce store. At the same time, you can incorporate a social media experience into every aspect of your Magento website, so don’t hesitate to provide your customers with the ability to use their social network profiles everywhere from login to checkout .
Combine social media strategy with other marketing strategies. You can always enhance your email marketing template with the help of social sharing options. Moreover, think of utilizing your social media connections to multiply customer subscriptions to your mailing list. And don’t forget about Google+ and its influence on search results.
Avoid being self-serving. Rely on an 80/20 ratio, where 20% is your promotional content and 80% is the content that engages your customers.
Use promoted posts. Usually, such posts don’t include any advertising information, drawing users’ attention by introducing some truly useful information like how-to guides, interesting facts, digests, photos, videos related to your activity, downloadable ebooks, and so forth.
Think of target ads. Using target ads helps you get to a specific social media audience, and as a result, increase website traffic.
Utilize specific social media for specific purposes. For example, business-to-business ecommerce advertising is more reasonable on LinkedIn. At the same time, women-related products can attract Pinterest users. Thus, you should figure out the demographic majority of the social network that you’re going to use for online advertising .
Reward your social followers. Provide them with exclusive offers, bonuses, and discounts. Do you like feeling special? Of course you do. So why do you think your customers wouldn’t like being treated the same way?
Use a social media marketing strategy and visual content.
Create eye-catching visual content.
Include infographics and video content in your social media campaign.
Run video ads with good CTAs.
Use SMM and SoLoMo (social-local-mobile technology).
Rely on real-time engagement to get loyal and highly active customers.
Utilize both offline and online marketing data to track individual and collaborative performance.
Reach people with the help of a mobile version of your ads (especially Facebook ads).
Use local awareness ads.
Try to increase conversions and decrease CPA. Get the lowest possible cost per acquisition.
Rely on advanced data insights and social media marketing analysis in combination with ROI-driven advertising.
Use new platforms .
Don’t limit your SMM campaign to only Facebook and Twitter.
Explore your traffic in order to understand where your audience hangs out.
Learn the preferences and tastes of your target audience.
Don’t try to conquer all social networking services.
Find new social ad channels.
Allocate your budget wisely and reduce wasted ad expenditures.
Try to avoid using outdated social media tactics.
Experiment with new platforms and approaches.
In any case, you should analyze the results of your campaign. Thus, you will be able to make vital improvements and fixes, and as a result, enhance its future productivity. It is extremely important to take all of your mistakes into account, as well as utilize all past practices. Always try to find answers to the following questions:
Did you get the expected results?
What is the ROI of your campaign?
How did a conversion rate change?
What are your mistakes?
How could you improve a future campaign?
Now let’s take a look at various social media ecosystems and proven ways of advertising within these ecosystems.
Facebook is the most powerful source of online advertising in a social media sphere. Since this network is surfed by all possible users, you can easily reach people who might be interested in the products that you are selling.
Start with creating your official store page on Facebook. You can do it even more easily by linking your personal page to it, as follows:
Go to Options and select Create page.
Choose the most appropriate business category (i.e., local business, company, brand, entertainment, etc.).
Specify the chosen category to fit your industry type.
Agree with the Facebook Terms and Conditions and click Get Started.
You then have to fill your new business page with content. The procedure is quite similar to personal page content management. You should necessarily include a description of your store, create a profile image (such as your company logo), and add this business page to your personal page’s Favorites (to get an immediate access to it).
Of course, there are several helpful features aimed at increasing the performance of your Magento website on Facebook. The following describes the most reliable ones.
Custom Audiences is a handy tool that allows you to monitor those users who come to your website from Facebook. Moreover, you can even identify which pages they have seen. It is possible with the conversion tracking pixel. With the help of the data gathered by this pixel, you get better understanding of your customers and their preferences.
Lookalike Audiencesis another useful Facebook tool that gathers information about the existing customers and utilizes it for searching new users that might be interested in your products.
Friend-to-friend Payments is an additional payment method for your store. All Facebook users can now link their debit or credit cards directly to their personal pages and purchase any products right there. As a retailer, you can adjust this feature to eliminate the necessity for your customers to visit your Magento website and struggle through a standard checkout procedure.
Dynamic Product Ads is a library of cool ad templates that considerably simplifies the process of creating ads on Facebook.
