Marketplace Advertizement Monetization

Empower Your Vendors, Improve End-User Experiences, Increase Top-Line Revenue
Promoting Vendors & Products With Ads

Marketplace Ads & Banners

The next topic in our marketplace resources guide is going to go into detail around marketplace ads and banners. Specifically, what we're referring to here is the capability of a marketplace to encourage positive behavior within the site for the buyers and potentially for the sellers as well.

Based on the content that they have been searching throughout the marketplace you can present relevant products in the form of ads and banners. These can be ads are custom built or they can be dynamic within the application. They can be paid ads and banner advertising that folks are bidding on. The resulting ads being shown are based on different algorithms that can take into account click through rates, quality of the ad, and experience for the user. They can also consider behavior as a reward for top sellers or highest quality vendors. They could reward highly performing vendors with free or discounted advertising and promotions.

Leveraging External Advertisement Resources

Utilizing AdWords, AdRoll, & Bing Advertising

It's also possible to bring in external ads from external resources like AdRoll, Google AdWords, or Bing Advertising to name a few. These different publishing engines offer ads for some of the folks that want to advertise in this particular marketplace that might not be a vendor or seller. So, it's possible to incorporate 3rd party ads and banners as a means of expanding your marketplace reach, as well as leverage a direct set of banner and ad resources that are part of a seller or vendor dashboard.

So, just to kind of dive into the most common scenario, which is a vendor setting up ads and banners. There are different flavors and different levels of detail for ads and banners. Most commonly you have the scenario where someone can set up banners of different sizes and they can upload images, videos, or interactive components that would go into those different sized elements throughout the site. They would need the ability to preview those and then set up links that lead folks to a specific landing page.

Now, most typically in a marketplace you want all of the traffic to stay within the marketplace itself, so we would commonly recommend not allowing traffic to go outside of the site but rather to be relative to that vendor store so that they can link folks to parts of their store but not to their external website.

Delivering Accurate, Engaging, & Efficient Ads

Advertisement Analytics & Dynamic Ads

Now In addition to that, it is also possible to gather marketplace analytics data on the actual banners and ads. For example, if someone has a very popular product that has a high margin and they want to sell more of it, they can promote that particular product or category through advertising. Even by essentially telling the marketplace to promote that item and letting the marketplace figure out what's going to get the best results and actually promote the ad. Possibly the vendor wants to limit their spending to X dollars a day, X hours a week, or certain amount per month They're going to let the marketplace determine where this product is presented and how much spend is done within those parameters.

With the analytics the marketplace is able to gather, it can learn and detect what area to put the tiles of dynamically generated ads for particular product. It can use the product title, price information, description imagery, etc. and run automated tests for that particular product to see which actual configurations work best.

This particular concept is essentially setting up a dynamic ad, although they're not perfect from a presentation perspective, these dynamic ads are very popular in that they can directly speak to a need that the end user has whenever they're on the site. It's a really helpful concept in general and very powerful for sellers, so that they don't have to make specific ads for every single product. They might have a catalog of thousands of products and they want to promote certain ones or possibly all of them. That's a huge amount of effort if it was necessary to set that up manually.

Growing Your Business & Revenue Pipeline

Monetizing Vendor Advertisementing

One of the key factors for any marketplace as it grows and thrives is the ability to monetize the interactions between the buyers and the sellers for the marketplace. That allows the marketplace to reinvest within itself and promote growth.

If your monetization strategy includes using ads and banners, potentially even if very selective and very focused, the analytics are going to be really critical to be able to attract the advertisers so that they're comfortable with the data. If you can prove to them that this is a good venue to spend their advertising resources on with being able to see things like conversions and bounce rate, and just general advertising statistics that are common within the industry.

Identify Key Opportunities While Protecting Your Users

Aggregating Analytics & Data Security

So, in order to aggregate that analytic data, the buyers are going to need to have analytics running behind the scenes whenever they're interacting with the site. Then the site itself can match the vendors ads to buyers’ behaviors on the site and then put that into the database for the marketplace application, allowing that data be aggregated later.

Most commonly, it's going to be a scenario where the underlying data from each user interaction on the site is decoupled from that user’s personal information so that in the event that something happened, such as a security breach, their sensitive buying patterns and interactions on the site aren't exposed outside of their particular direct account access.

So, in other words we want to make sure that the way we're storing the information is helpful for the sellers when they're reviewing their ads and banners, but also doesn't store too much sensitive information that puts the buyer’s sensitive data at risk.

Concept Application & Scenario Preparedness

Apply Key Concepts Within Your Marketplace

Finally, just wrapping up on ads and banners it's a really common concept of an ad in a banner to enable the ability to track specific links and track specific A/B testing concepts. Generally, giving access to standard testing and validation data so that whenever someone is setting up a manual ad or they're comparing the dynamic ads, they are able to test and analyze things on the granular level.

Some examples would be the testing of an ad that's manual intensive and comparing that to a dynamically generated ad, which one performs better and why. What about the testing of multivariable? As well as being able to track exact clicks that possibly lead to the product detail page, adding something to the cart, getting into checkout, completing checkout, etc. What the source of those different leads and then possibly customers will allow the buyer seller to be able to repeat the process over and over. As you can see, it’s really helpful to enable the marketplace, tracking, and analytics, to be able to see into that data on behalf of the seller, so that they can focus on what's working within the market.

How Can We Help

Clarity Marketplace Experts

As you can tell there's a lot of detail here and we'd love to help you go through some of these discussion points and topics do you can make the right choice for your marketplace long-term. Although some of the more high fidelity, detailed aspects of this won't apply right away, we encourage you to look at the options and make sure that the architecture of whatever marketplace solution you choose to go with has those capabilities available to you.

Related Posts