Platforms for e-commerce ads

E-commerce ads are necessary, whether you’re helping to launch a new e-commerce store or working for a thriving e-commerce business, one of the best ways to acquire new customers is through e-commerce advertising. E-commerce advertising is any form of online or offline advertising that raises awareness of and drives traffic to an e-commerce business. E-commerce advertising—along with other digital marketing tactics—can help support any e-commerce marketing strategy. In this reading, we’ll discuss some top online platforms through which to advertise your e-commerce products or services. 

Google Ads  

If you’ve taken previous courses in this program, you’ve learned how Google Ads can support a business’s digital marketing strategy. Google Ads is an ideal tool for e-commerce businesses that want to boost brand awareness or acquire new customers. Google Ads enables you to show Search ads on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) and place display ads on websites via the Google Display Network. As the world’s biggest search engine, Google’s Search and Display ads have tremendous reach potential. 

Google Shopping ads

Google Shopping ads are image-based product ads that show a photo of a product, its title and price, the store name, and any reviews. These ads allow e-commerce businesses to display their products every time a relevant search is made, enabling them to expand their products’ visibility to a wider audience. When a user clicks on an ad, they are taken to the product page in the e-commerce store. Since many people use Google to search for products, Google Shopping ads can help drive traffic and conversions. You will learn more about Google Shopping campaigns in an upcoming lesson.

Google Discovery campaigns

Google Discovery campaigns deliver highly-visual, personalized ads that can be displayed on the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, the Discover app, and the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs. Discovery campaigns are designed to reach users who are most likely to be interested in a product or service, as determined by Google’s algorithms. Discovery campaigns can help you drive engagement and conversions because they show relevant, meaningful ads to people when they are most receptive to learning more about a business’s products and services.

YouTube Ads

With more than a billion hours of video viewed daily, YouTube Ads can reach a wide and diverse audience. On YouTube, e-commerce businesses can set up video ads and campaigns that align with their marketing goals and post them on their channel. This can provide these businesses with the opportunity to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their online store. YouTube Ads are especially effective for sharing educational or informational content, such as product demonstrations, product reviews, or explainer videos.

Amazon Ads

Amazon Ads can help e-commerce businesses connect with potential buyers on a platform specifically designed for shopping. With Amazon Ads, advertisers bid on keywords and placements to show their products higher in search results. This can help businesses get their products in front of a wider audience. Amazon offers a variety of advertising options, including sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored display ads, video ads, and audio ads. 

Facebook and Instagram Ads

Facebook and Instagram, both owned by the parent company Meta, are incredibly popular social media platforms visited by hundreds of millions of potential customers daily. Ads Manager is an all-in-one tool for creating ads, managing them, and tracking their performance on these platforms. 

Facebook Ads

Facebook has the most users of any social media platform, with billions of active accounts. Popular among a wide variety of demographic groups, Facebook Ads can help reach a target audience. Facebook offers a variety of ad formats that may benefit e-commerce businesses. Collection ads, for example, provide videos or images of products from a business’s catalog and allow people to move seamlessly from the discovery of a product to a purchase. Facebook Ads also allows businesses to target customers by location, occupation, interests, past activity, and more.

Instagram ads

On Instagram, e-commerce businesses can create ads in a variety of highly-visual formats—from image-based ads to video reels to stories—to promote their products and connect with their target audience. Instagram ads can be directly linked to a product page or another landing page, giving users a quick and easy way to engage with products. 

Pinterest Ads

Like Instagram, Pinterest is a highly-visual platform. With Pinterest ads, brands can advertise their products through promoted ads appearing as pins in the organic search results. 

TikTok For Business

TikTok For Business offers e-commerce businesses an opportunity to promote their products to a young, highly-engaged audience. Influencer marketing is a key component of advertising on TikTok, and TikTok’s Creator Marketplace helps brands find influencers to partner with. 

Twitter advertising

Twitter is a social media platform primarily used for breaking news and engaging with influencers and celebrities. Twitter advertising offers two options: Quick Promote, which automatically promotes Tweets an advertiser chooses to their target audience, and Twitter Ads. Twitter Ads campaigns are objective-based, meaning they are optimized towards the objective the advertiser selects, and they are only billed for actions aligned with that goal.