Multi-Product Ads allows you to display several products in a single ad. It increases your chances to grab the interest of your target audience.
If you still have questions regarding Facebook advertising management, I recommend you to look at these profound video-lesson devoted to effective online advertising.
The Best Facebook Modules for Magento
Facebook covers a vast variety of demographic groups that can help you build a good stock of loyal audience that always looks for new items on your digital shelves. Utilizing Facebook’s endless potential for attracting new customers will become even more effective when you connect your Magento store directly to the social network’s features and functions, and choosing specialized Facebook modules for Magento. Since there are lots of various extensions available for Magento, next you will find only those that are really worth using.
Facebook Store Application
This extension offers a complete integration with Facebook as well as an opportunity to customize almost every feature. Developers from StoreYa provided their product with a set of tools that can import all of your website data to a corresponding Facebook page with just one click. Moreover, the module is easy to use, so you won’t stop trying to enable or disable a specific feature. Facebook Store Application contains a flexible stats dashboard that allows you to monitor visitors coming from Facebook to your website, the number of clicks made to get there, and products that tend to be more popular than others. In addition, your Facebook store will be available in all languages and will accept transactions in all currencies. The extension is free and adjustable for sharing content across various social platforms.
Facebook by ORBA
With this module your website, customers get the ability to connect with their personal Facebook pages right on an ecommerce store. Basically, they can register and login to your website by entering their Facebook login and password, which means that you automatically get access to the audience of this social network. Moreover, your customers will always stay logged in on your site while being logged in on Facebook. The extension also contains a Like button that can be placed on all relevant pages, such as pages and categories. Note that the module is available for free.
Facebook Comments
Facebook Comments is a relatively new module that enables your users to use their Facebook accounts for leaving comments under blog posts or products. Comment fields and an interface look as they do on the social network itself, creating a more habitual atmosphere and encouraging users to leave comments. Another useful feature is presented by an offer to share comments with users’ friends through personal pages. When these friends see those comments, they are more likely to become interested and click an attached link leading to your website page. This opens even more possibilities for driving additional traffic to your online store. The Facebook Comments module costs just $15.
Facebook Fanbox
This extension activates the Facebook Fanbox, which is basically a box that contains fan users’ posts dedicated to your store or its content. A website visitor can “like” these posts and subscribe to all the following updates from the box. You can allocate the box either on left or right side of your website and set a desired size and width to suit the rest of its components. The module is free.
Facebook Wall
As the name suggests, this extension allows you to display a feed with the latest posts from your store’s official Facebook page. The module costs $39, but it’s worth it, considering that the extension runs on all major browsers and uses the latest graph API versions.
All4coding Facebook
This extension provides you with a full package of Facebook integratable features, including Fanbox, a Like button, a Send button, comments, sharing, and many more. With their help, you can easily monitor the activity of Facebook users on your website, as well as on your Facebook official page, in order to maximize the overall benefits from Magento-Facebook integration. You can try out a demo version of this module for free.
Facebook Referral Discount
The main purpose of this extension is to adjust your online store for promoting your products with the help of Facebook functions. In fact, you motivate your visitors to promote your goods and website when they recommend them to friends. They will do it in order to get discounts on the products they share on their Facebook friend list. The extension displays a link to a product, its name, picture, and a short description. The module can be purchased for $59.
Since this social media network ranks second after Facebook in number of users, it is necessary to utilize it for promoting your business as well. Although Twitter shares many features typical for other social networks, it also has a certain amount of unique stuff that makes it more appealing for online advertising. Let’s consider Twitter’s unique features :
Promoted tweets are basic types of ads that require using small input space to attract customers in the most concise way. Thus, you can promote the most relevant products of your website, the upcoming items of your company, and marketing events that you take part in by putting them into a neatly structured tweet.
The Promoted accounts feature lets your brand account appear among the leading positions on the Who to Follow list. This will primarily gain more audience to your store and evoke extra interest in your current inventory.
Promoted hashtags are available to the most successful merchants due to high cost. They are placed in the Trends widget to make users notice and discuss them in their feeds. Moreover, users often click hashtags to find all related tweets and discussions.
Liking product-related tweets. It’s a pretty smart promotion scheme that attracts Twitter users’ attention to your brand. For instance, if your business concerns making furniture, you can use Twitter Search to look for users that have your keywords in their posts (like new bed, furniture store, nice wooden tables) and you can add their posts to Favorites.
