The newcomers in the field of e-commerce often tend to have problems with gaining enough traffic to their web sites. It is quite difficult to attract customers if nobody even knows about your existence. Since making profit online requires a lot of time, investments, planning, and management, you have to be patient and consistent to get your web site out of the Google search abyss and increase your web site traffic. In this chapter, we’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 e-commerce 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. E-commerce 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 aims .
If you’re not really sure what you want to reach by 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 the amount of 1,000 orders per month.
Obtain 500 new customers.
Increase the growth of 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 web site, the following rates must be considered:
average amount of product page views
percentage ratio of users that purchased your products to all users that viewed your web site during a certain period
sum of total revenue
Implement comfortable metrics tracking .
Having your ads active allows you to easily monitor the amount of visitors coming to your web site 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 amount of product page views for a given period.
Be original with every media representation of your site .
For each ad campaign, you should use different visual solutions to perfectly suit the social environment you want to integrate your web site with. For instance, if you create an ad on Facebook, make sure to use unusual color scheme or imagery which is likely to attract the major audience of the network to your web site. Sometimes you will even have to be minimalistic if you don’t want to spoil impressions of your customers.
Use UTM links to direct users to the most suitable page.
If you create ads on several web sites or platforms, it would be nice if you could see which of them brings the greatest amount of customers. Thus, you can utilize so-called UTM links which are basically specific parameters assigned to the main link. They can help you with tracking the amount of clicks performed with 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 main UTM parameters for adjusting to an ad link are:
source (web site 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 looks as follows:
http://yoursite.com/blog-post-fall-collection/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=bannerverision1&utm_- campaign=autumncollectionAdd such link to all 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 on ads, browsing various product pages and ending with check-out. 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 best solutions are listed below:
KISSmetrics —a flexible medium for effective tracking of major campaign rates;
Google Analytics —good at dealing with UTM links;
Converto —a more advanced tool which offers the ability to analyze the efficiency of all 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 appeared to be insufficient and to 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 yet. 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, we can suggest that Facebook is likely to be effective for attracting customers, but certain modifications of your ad campaign on this platform are required. If your Twitter ad campaign brought you just 200 page views, but 150 of those still ended up with completing an order, this ad source is worth being invested. Those ad sources that brought you nothing but a few page views for the whole period should be discarded.
Finally, learn all your achievements and failures from the current marketing strategy and next time apply this knowledge for getting your business to the first positions on the e-commerce 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, in case of a small store it is not profitable to rely on direct traffic, so you’ll 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 web site 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 opening of an offline store chain. The principle disadvantage of this source is that it can only bring 10-15% 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.
E-mail 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 e-mail 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:
Sufficient database volume
This means that you should have an adequate number of users to whom you will send your e-mails. 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 e-mail 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 e-mail addresses with you. This includes creating visual incentives—for instance, offering bargains to your items to subscribed users.
Frequent e-mail delivery
Any type of e-mail marketing campaign suggests that you should provide a regular e-mail delivery to your contact list users. However, this regularity should not exceed three emails a month, because frequent e-mailing will cause people, as well as e-mail services, to consider you as a spammer. When a smart e-mail service, such as Gmail, identifies you as a spammer, your e-mails 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 e-mail content
When it comes to building up content for your e-mails, use the information which can be found on only your web site. Goods and prices that don’t exist on your Magento 2 store will disappoint potential customers. Besides, don’t make your e-mails too long. Write only about the most relevant things that can 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 4-5 sentences to describe your content and then support them with a relevant picture representing your offer. Apart from the things mentioned above, we would like to recommend adding corresponding links to your web site.
Thus, you should manage e-mail marketing during the first days of your web site 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. Despite the fact that e-mail marketing accounts for 10-30% 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 e-mail marketing campaigns, you can also utilize services of specialized e-mail marketing providers. They can consult with you (often for free) and give useful advice on how to get along with this source of traffic. The price for paid services varies a lot depending on whether you want to save your time and make the whole process run automatically or manage everything yourself. Such a service which combines a set of valuable e-commerce features with a reasonable price is MailChimp .
MailChimp
For a minimum of $10 per month, you can get high-end e-mail content that will be appealing to your customers. Moreover, you can also take advantage of regular analytics reports that will inform you about the current progress of your e-mail 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:
E-mail Designer
E-mail Designer is an all-in-one editor which is based on the drag-and-drop principle. It can be managed from a PC and laptop as well as from a tablet or smartphone. Its built-in toolkit allows you to:
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 e-mails.
