Joshua Dreller
Sr. Director, Content Marketing @ Skai
Now the third-largest digital marketing channel in the U.S., commerce advertising has evolved to become an incredibly valuable, performance-driven tactic.
Why has it grown so quickly?
It offers marketers five powerful features found in best-in-class advertising.
To put this into perspective, historically, advertising channels with just one of these five characteristics are generally considered highly valuable—and commerce advertising offers all five.
The Skai 5: Five Powerful Features of Commerce Advertising
Powerful Feature #1 – Valuable, in-market audiences
You can’t get further down the funnel!
While the goal of many other channels—such as search engine marketing, social advertising, or email—is to transport internet users away from their current experience and to an online marketplace to purchase, this channel reaches shoppers while they are already browsing in a store and ready to buy.
Powerful Feature #2 – Single view of the customer
Online shoppers are logged in across devices.
In the new era of crumbling cookies and consumer data privacy which severely limits marketer tracking, online marketplaces are able to track all devices/browsers back to the same logged-in user. Offering a single view of a customer journey is a prerequisite for best-in-class targeting, measurement, personalization, and optimization.
Powerful Feature #3 – Targeting by browse/purchase history
Previous purchases are one of the strongest predictive signals of future purchases.
Marketers invest billions every year into audience segmentation based on signals much less valuable than purchase data, i.e. demographics, psychographics, etc. While segments based on purchase history are a premium and expensive form of audience ad targeting, retailers can offer this targeting as part of their standard commerce advertising solution.
Powerful Feature #4 – Highly relevant ads
Reach online shoppers based on the keywords they search while in the store.
The future of commerce advertising is primarily search ads triggered by shoppers or highly-targeted display ads. These types of ads have proven to be highly effective ROI drivers for brands over the last two decades of online advertising because they deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
Powerful Feature #5 – Programmatic
Highly efficient and extremely optimizable.
Akin to high-volume stock trading, commerce advertising is technology-driven and purchased intelligently one impression at a time. These ads enable massive scale with incredible precision and efficiency; a few skilled marketers with the right platform can buy billions of ad impressions with minimal effort.
Are you “all in” on commerce advertising?
If you are marketer already selling products on Amazon or Walmart, how strong is your commerce advertising program? Are you still dipping your toes in the water or are you all in?
Whatever level of commerce advertising program you are running now, chances are you will be investing more in this channel very soon.
Leading brands and agencies leverage Skai Ecommerce’s advanced optimization, analytics & automation solutions to get started quickly, navigate new ad formats, and drive growth.
Contact us today to schedule a brief demo to see how we can help.
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