Twitter offers is an official Twitter feature that enables merchants to create card-linked promotions and share them with other Twitter inhabitants.
Quick Promote Ads. To use this Twitter feature, you need an advertising account. According to it, your tweets will target those users that are interested in your current followers.
Twitter Modules for Magento
Of course, managing your Twitter profile apart from the website will not work unless you link it to your store page. Magento users can utilize one or several Twitter extensions (described next) for a successful integration with the Twitter environment that maximizes the amount of traffic coming from this popular social media.
Multi Twitter
This extension will display your latest tweets on the main page of your Magento website. Furthermore, you can display tweets of multiple Twitter users if they mention the name of your store in their posts: simply add necessary usernames to the extension’s configuration field. It is also worth mentioning that Multi Twitter is compatible with the latest versions of all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and IE. Another useful feature allows choosing a desired amount of tweets for displaying on your website page. Note that customers often read not more than three to five tweets per visit, so there’s no need to display more than ten of them. After all, the main content on your store is products, not tweets. You can purchase the module for $39.
Latest Tweets from Twitter
With the help of this plugin, you can enhance your Magento website with the functionality of the previous solution for free. Since it provides regular and flawless updates of your Twitter box, your visitors won’t miss any important announcements and offers regarding products and services from your store. Apart from major integration features, the module has a user-friendly interface and an easily configurable toolset. Due to the open-source nature of the extension, you can customize and improve its performance by adding new features and tools.
SM Twitter : Responsive Module
Unlike the previous modules, this one provides more a profound social experience for you and your visitors. It not only displays a timeline on your website, but it also provides you with the ability to interact with Twitter followers right from the store. This interaction includes such features as posting tweets, retweeting posts, adding tweets to favorites, and following. You can edit the size, placement, and design of the module’s Twitter box anytime. The extension is available for free and is fully compatible with Magento 1.7.x.
Twitter “Tweet” Button
With the help of this extension, you can enable Tweet button on all pages of your store (on product pages and blog posts). Although the function of the Tweet button is quite straightforward, it still can be customized either by size or text type. In addition, you can set the most appropriate URL to be opened when somebody clicks the Tweet button. For instance, it’s possible to shorten your link and add the name of your brand to make it more eye-catching. The module is completely free.
Creare Latest Tweets from Twitter
This free module is very popular due to the OAuth protocol and Twitter API 1.1 standard, which make it safe and reliable in terms of usage. It also offers a customizable Twitter box and a Tweet button for a full-range social interaction.
Although Instagram is considered to be less adjusted for advertising, it still attempts to level up as a competitive social marketing platform. Merchants are now widely using Instagram for posting the photographs of their goods to attract attention of local users. There are more than 475 huge companies on Instagram. Such giants as Disney, Electronic Arts, The Gap, and Taco Bell implement their ad campaigns with the help of Instagram. This social networking service still lacks real advertising features , but there are already numerous methods created to boost your efficiency on Instagram:
Carousel ads is a feature that has recently been launched within the network. It enables merchants to add multiple photographs into one post; images are simply swiped left, so there are no obstacles for you to grab users’ attention. Such brands as Samsung, Banana Republic, and L’Oréal Paris have efficiently used this feature for their campaigns .
A specific amount of hashtag adoption. According to recent stats, ecommerce merchants prefer using more hashtags than any other businesses that work on Instagram. The lack of keywords and links is the main reason of such behavior. So don’t hesitate to utilize hashtags, but use them wisely.
Feedback to your followers is the most powerful action on Instagram because it helps you get more trust and loyalty. An individual approach is likely to bring positive results from your interactions within this social media service.
Instagram Extensions for Magento
If you intend to make Instagram your primary social media traffic source, you will hardly achieve your goal without specialized Magento extensions developed for the best practices in interaction with Instagram users.
Instagram Extension by iKantam
This extension provides high-end integration with your account, allowing you to post Instagram images on your website. In addition, you can decide which pictures will be shown on your store and which are to be omitted. All the images can be easily filtered by appropriate hashtags or usernames to make your content more relevant. The module is available for only $39.