E-mail templates
MailChimp offers a smart collection of predesigned templates which you can use if you lack enough time or experience for creating 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. In case you intend to code your own e-mail template, there is the E-mail Template Reference option that has a lot of useful information and recommendations on how to make a nice and working template for a successful e-mail 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 e-commerce platforms
If you want to reach various categories of customers with equal efficiency, you will 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 e-mails to 2,000 users each month. Also, you can sort your customer list out to manage e-mail delivery to target groups of customers. The plan supports e-commerce integration and the access to the pack of ready-to-use e-mail templates. The downside of this plan consists of the lack of support for analytical tools for monitoring the coming web site 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 e-mail per month. If you acquire more than 2,000 users, you will need to subscribe to 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 e-mail delivery to 600,000 subscribers. You can use MailChimp’s official web site1 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 will cost you $75. The same pricing works for the High Volume Sender package as well. The plan supports customer list segmentation and integration with e-commerce platforms. Additionally, you get an opportunity to manage your team work by using E-mail Designer and have a regularly available consulting team of experts to help you adapt the MailChimp system within your e-commerce store.
The High Volume Seller package suits large corporations with wide audiences (600,000 customers). It offers the ability to send billions of e-mails 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.
Magento 2 MailChimp Integration2
Organic search engine results
These are results displayed to a user after he enters a search request. The first appearing 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 web site among the first positions requires high popularity among people or original and rare products and services which won’t create excessive competitiveness on the Internet. In addition to the things mentioned above, 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 for 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 web site traffic because it can 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 web site.
Although the main SEO optimizations are described in the first chapter of this book, we’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 will have to work on the effectiveness of your texts and product listings. The whole procedure includes:
Check and improve your product categories. Make sure that every product contains a sufficient amount of key-words (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 web site: headers, item descriptions, image names, internal links, and 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 proper order.
Utilize landing pages. Originally, a landing page is a single web site 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 towards a certain product page containing a description, characteristics, and price. This is likely to motivate a user for a purchase.
Ask bloggers and other retailers to mention your store on their web sites. This part is the most difficult one, because further success of your marketing campaign becomes in some sense dependant on whether your web site URL appears on other blogs or pages. It makes sense to be friendly in order to become successful.
Submit your web site 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 web site traffic faster than any other alternative solutions. This technology allows you to buy visitors on the web sites where you place your ads. Once users click on your ad, they are instantly redirected to your web site. As an advertiser, you have to pay to web sites 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 whom occupy the top positions in search results.
Analyze how many retailers 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 web site. Retargeting ads are basically the same old ads but their aim is to track your web site visitors after they have left a web site page. For instance, when a person goes to your web site, nothing happens, but as soon as he or she proceeds to other web sites, 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 every image has a proper size, check if 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. An even more surprising fact is that you can use Pay Per Click ads on mobile devices.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing includes interaction with third-party web sites that will definitely come in handy when it comes to driving traffic to your store. Basically, these sites use the same methods as those mentioned above for selling your products “on their territory,” but it will require extra expenditures (about 10%) from every sale they make. The most reliable affiliate web sites are Affiliate Window, Linkshare, and Webgain.
Unfortunately, dealing with affiliates will involve 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 web site. 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 web sites by using Google Analytics platform.
The best Magento 2 affiliate and referral modules
Here is a set of Magento 2 extensions aimed at simplifying the process of finding and cooperating with affiliates and referrals. Each affiliate module serves different purposes, so be sure to pick up the one that you really need.
Mirasvit Reward Points + Referral program for Magento 2
Currently, only Mirasvit offers a referral Magento 2 extension. It is a flexible tool designed for implementing loyalty programs on your Magento 2 storefront. Reward Points + Referral Program appreciates your clients every time they do something good for your e-commerce business. Thus, by encouraging your shoppers, you turn them into loyal customers and returning buyers who invite their friends to shop on your web site.
As a store owner, you can reward your visitors for:
*referring friends to your Magento 2 store; *purchasing several items simultaneously; *reviewing products; *buying specific products; *placing votes; *signing up; *telling about your store on social networks.
There is also an opportunity to reward someone in case of a birthday. As for the back end opportunities, this referral Magento 2 extension allows you to create and manage flexible earning and spending rules. Besides, you can create rules for notifications, add points manually, and change point statuses.
