Owning an ecommerce store has a lot of perks: It’s a self-run business available to anyone, it helps leverage an already existing online presence, it requires minimal overhead compared to traditional retail shops, and a good store has limitless revenue potential. Ecommerce stores epitomize the American Dream.
There is, however, some significant drawbacks to running an ecommerce hub; mainly having to compete with gargantuan marketplaces like Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay. In fact, many pieces have been published which discuss the fact that Amazon is crushing small businesses.
Despite this, entrepreneurs and business owners set up their digital shops in hopes of making it big; but most just end up wondering where all their traffic is.
No matter if you are trying to acquire your first customer or reach $1 million in revenue for the year, all businesses need to increase their traffic in order to see continued growth.
How to Drive Traffic to Your Online Store
If you are looking for ways to drive more users to your web and product pages, these are tried and tested strategies that will make an impact on your traffic and bottom line.
#1: Diversify Your PPC Efforts
PPC is still one of the most effective ways to immediately generate website traffic. Whenever and wherever your budget permits, employing technological tools and services that lighten your managerial load is always a great call.
For driving traffic to your webstore, StoreYa has created a helpful solution: Traffic Booster.
Traffic Booster is a powerful and affordable service that allows business owners to hand off the complex task of PPC ad creation and management to trained professionals. It’s backed by a sophisticated algorithm specifically created for driving targeted traffic for ecommerce companies.
Business owners just need to fill out a short form with their business information like website domain, demographics, and similar fields; it only takes about 30 seconds in total. From there, the Traffic Booster team analyzes the information to establish your target audience, effective strategies and keywords, and the most prosperous channels to use so as to drive the most relevant traffic at the lowest price across Google, Bing, Facebook, and other popular advertising destinations.
If you do decide to do things “the old-fashioned way” of running your own ads, the key to epically successful PPC campaigns always lies in the creative elements. Visual components are just as essential as the language you choose.
Tools like Canva can help you appear polished and professional, even if you’re a design amateur. Canva has a plethora of templates and customizations to help you create stunning and effective graphics, and it will also format these to meet the specific criteria of platforms like Facebook Ads. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer with PPC, Canva is a godsend.
#2: Making the Most of Your Campaigns
Generally speaking, businesses generate $3 for every $1.60 spent on Google AdWords. So if you’re seeking immediate traffic, this is still a very effective channel.
From an ecommerce perspective, when advertising with Google, one of the best options is Product Listing Ads. While these have been around for quite some time, they are still immensely powerful.
In Q1 of 2016, Product Listing Ads accounted for 43% of all retailer’s ad clicks on Google and 70% of non-brand clicks.
If you would rather go the route of social media, Facebook and Instagram both provide a myriad of targeting options and dynamic experiences that can help you reach the right crowd.
With these platforms, promoters can target ads based on age, location, interests, behaviors, and other defining characteristics. Additionally, Facebook Dynamic Ads help businesses by serving up automatically-generated ads to users who have already visited your site.
Outside of these two social juggernauts, Pinterest is a prime location for ecommerce adverts as 93% of users have leveraged the platform for planning out purchases and 52% of pinners have bought something they saw on the website.
That said, mastering each of these ad platforms is challenging (that’s putting it mildly). Many small business owners find that the ever-increasing prices for clicks is beginning to squeeze them out of the market. For example, the phrase “free online auto insurance quote” can cost advertisers $75 – $344 per click, depending on where they are.
Whether or not you gain a sale, you’re going to be paying for those clicks.
Considering that sites like Amazon are bidding top-dollar for the most relevant keywords, it’s likely to be impossible to edge them out.
Moreover, if advertisers end up making an all-too-human mistake of misspelling a keyword, neglecting a landing page while managing an ad campaign, or committing any number of simple errors, Google will downright penalize you.
Not to mention that if you ever forget to turn your campaign off, it could cost you thousands.
If this all sounds too complicated for your taste, fear not, for there is other options.
#3: Offer Your Audience Premium Content
Content is the ultimate driver of web traffic. Considering that ecommerce is not only about selling products, but providing consumers with helpful assistance, a blog is the perfect solution.
Your target audience has a variety of problems and pain points that they need solving. In the ecommerce space, this is about finding the perfect product within a certain category, new techniques for using merchandise that will optimize their experience, and other how-to information.
Producing a blog that offers consumers honest product reviews, tutorials, and other informative advice in related topics is a stellar avenue for driving traffic to your site; just be sure to include the product’s URL in the post, optimize it for SEO purposes, and share it across your social media accounts.
#4: Let Influencers Do the Heavy Lifting
Influencer marketing has effectively allowed advertisers to gain access to sizeable, highly-targeted audiences to promote their products or services with credence.
By leveraging the creativity, trust, and reach of various social media influencers, your webstore can be put in front of thousands of new customers who will very likely visit your digital shop.
As it stands, influencer marketing generates, on average, $6.50 in earned media value for every $1.00 of paid media. Plus, an influencer’s recommendation is trusted as much as that of a real-life friend.
Leveraging platforms like Famebit, HYPR, and the myriad of others out there has made entering the influencer arena easier than ever.
Driving traffic to your site doesn’t have to be a maddening endeavor. The key to success lies not in the number of tactics you employ, but the depth and expertise with which you execute. Play to your strengths and become a master of two or three strategies, devote yourself to the long haul, and you will see positive results.
Traffic Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “Proven Ways to Increase Targeted Traffic to Your Ecommerce Store” was first published on Small Business Trends