Instagram Connector
Instagram Connector is a module intended for creating an exclusive Instagram library of product images that can be displayed on your ecommerce shop. When a new image is uploaded to your Instagram account, it becomes visible on the website. The same action is possible after updating a gallery through the extension panel. All pictures in the gallery are instantly displayed in a slideshow manner, which prevents your visitors from the long and tiresome clicking on every image individually. The extension is very light and costs only $4.99.
Instagram Extension by eGrove Systems
This Magento module also extends website opportunities by displaying Instagram images at the right side of your homepage or blog section. You can also customize the order of their appearance depending on specific keywords used for a content description. The module also features a user-friendly interface and flexible configurations. You can acquire it for $69.
Instagram Widget
With this extension, you get the ability to display Instagram profile pictures anywhere on your online store starting from the homepage and ending with checkout for only $10. The module covers the whole range of previously mentioned features. In addition, it offers the count of pictures that are shown on your website, unique customizations for various pages, and an easy-to-use enable-disable option.
Pinterest is a visual content social media network that consists mostly of US users. Another useful demographic fact is the ratio between female and male users: women account for about 80% of all Pinterest users. Moreover, most of these women are in their forties; consequently, you get a sufficiently reduced target audience. But you still have all chances to get new customers here, so don’t ignore this network.
So what should you do to drive more traffic to your Magento website?
Create multiple company boards. Each board can be devoted to a specific type of your products. Additionally, try to utilize more creative, sensitive, and even touching images that are somehow related to your product.
Provide short descriptions, direct links, and prices to your item images .
Give preference to lighter, taller and no-face images. According to statistics, these tactics boosts the amount of repins to 23%.
Place a pin button on your website to provide your customers with the ability to share your products with their followers.
Use both rich pins and promoted pins features for your ad campaign. Although these features are not free, they are rather effective in Pinterest environment. Rich pins allow you to include additional information about your products including prices, sales, quantity, and brand. Promoted pins are designed to enlarge your audience.
Utilize an effective hashtag since there is only one you’re allowed to have on Pinterest.
Pinterest Extensions for Magento
Here, you can find all Magento extensions for integration with Pinterest.
Best Blogging Platforms Worth Using
If you haven’t adapted a blog for your online store yet, take a look at the following descriptions of the most powerful blogging platforms. All the solutions mentioned next will provide you with a full set of features that allow you to maximize customer responsiveness and bring more traffic to your Magento store.
WordPress
WordPress is considered to be the best blogging platform that perfectly suits the needs of ecommerce businesses from any possible niche. The platform is built on PHP and MySQL and is totally open source, which allows you to implement further customizations to meet the specific needs of each user. The main functionality of this blogging solution is available for free, but if you intend to attract more customers to your store, you might acquire a special business plan for $299 per year. This plan includes unlimited storage space, the ability to create custom links, and an access to advanced plugins and additional blog themes.
Movable Type
This blogging solution is aimed at businesses looking for an advanced dashboard to manage their workflow, optimize the level of performed tasks, provide a high-end self-service support, and so forth. The main advantage of the platform is its ability to create original and outstanding content that is likely to interest your customers. The whole pack of tools and features can be purchased for $595.
Squarespace
This platform offers a unique blogging solution for ecommerce merchants by introducing a mixture of a blog and an online store where you can share information with your customers and at the same time sell your products and services. You can utilize Squarespace’s free customizable domain together with paid plans (ranging from $8 to $24 per month). The most expensive plan allows merchants to sell an unlimited number of products through Squarespace platform.
Typepad
Typepad combines easy-to-use functionality and a set of useful analytics tools that can easily turn your blog into the second main source of traffic. For only $8.95 you will get all the necessary features aimed at the best blogging experience.
Tumblr
Being a smart combination of a micro-blog and a social network, Tumblr offers support for texts, images, and videos. With such content, you can create a perfect environment for merchant-customer interactions. Since it is possible to use all the platform’s features for free, you’re welcome to utilize all of Tumblr’s potential for embodying your creative ideas.
Pen.io
Pen.io is an alternative blogging platform that can be used anonymously and absolutely for free. Thus, you don’t have to register or pay for using any features. Moreover, you’re allowed to use your own URLs without any additional domain submission. The platform is fast and user-friendly, so you won’t have to waste time learning how to apply any particular feature .