And it is necessary to mention three types of earning rules . First of all, you can create product-based rules . Then, the module provides an opportunity to make some behavior- based rules . And finally, you can create cart-based rules .
More about Mirasvit Reward Points Referral Magento 2 Extension3
Other useful traffic-driving techniques …
…to use on your web site
Simplified checkout
Approximately 50% of all abandoned check-out processes are caused by complex and unfriendly shopping experiences. The more complex and lengthy 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 subject to vary significantly. Therefore, complex shipping costs and conditions increase the number of failed check-out 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 from customers.
Mobile-friendly environment
There is almost nobody who doesn’t have access to a mobile device these days, and there are a huge number of people that spend much more time surfing the Internet from their smartphones and tablets rather than laptops or computers. This means you must adapt to the universal trend and optimize your web site 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 the 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 web sites. 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 web site 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 feedback. Not everyone is apt to leave it after purchasing a product.
Although reviews can be positive or negative, you must be ready to see both types on your web site. It’s not always the case that your products or services are bad, though. But it doesn’t matter what the reason for a bad feedback is. Think of it as a factor that can help you boost your market performance and increase overall traffic to your web site.
These techniques are also important when estimating the conversion rate of your web site. Abandoned shopping carts, zero returns from e-mail 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 towards conversion rate optimization strategy.
…to use outside of your web site
Don’t give up on traditional advertising .
Although we live in the age of computers, it doesn’t mean we cannot use old-school methods anymore. It also concerns advertising, however controversial this sphere may be. Traditional advertising can be still actualized through magazines, newspapers, direct mail marketing, radio stations, TV, and even billboards. Moreover, it can also increase your web site traffic!
Consider such giants as Zappos, Diapers.com, Bonobos, and Amazon. Despite the fact that they are hugely popular on the Internet, these companies still rely on traditional advertising to keep their sales and web site 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 various content which could bring you more customers since it is funny. One of the most commonly used entertaining elements in the sphere of e-commerce is a viral video. Viral videos are made by many world-famous brands, and their efficiency is considered to be proved due to enormous success they achieve afterwards. 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 which has been recently launched. Apart from using traditional ways of e-commerce 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 e-commerce platforms .
If you don’t yet feel stable enough with traffic, don’t hesitate to promote your products on bigger e-commerce 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 2 web site. Since it is quite complicated, we’ve decided to devote a separate part of this chapter to banner ads. You can check it out below.
Banner Ads
This type of advertisement must be familiar to every e-commerce retailer, but many of them do not consider it to be as effective as previously thought. Firstly, 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 web site is dictated by the need to read/watch something interesting or communicate with somebody rather than to click on 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, which 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 web sites. Below we will tell you how to use them properly.
How to use
Considering current problems related to banner ads, you may come to the conclusion that it’s almost impossible to profit from using them. But there are key conditions which are to be observed in order to make your banner ads work:
Define a list of web sites relevant for your audience . If you think that having an ad everywhere can improve your situation, you’re highly mistaken.
Spend more time on making your ads creative. Creativity still attracts attention, as it can be beautiful, entertaining, smart, and eye-catching.
Make some tests before submitting your banner ad . If it does not work properly or 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 web site 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 is.
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 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 web site, either already existing or newly created ones. The main purpose of landing pages is to incline users to buy your goods. Thus, it’s up to you which place on your Magento 2 store will be a landing page.
Where to buy
Basically, you will 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, go and contact 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 web site 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 web sites to publish your banner ads on. Thus, they can save you time performing all the work instead of you. As for the bad 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 attempt to get more traffic to your web site. With the help of this program you can manage your ads and choose the most appealing web sites 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; therefore, users can go directly to a product page they get interested in.
How it functions
Keyword is a basic element of the AdWords toolkit that allows you to place your web site 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 web sites sharing Google-owned properties (like YouTube) as well as Google’s partner sites (like NYTimes.com or Families.com ). The place on the web site 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 web site or among search results. It also determines whether your ad will be displayed at all. You should remember, though, that the main factors defining an 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 will be 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/web site quality, their value varies depending on the kind of ads you use as well as the kind of web site 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 (which is calculated according to the expected number of potential clicks), ad relevance and landing page availability. Ad auction determines the maximum cost-per-click bid which is required to keep your ad at a given position.
