In our Skai 5 series, we discuss digital advertising tips, tricks, and trends to keep you one step ahead of consumers, market trends and your competition. For this portion of the series, we highlight five tips for buying ecommerce advertising software.
There’s no getting around it — shopping for new ecommerce ad software can be overwhelming.
With thousands of products on the market, it can be easy to get sidetracked by bells and whistles and forget exactly which tools your team had decided you needed in the first place.
5 Tips for Buying Ecommerce Ad Software
Here’s a helpful guide to buying ecommerce ad software that fits your unique needs.
1. Know What You’re Getting
Buying ecommerce ad software is a little like buying a car: the sales team expects customers to want to take a test drive. Or, in the case of ecommerce ad software, multiple test drives.
So when you’re shopping for new ecommerce ad solutions, make sure you’re working with the sales team to understand exactly what you’re getting, and, alternatively, that the sales team knows exactly what you want. Adopting new ecommerce ad software is time-consuming and costly but becomes even more so if you adopt the wrong solution and have to start the search all over again. So be upfront, tell the sales team exactly what you need, and out as many demos as you need to make the choice that is right for your business.
2. Look beyond the sales team
While a great sales pitch, and multiple demos, can help the customer see how an ecommerce ad software solution will work for their business, customer support has to go beyond the sales team.
A major factor in making sure an ecommerce ad software is right for you is making sure your team is able to correctly use costly ad solutions. And learning to implement new software doesn’t happen in a vacuum. During the sales process, be sure to ask about how customer support, training, and customer success factors into the software purchase.
Find out who your team will call if they have problems integrating the ecommerce ad software.
The ecommerce ad software space is crowded. In fact, at last count, there were around 8,000 tools to choose from. And along with those 8,000 tools, there are countless sales people all saying that their solution is the one that can do it all.
The truth is, most businesses need multiple tools to remain competitive in today’s ecommerce advertising landscape. So much so that the typical enterprise company reportedly uses around 1,295 cloud services on average.
But with so many options comes the paradox of choice. After a while, all those options become anxiety inducing since every choice starts to sound the same – A “powerful” tool that can solve all your ecommerce needs. However, there is such a thing as too much power. Even if a product promises to do it all, your business probably has specific ecommerce needs, and your team needs to be able to use the product that you’re buying.
Make a list of the top few things you need a tool to do and take stock of exactly what your team wants in terms of usability. The best product in the world won’t be all that effective if no one can use it.
4. Factor In Optimization
One of the biggest differences between online and offline advertising is the fact that digital marketers have the advantage of optimizing mid-campaign to improve performance. But getting great at optimization first means that you will need great tools for reporting and analysis to see the ways that campaigns can best be optimized.
Any ecommerce ad software you adopt should provide real-time campaign insights and features that help you best understand how to quickly optimize those insights in order to get the most mileage out of your digital marketing campaigns. After all, laying a foundation of consistent, up-to-the minute insights is likely why you’re interested in ecommerce ad software in the first place.
Make sure those insights are easily understandable and provide you the tools you need to course correct campaigns.
5. Dive In!
It’s likely that a new ecommerce ad software is going to come with a lot of features. And as tempting as it can be to spend weeks or even months making sure your team understands every aspect of the new software before getting started, the best way to integrate a product into your digital marketing strategy is to learn by doing.
Begin with the basics: build a campaign with the new tools and get it ready to go live. From there, get your customer support team involved! Have them look at the campaign before it launches just to make sure everything is a go. And once the campaign is live, test out some of those more advanced new features in order to see how they work in action.
By crawling before you walk, you’ll be ready to run with your new ecommerce advertising software in no time.
Skai’s Retail Media Solution
As part of Skai’s intelligent marketing platform, our Retail Media solution empowers brands to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. Built with best-in-class automation and optimization capabilities, our unified platform allows you to manage campaigns on 30+ retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart all in one place.
Client results include:
- 461% increase in Amazon Ads ROAS and 57% increase in page traffic for Bondi Sands
- 92% increase in share of voice on Amazon for a Fortune 500 CPG brand
- 72% increase in revenue for VTech
- 1,390% year-over-year sales growth for Kamado Joe
For more information or to schedule a brief demo, reach out today!
