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More and more e-commerce companies and online shops are using digital marketing agencies to advertise their products online – not just on one, but on several marketplaces. Whether it’s your first time adding ecommerce clients to the agency portfolio or working with those clients, you need to break the noise of advertising on marketplaces.

Successful e-commerce advertising campaigns require high quality PPC ads, banner ads, text ads (advanced and simple), and keywords. However, there is one thing to keep in mind when creating, modifying, and tweaking these campaigns: the way they are run. Since you need to promote many products in multiple marketplaces, a manual approach can be complicated and time-consuming. This is where automation comes in. You therefore need the right digital marketing technology to provide automation and analytics, and to provide intelligent segmentation and hyper-personalization capabilities to ensure the growth and success of your ecommerce customers.

What technologies can you use to run large-scale e-commerce campaigns quickly, optimize them if necessary, and get the data you need to be successful? This article introduces some new tools to add to your arsenal.

Why automation is key with ecommerce clients

E-commerce customers often have large inventories of products. Imagine manually editing every ad for every single product – that sounds crippling. Additionally, a manual approach can lower your ROI on ad spend, deliver disappointing click-through rates, and you don’t have the data to optimize your campaign for response rates. All in all, you will be wasting time.

What technologies can you use to create high-volume advertising campaigns (PPC, banners, and text) for individual products that provide the analysis you need to ensure that your advertising campaigns are performing well? There are two technologies to consider for your ecommerce customers: product feed management, and text and shopping ad tools.

Product Feed Management – The New Marketing Automation Tool

Product feeds are XML, CSV, or data files that provide an overview of the products or items that you want to advertise online. This includes product properties such as title, color, size, EAN / GTIN number and more. With online stores based on e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce, it is easy to extract this data file.

Figure 1: Channelable dashboard

If you place advertisements through third parties such as price comparison websites, marketplaces or affiliate networks, they need product information in a certain format. If you export your product catalog to different channels for different purposes, you will need to create your product feed in custom formats. Market intelligence requirements for products can be easily overwhelming and difficult to manage. Especially when you advertise on several marketplaces at the same time. This is where product feed management tools make it easier.

Product feed management tools allow you to upload the original data file and optimize it in a format required for each marketplace. Changing the product information each time to reach the market is easier because there is no need to touch the original source. It’s easy to add data to your feed, enrich product information, and filter content based on the “rules” of technology.

Role of text and shopping advertising tools

To take your text and shopping ads to the next level, text and shopping ads tools can automatically generate thousands of campaigns, ad groups, ads (e.g., PPC, banners, text) and keywords based on your product data feed. What’s really handy is that you can set up Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising campaigns for products in seconds. This works through your product feed. You can use the feed to generate templates / structures for search, advertisement and shopping campaigns. These can be updated automatically based on your constantly changing product feed. With a built-in ad copy generator, you can even create hyper-relevant ads and manage a large inventory. Text and shopping ad tools can combine static and dynamic data from the product feed, increasing the relevance of your ad and reducing your ad spend.

You can also use the product feed data to quickly generate long-tail keywords for all of your ads. This eliminates almost any manual work. By connecting your data feed to your text add generator, you can use the rules to take complete control of your ads and get real-time updates for all of your ads including sales price, inventory info or shipping costs, etc.

Why should you add these tools to your arsenal?

Here are some advantages:

• With everything centralized, digital marketers can optimize, enrich and maintain product data themselves for a variety of marketplaces and products
• The feed management is open so it is compatible and flexible with any online strategy. You can create an export feed for various price comparison websites, partners or marketplaces while defining your channel portfolio
• You are in control. Product feed management is a form of marketing automation that agencies can use to monitor data and adjust the screws if necessary. There is little risk of error messages and poor quality exports, and you don’t have to tap an IT department to handle them
• Product feed management is agile. Data optimization is only one piece of the puzzle for a successful online marketing experience. All-in-one product feed management platforms offer additional features like PPC automation, order synchronization with marketplaces, and even the ability to integrate Google Analytics to manage and evaluate the online performance of your ads

Automation and e-commerce go hand in hand. Large inventories and increasing amounts of data therefore require product feed management and advertising tools so that agencies are one step ahead of the ever-changing product catalogs and sales channels. These tools can help you increase your click-through rate and return your marketing spend while reducing your cost-per-action. All in all, these tools help save time and money and create satisfied customers.

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