How to fit into budget
One of the main drawbacks of AdWords lies in its competitiveness , i.e., 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 web site. Thus, a steady-developing retailer has to be able to invest at least $2,000-5,000 a month in an ordinary AdWords campaign. Nonetheless, buying web site traffic consists of more than clicks. The better retailer 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 ready to spend for 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 web site experiences the best-selling hours.
Is your quality score high enough to be worth risking? If you’re not sure about the relevance of your keywords and the quality of your ad and landing page, it’s better to invest in 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 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 will definitely be worth it.
How to launch an AdWords campaign
Below, we will shed light on launching an ordinary AdWords campaign for your Magento 2 web site. Let’s start with some basic aspects, such as your AdWords account.
Create an account in AdWords
First, visit AdWords’ main page4 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 e-mail address as well as a relatively strong password. Then solve a captcha and create an account.
Select your country, timezone, and 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 e-mail address.
Choose your ad campaign
Each campaign can be run on the same or various AdWords settings. It’s up to your tastes and 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 in order to be able to find a particular campaign afterwards.
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 web sites. The first option implies that your ads will be shown on Google-related web sites including YouTube and AOL, and the second option enables your ads to be shown on other web sites having 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 ad’s 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 web site, 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 the program of your campaign or times ads appear each day.
Create a new campaign .
Click on “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 on “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 a 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, 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 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 on “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 of keywords is 10-20.
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 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 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 landing page leading towards a product page on your web site. 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
Click on “Campaigns” and then “Campaign > Shopping”
You will be forwarded to the “Campaign Settings” page. Type the name of your campaign in the first place.
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 in case of several shopping campaigns promoting the same product.
“Inventory filter” will allow 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 2 web site. This includes the number of ad clicks, product page views, app downloads, order check-outs, etc. Conversion tracking also features all the necessary tools for maximizing profit from you 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 1x1 pixel image placed on one or several web site 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 web site including:
ad clicks from affiliate web sites;
checkout button clicks on a checkout confirmation page;
clicks on referral URLs leading from your store, which allows you to track visitors even when they leave your page.
Despite the fact that Magento 2 does not support AdWords conversion tracking out-of-the-box, there are a lot of third-party possibilities for effective integration. For instance, here5 you can find a handy module written in JavaScript. Its primary role is tracking conversions from a checkout/success page of Magento 2 stores.
Here is a list of other useful guides and articles that would help you boost your AdWords experience:
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 web sites. However, it may often be not that efficient and even harmful for your business, especially if you’re a new entrepreneur. The problem is that you cannot realize the consequences until you invest in an 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 will 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 e-commerce newcomer, you won’t be really knowledgeable in all the specifics of AdWords, so you will 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 don’t know any end results.
Vague bidding system . AdWords has a quite intricate system of money distribution. Although you can control the amount of bids you submit for you campaign and even invest as little or much as you can, 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, since they have a tight 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 UK, the US, Canada and Australia.
Featured Listings. The program includes Traffic Program combined with simple sidebar ads implemented in search engine result lists and directories. 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 which helps new entrepreneurs with addressing themselves to certain demographics and audiences within a billion-member social community. The principal aim here is to create a separate Facebook profile which will represent your web site inside the social media environment. From there, you can try various advertising schemes to gain the maximum web site viewing results. The main advantage of Facebook Paid Ads is its simplicity and high efficiency.
Clicksor
Clicksor is another alternative to AdWords with targeting certain market segments. It has extremely cheap bidding offers; therefore, you can start investing from just five cents a month. Clicksor relies on time, contextual, and geo targeting to achieve the best advertising results.
Yahoo! Bing
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 will get an opportunity to access the service’s ad partnership which includes such giants as Amazon and Facebook. Bing is very popular in the US, so you may already know what audience to target there. Moreover, bidding prices are significantly lower on Bing compared to AdWords.
Yahoo! Gemini Ads
This is an additional advertising tool from the Yahoo! search engine with the help of which you will effectively encourage people to visit your web site; but 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 that popular as the ones described above, however, it is nonetheless effective. It has recently reached a milestone of selling over six billion ads a month; consequently, there are no reasons to omit it. First of all, 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 case of an unexpected money shortage.
BlogAds
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 web sites 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 here literally everything you want and still get nice rates of visits. 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 converting 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 enlarge the amount of your sales. That’s why you should always be sociable and head towards 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 e-commerce retail promotion . With millions of people surfing social network web sites, the traffic source is worth investing. 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 will 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, etc.