Weebly
The Weebly platform is famous for its multipurpose functionality that allows you to create a blog, an online store, or a separate website. Blogging features include drag-and-drop mechanics, customizable themes, and progressive feedback opportunities. You can start your blog with a basic free plan or you can purchase a more advanced premium plan for $4 per month.
Anchor
Anchor is a useful open source platform that offers an opportunity to build custom blogging elements in HTML, JavaScript, and SCC. The only restriction is that it works with the latest browser versions, so don’t hesitate to update your software. You can get full access to the platform’s features for a single donation of $5.
You can find more information about other useful blogging solutions in this article. Also review the list of social media integration Magento extensions4.
Best Magento Modules for Blogging
Despite the fact that blogging platforms significantly improve the performance of ecommerce projects, they still have one major disadvantage—blogs are detached from the primary online store, which makes it more difficult to interact with customers. That’s why ecommerce developers are concerned with integrating blogging features into retail websites. Magento platform also has a wide range of free blogging solutions that you can use along with your website.
Blog - Community Edition by aheadWorks5
This blog module for Magento will allow you to create regular news posts and special offer announcements to keep your customers loyal to your products and services. Furthermore, the extension can generate SEO-effective text links to improve your rankings and bring more visitors to your website. Also, you can switch on a commenting feature that provides your visitors with an opportunity to leave comments under your posts. Thus, you can easily see their opinions on your articles.
nBlog - Blog extension by Neotheme
The nBlog Magento module includes all the typical blogging features and at the same time offers something unique. For instance, a pack of cool predesigned layouts can be used for making a custom template if you don’t possess any serious programming skills. These predesigned layouts can be applied to various categories of your blog to make it look original.6 Other useful features include delayed posting, blog RSS integration, and Facebook commenting.
Blog Pro
This extension concentrates on making your blog responsive. In addition, you can make it even more attractive by adding thumbnails, images and videos. There is even a social media sharing feature that allows users to share your blog posts with their friends on all major social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, VK, and so forth.
Magento WordPress Extension by FishPig
If you’ve already created a blog on such a popular blogging platform as WordPress and would like to integrate it with your Magento store, I recommend that you pay attention to a specialized extension developed by the FishPig team. This is a multilingual module available for all Magento editions. It offers a complete WordPress integration and supports all major plugins, original URL addresses, and shortcodes. You can also associate your blog posts with Magento products and apply a Magento theme for your blog to make it look a part of your native environment.
If you would like to find out more about how to integrate your ecommerce project into online social environment, don’t hesitate to read this profound social guide7 from the Firebear team.
Real-Time Social Experience with Periscope and Meerkat
Periscope and Meerkat are two new social services designed for real-time streaming. Both solutions can be utilized within any ecommerce business. Here, I describe their features, core differences, and ecommerce opportunities.
Both Periscope and Meerkat produce live streams, which is a core common feature. Another aspect is integration with Twitter; sharing is optional with Periscope links, whereas Meerkat tweets all content automatically. Thus, Periscope users can easily control their audience.
Another difference consists in the availability of recorded content after the end of your stream; Periscope keeps videos for 24 hours, whereas Meerkat doesn’t provide any storing capabilities, which leads to a broken user experience. In addition, Periscope provides tighter integration with Twitter; you get access to your followers from within the app.
Periscope is currently used by such giants as Pepsi’s Mountain Dew, Spotify, and DKNY. Starbucks and MasterCard are among Meerkat’s prominent users. When it comes to the number of users, Periscope also holds the leading position. But what about ecommerce opportunities?
Since videos have always helped merchants become transparent with customers, live streams play a prominent role in this process. You can easily inform your target audience about any latest offer or product by using social streaming services.
There is also an opportunity to show your business from inside, since you already have lots of customers interested in this information. Moreover, this will help you to get new ones. Note that a live stream is a great tool for establishing credibility among your target audience. You can even stream live demos of your products, which will make your ecommerce business even more attractive. Thus, by providing live lessons related to the products you sell, sharing some interesting facts, or offering any other engaging content, you will utilize the ecommerce opportunities of Periscope and Meerkat :
Place your customers in the middle of flash sales. You can easily engage your customers with the help of Periscope or Meerkat by placing them at the center of a flash sale. You just need to start a live broadcast of your event and make customers communicate with you. This should look like a TV show. Your customers are not only situated on your ecommerce website—they’re live on the air with you.