Choose a 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 a 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 pay attention to 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 core requirements for every e-commerce store. At the same time, you can incorporate social media experience into every aspect of your Magento 2 web site, 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 e-mail 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 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 and videos related to your activity, downloadable e-books, etc.
Think of target ads . Using target ads helps you get to a specific social media audience and, as a result, increase web site traffic.
Utilize specific social media for specific purposes . For example, business-to-business e-commerce advertising will be more reasonable on LinkedIn; at the same time women-related products can attract Pinterest users. Thus, you should figure out a demographic majority of a social network 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?
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 CTAs12.
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 mobile versions 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 a combination with ROI - driven advertising.
New platforms
Don’t limit your SMM campaign to Facebook and Twitter only.
Explore your traffic in order to understand where your audience hangs out.
Learn preferences and tastes of your target audience.
Don’t try to conquer all social networking services.
Find new social ad channels.
Allocate 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 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 products 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:
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 “Facebook Terms and Conditions” and click “Get Started.”
Furthermore, you 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 which might be basically a logo of your company, and add this page to your personal page’s Favorites (to get immediate access to it).
Of course, there are several helpful features aimed at increasing the performance of your Magento 2 web site on Facebook. The most reliable ones are described below.
Custom Audiences is a handy tool that allows you to monitor those users who come to your web site from Facebook. Moreover, you can even identify which pages they have seen. It is possible due to the aforementioned conversion tracking pixel. With the help of the data gathered by this pixel, you get a better understanding of your customers and their preferences.
Lookalike Audiences is 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 2 web site 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, we recommend you look at this profound video-lesson13 devoted to effective online advertising.
The Best Facebook modules for Magento 2
Facebook covers a vast variety of demographic groups, which 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 2 store directly to the social network’s features and functions, choosing specialized Facebook modules for Magento 2. Since there are lots of various extensions available for Magento 2, below you will find only those that are really worth being used.
Facebook Store Application14
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 your web site 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 allowing you to monitor visitors coming from Facebook to your web site, a 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, as well as accept transactions in all currencies. The extension is free and adjustable for sharing content across various social platforms.
Since this social media network is in second place by the amount of users after Facebook, 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 web site, the upcoming items of your company, and marketing events 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 of 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 for the most successful merchants due to high cost. They are placed in the Trends widget in order to make users notice and discuss them in their feeds. Moreover, users often click on hashtags to find all related tweets and discussions.
Liking product-related tweets is a pretty smart promotion scheme that allows attracting 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 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 2
Of course, managing your Twitter profile apart from the web site will not work unless you link it to your store page. Check one of the first Magento 2 Twitter extensions here.15
Despite Instagram being considered 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 the 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’Oreal Paris have efficiently used this feature for their campaigns.
Specific amount of hashtags adoption. According to recent stats, e-commerce merchants prefer using more hashtags than any other businesses which 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 2
If you intend to make Instagram your primary social media traffic source, you will simplify your goal with specialized Magento 2 extensions developed for the best practices in interaction with Instagram users. We will update this section of the book right after the first Twitter extensions for Magento 2 is published.
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 the chance to get new customers here, so don’t give up on this network.
So what should you do in order to drive more traffic to your Magento 2 web site?
Create multiple company boards. Each board can be devoted to a specific type of your product. 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 web site 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 a 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 effective hashtags, since there is only one you’re allowed to have on Pinterest.
Pinterest extensions for Magento 2
Here16, you can find all Magento extensions for integration with Pinterest. As for Magento 2 modules, they are not yet available.
Best blogging platforms worth using
If you haven’t adapted a blog for your online store yet, check the following list of the most powerful blogging platforms. All the solutions mentioned below will provide you with a full set of features allowing you to maximize customer responsiveness and bring more traffic to your Magento 2 store.
WordPress17
WordPress is considered to be the best blogging platform which perfectly suits the needs of e-commerce 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 access to advanced plugins and additional blog themes .
Movable Type18
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, etc. 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.
Squarespace19
The platform offers a unique blogging solution for e-commerce 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 the Squarespace platform.
Typepad20
Typepad combines easy-to-use functionality and a set of useful analytics tools which 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.
Tumblr21
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 Tumblr’s potential for embodying your creative ideas.
Pen.io22
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 of the web site’s 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 on learning how to apply any particular feature.
Weebly23
Weebly platform is famous for its multi-purpose functionality, allowing you to create a blog, an online store, or a separate web site. 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 .