Introduce your ecommerce business with the help of a Q&A session. There are probably dozens of customers willing to ask questions about your business. Don’t send them to the FAQ section of your website, because there is a better decision. You can gain their confidence with the help of question-and-answer sessions. You just need a Periscope or a Meerkat live stream. Don’t be afraid to show yourself to your customers; by being relatable, you will push your ecommerce business to a new level.
Build product awareness and grow your sales. Ask your customers to add their real-life examples while you broadcast product information. This will not only help with building product awareness, but also increase consumer confidence, and as a result, sales.
Provide the customer with a better user experience. You can utilize live streaming for your customer support needs. Thus, you will be able to provide help not only to a particular customer, but to your whole audience of buyers.
Get real-time feedback. Ask buyers to leave real-time feedback about your goods and services. You can call them, or even them invite to broadcasting events. If someone famous is using your products, ask this person to take part in the streaming .
Turn all of your offline events into online ones. With the help of both Periscope and Meerkat, you can easily turn all of your offline events into online real-time translations. Since you have customers who are not able to take part in your events, you will provide them with such opportunity.
The following tips will help you maximize the effectiveness of your Periscope or Meerkat campaigns :
Think about personalization. Greet your viewer by nickname or name. Remain polite. Don’t be afraid to say a name every time you answer a question or address a user.
Announce your live streams a few days before you go live. You should do this on all possible platforms, as well as on your website. You can also use eye-catching banners to attract more attention.
Never omit questions. It’s always better to say that you don’t know the answer.
Use only portrait mode. In landscape mode, Periscope still displays messages from your customers in portrait mode, making a stream inconvenient for viewers. That’s why you should use it in portrait mode only.
Use hashtags. Both Meerkat and Periscope are tightly connected to Twitter. You should always remember this nuance when creating a title for a new broadcast. Use the following hashtags to increase your findability on this social network: #periscope; #werelive; #livestream; #livebroadcast.
Social Influencers for Promoting Your Products Online
One of the most up-to-date methods of gaining some traffic to your website is dealing with famous people on the Internet. They include media personalities, bloggers, vloggers, and even social media accounts run by different people all over the world. All of them are perfect as marketing channels to boost sales on your website. This marketing technique might be particularly interesting for those who have recently launched their business, but now suffer from the shortage of traffic.
Get to Know Some Instagram Influencers
Instagram is now very popular among younger audiences. It may become crucially tempting to attract new customers from such a crowded place. Moreover, it was found that Instagram is the platform giving 25% more customers to those brands that integrate their products with the local influencers than any other social media networks.
So, if you intend to find influencers for promoting your online store on Instagram, start looking for primarily those accounts that specialize in activities that might be directly or indirectly connected with your goods or services. The common mistake in this case is to look for the most popular users with a high number of followers; but it’s more likely that you will tap into a community that has nothing to do with your website at all.
To make your search even more productive, use a handy website called WEBSTA that keeps all the popular Instagram hashtags and user information in its database. Users with an impressive amount of followers usually don’t limit themselves by having only an Instagram page. They probably have their own websites and blogs; meanwhile, Instagram plays the role of an additional promoting source. Once you have found several potential candidates, don’t forget to look at their bio or contact page—website links and email addresses are the main indicators that they don’t mind cooperating with ecommerce businesses.
Another way to target influencers on Instagram is through the official mobile app. You can basically browse “the popular page” (with thousands of the most popular photos) in search of those that somehow relate to your business. Through them you can reach the owners of those photos and contact them through email (if possible).
The final thing is to write to the chosen Instagram account holders to attract their attention to your website and its products. You basically have to write a letter, which must be as neutral and loyal as possible, telling the person that you’re a fan of his or her posts, and you’ve just launched your own website dedicated to the things you’re selling. Further, you should kindly ask the person to try a sample of one of your products and share it with his or her followers. At the end, you can attach one or two images of your product. Alternatively, you can just leave a link to your website page.
Look for Popular YouTube Vloggers, Bloggers, and Press
Like Instagram, YouTube is full of popular users. What is more important, they don’t mind promoting stuff that is not only a part of their target subject and also stuff that is not related to their subject at all. To reach out to the appropriate vloggers, you can use the native search engine of the website by typing keywords that describe your business interest. The same traffic-gaining strategy applies to bloggers, but can be realized through the Google main page. It’s worth noting that targeting bloggers with fewer followers is often more profitable than targeting those with thousands of them since a small audience is usually more loyal to its blogger and his content and advertisements.
As for the press, you might pay more attention to local news sites rather than global ones. Here, however, you have a chance to promote your products only by writing about them in the most original way and presenting it as a good pitch: laconic and interesting to read. So if you want to grab the attention of the press, make your story concise and valuable.
Do Some Smart Advertising on Reddit
This platform is very useful in terms of its mechanics, which allows you to get involved with an appropriate user category through a corresponding thread called a subreddit. There are thousands of subreddits devoted to all possible subjects, so you’re likely to find what fits you the best. But the thread that must be of the utmost importance to you is always in the “/r/entrepreneur” subreddit. There you will find a lot of useful discussions concerning business and ways to improve. “/r/smallbusiness” is another option for new entrepreneurs .
If you managed to find a subreddit dedicated to your website content, you can post unobtrusive little sentences there containing a nice and catchy offer to purchase your products for satisfying user needs. However, if you exaggerate with this offer, you’ll probably be banned, which will bring you no actual profit. Therefore, read general and/or local Reddit rules first.
Convert Your Family and Friends into Customers Through Facebook
Making advertising posts on your Facebook page seems legit, and also important, free. Moreover, this way of attracting customers is one of the first free online advertising methods being adopted by thousands of businesses all over the world. It might not bring you much profit in the end, but you shouldn’t lose the opportunity of making a few customers out of the people you know. You can even give them a 50% discount. Allowing your friends and family to be special customers can make them become loyal buyers.
Extend Your Website to Twitter
It’s also a good idea to create a separate Twitter profile for your website, but it’s certainly not enough for getting more traffic to your website.
The initial strategy in this case is the same: use appropriate keywords and find people posting tweets about content related to your website.
The next step is to follow those people, as they might become interested in what you’re doing.
Take part in events related to your products, such as fairs or presentations; make sure that you post a tweet with cool photos.
Inform your followers about new stuff coming out—keep their interest warm.
Mention Your Potential Influencers in a Profound Blog Post
This method might become one of the most effective ones, as it’s probably going to get through to target influencers’ hearts. The only thing you need to do is to write a blog post about their activities, combining all the information you have under a unified title and catchy introduction. When writing about their blogs, don’t forget to mention their names, because this is what will make your website better.
Amazon Product Advertising
There is nothing more reasonable than advertising on Amazon since it is the biggest and the most popular ecommerce platform that ever existed. It’s no surprise that the company works hard on allowing merchants to fulfill their marketing ambitions in the easiest way. However, if you want to turn your website into the primary destination for Amazon users, then Amazon Product Ads is what you really need to utilize.
In general, Amazon Product Ads is a program for external businesses selling their products outside the Amazon platform which plays the role of a product promoter that attracts more customers. How to start using it?
Create an Amazon Product Ads account here. If you already have an account, simply sign in on the same page.
Go to the Settings bar and select User Permissions. Here, you will get a long list of product, advertising, reports, and other settings that you have to either check or uncheck, depending on your preferences. Save the changed permissions.
Complete your account information. Go to Settings ➤ Account Info. Set a daily budget by clicking the corresponding category on the Advertising bar. The daily budget setting page is rather straightforward, which means that you can set only one price for all of your ads on Amazon.
Then you’re able to upload a product list file by selecting Add Products via Upload. In the new window, click Download Template. You have to choose the most convenient template format here.
Amazon Product Ads requires using the following attributes: category, title, link, SKU (stock keeping unit), and price. Thus, you should be ready to edit your uploaded product feed according to the requirements.
After you have uploaded your product feed, wait while it is processed. You should also check the status report for errors .
Later, when you decide to change the bidding amount or update your inventory, you will have to upload a new product feed to Amazon Product Ads. Seems tough, but if you find Amazon helpful, it’s the only way to get the maximum from the marketplace, since there are no alternate solutions.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that every SMM campaign is unique. Try to figure out all the particular proprieties of your ecommerce business in order to create the most effective social media strategy. You can rely on third-party social media companies, hire a social media marketer, or do everything with the help of existing specialists—it’s up to you, but the core principles of successful campaign will always be the same.