Anchor24
It is a useful open-source platform which offers an opportunity to build up 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.
Best Magento 2 modules for blogging
Despite the fact that blogging platforms significantly improve the performance of e-commerce 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 e-commerce developers are concerned with integrating blogging features into retail web sites. Magento 2 platform also has a wide range of free blogging solutions which you can use along with your web site.
Blog for Magento 2 by aheadWorks25
Since aheadWorks is one of the best and most well-known companies on the Magento market, its extensions are always reliable, user-friendly, and useful. And Blog for Magento 2 is not an exception.
This Magento 2 extension includes all the features dictated by the best industry practices, because it was designed with the ability to create and manage the most engaging content in mind.
When exploring this Magento 2 blogging extension for the first time, pay attention to its feature-rich content editor, which incorporates all the essential writing/design features and tools. A slightly deeper exploration will lead you to the understanding of SEO-friendliness available with Blog for Magento 2 by aheadWorks. All the best practices are implemented within the module. You can easily get SEO-friendly URLs, an XML sitemap, and metadata by using the extension.
Content navigation of this Magento 2 Blog is a separate topic, since it provides one of the most convenient ways of traveling through various categories, tags, and sidebar blocks. If you are wondering, how good are the comment management features of this Magento 2 extension, we can say without any doubt that they are excellent due to the DISQUS integration. Additionally, the extension offers instant live support and clear documentation.
Blog Extension for Magento 2 by MageFan26
MageFan also offers a tool which can help you create a professional blog on Magento 2, where your awesome posts will look even better. The extension supports multiple languages, so you can write your posts on any one available on your Magento 2 web site. And with the aid of a convenient search system, your visitors will easily find the materials they are looking for.
To increase views and sales, you can use relinks to your products and other posts as well as add widgets with recent posts or monthly archives. Additionally, there is the possibility to move your posts and even whole categories from WordPress.
Blog Extension for Magento 2 by MageFun is SEO-friendly, since it uses optimized permalinks. As for sitemap XML and RSS Feed, they are also available with the module.
Blog by MageArray27
Nobody will deny that blogging is among the best marketing tactics nowadays. That’s why running a blog on a Magento 2 web site is among top steps of every pre-launch checklist. And with the Blog Extension by MageArray , you can easily implement all the powerful blogging features on your e-commerce shop. Promote newly launched products, inform your buyers about upcoming items, or just tell interesting stories about your business—the extension offers such opportunities.
With user-friendly category management, you can not only make the navigation on the blog easier, but set metadata per category, improving your SEO. Other SEO features include friendly URLs, meta titles, keywords, and descriptions per post, category, or author, as well as auto generation of Breadcrumb. Additionally, the Blog Extension by MageArray provides the ability to tag posts, so your users can find the desired information with minimum effort.
As for comment management, your clients get the ability to share their thoughts by leaving comments. As a store administrator, you can approve these comments manually or use the auto-approval feature. All spammers will be stopped because of the captcha feature. It is also worth mentioning that MageArray Blog for Magento 2 lets your readers share your post on social media, providing you with new visitors and potential customers.
Blog Pro by Magenest28
If you still cannot imagine your Magento 2 web site without a blog, but the aforementioned Magento 2 extensions do not look like the solution of your choice, pay attention to Magenest Blog Pro. It’s a powerful and completely open-source Magento 2 extension. Get a great opportunity to communicate with your customers and promote your goods among all visitors of your web site for free.
Note that the Blog Pro extension is integrated into social media services. Hence, readers can easily share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or wherever else without any additional tools. As for navigation, the extension supports categories, so customers will never get lost among your articles, how-tos, and reviews.
In case you would like to find out more about how to integrate your e-commerce project into an online social environment, don’t hesitate to read this profound social guide29 from our team .
Real Time Social Experience with Periscope and Meerkat
Periscope30 and Meerkat31 are two new social services designed for real-time streaming. Both solutions can be utilized within any e-commerce business. Below, you will find their features, core differences, and e-commerce opportunities.
Both Periscope and Meerkat produce live streams, which is their core common feature. Another aspect is integration with Twitter, but in the case of Periscope links-sharing is optional, while Meerkat tweets all content automatically. Thus, Periscope users can easily control their audience of viewers.
Another difference consists of the availability of recorded content after the end of your stream. Periscope keeps videos 24 hours, while Meerkat doesn’t provide any storing capabilities, which leads to a broken user experience. In addition, Periscope provides more tight integration with Twitter: you get access to your followers right 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 lead position. But what about e-commerce opportunities?
Since videos have always helped in becoming 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 e-commerce business even more attractive. Thus, by providing live lessons related to products you sell, sharing some interesting facts, or offering any other engaging content, you will utilize the e-commerce 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 e-commerce web site, they’re live on the air with you.
Introduce your e-commerce business with the help of Q and 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 web site because there is a better solution. You can gain their confidence with the help of Q and A sessions. You just need a Periscope or Meerkat live stream. Don’t be afraid to show yourself to your customers: by being relatable you will push your e-commerce 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 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 the whole audience of your buyers.
Get real time feedback.
Ask buyers to leave feedback to your goods and services in real time. You can call them or even invite to broadcasting events. If someone famous is using your products, ask this person to take part in the streaming.
Turn all your offline events into online ones.
With the help of both Periscope and Meerkat, you can easily turn all 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:
First of all we recommend you think about personalization: greet your viewer by nicknames or names; stay 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 web site. 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.
Being in a landscape mode, Periscope still displays messages from your customers in a portrait mode, making a stream inconvenient for viewers. That’s why you should use it in a portrait mode only.
Both Meerkat and Periscope are tightly connected to Twitter. You should always remember this nuance while 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 web site 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 web site. 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, and 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 just for the most popular users with a great amount of followers. It’s more likely that you will tap into a community that has nothing to do with your web site at all.
To make your search even more productive, use a handy web site 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 their Instagram page. Probably, they have their own web sites and blogs. Meanwhile, Instagram plays the role of an additional promoting source. Having found several potential candidates, don’t forget to look at their bio or contact page. Web site links and e-mail addresses are the main indicators of the fact they don’t mind cooperating with e-commerce 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 e-mails (if possible).
The final thing is to write to the chosen Instagram account holders to attract their attention to your web site and its products. You basically have to write a letter, which must be as neutral and loyal as possible, saying that you’re a fan of a person and his or her posts, and you’ve just launched your own web site dedicated to the things you’re selling. Further, you should kindly ask a 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 web site page .
Look for popular YouTube vloggers, bloggers, and press .
Like Instagram, YouTube is full of popular users, and, what is more important, they don’t mind promoting stuff which is not only a part of their target subject but 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 web site by typing keywords that describe your business interest. The same traffic-gaining strategy is applied for bloggers, but can be realized through the Google main page. It’s worth noting that targeting bloggers with less followers is often more profitable than targeting those with thousands of them since a small audience is usually more loyal to its blogger, his content and advertising than a big one.
As for the press, you might have paid 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 right through a corresponding thread called subreddit. There are thousands of subreddits devoted to every possible subject, so you’re likely to find what fits you the best. But the thread which must be of the utmost importance to you is always in “/r/entrepreneur” subreddit. There you will find a lot of useful discussions concerning business and ways to improve it. “/r/smallbusiness” is another option for new entrepreneurs.
If you managed to find a subreddit dedicated to your web site 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. That 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, what’s more 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 after all, but you shouldn’t lose the opportunity of making a few customers out of the people you know. You can even make a 50% discount for them: allowing your friends and family to behave as special customers can make them become loyal buyers, after all .
Extend your web site to Twitter * It’s also a good idea to create a separate Twitter profile for your web site, but it’s certainly not enough for getting more traffic to your web site. * The initial strategy in this case is the same: use appropriate keywords and find people posting tweets about content related to your web site. * The next step is to follow those people, as they might become interested in what you’re doing. * Take part in your product-related events such as fairs or presentations; make sure 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 a good job for your web site.
Amazon Product Advertising
There is nothing more reasonable than advertising on Amazon since this is the biggest and the most popular e-commerce 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 web site 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 attracting more customers. How to start using it?
Create Amazon Product Ads account here32. If you already have one account, simply sign in on the same page.
Then you can go to the “Settings” bar and select “User Permissions.” Here, you will get a pretty long list of product, advertising, report, and additional settings which 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 on the corresponding category in the “Advertising” bar. The daily budget setting page is rather straightforward, which means that you can set only one price for all 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 on “Download Template.” You will 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 above.
After you have uploaded your product feed, wait while it is processed. You should also check 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 alternative solutions.
Keep in mind that every SMM campaign is unique. Try to figure out all the particular proprieties of your e-commerce 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 core principles of a successful campaign will always be the same.