Marketplace Advertising Best Practices – Vendor Portals

Effective e-Marketplace Virtual Advertising

With a marketplace eCommerce platform, one of the biggest hidden gems is internal promotion and advertising, and this data-as-a-service that's truly native to having an eMarket. It’s especially important once the business scales, even if it's just within a few niche categories.

As the eCommerce marketplace continues to grow, operate, and generate traffic and analytics data, because of the nature of connections to rich data about the users, we can normalize the user-specific data while understanding the roles, personas, tags, and categories these users are frequenting. Then we can determine what's going to be the most interesting and powerful to them as far as advertisements and product recommendations.

How Virtual Advertising Design Impacts Customer Experience

From a marketplace governance and community guidelines perspective, the goal for any marketplace is to maximize the buyers’ and the sellers’ benefits from the eMarket. If buyers are getting what they want and they're happy with their experience, they're going to keep coming back and buy more, and the marketplace is going to scale. The sellers also need to have a good experience so they continue selling through the eCommerce marketplace.

Therefore, it's critical that with marketplace advertising and promotions you leverage a feedback loop that incorporates data about buyers' experiences and what they are seeing as valuable versus noise and spam. It's important to stay away from spam within the marketplace—you don't want to have a bunch of ads that are interrupting the natural flow that users are accustomed to.

One thing that helps with this is to have internal ads take up less space than organic results for different ads, recommendations, search results, etc. Promoted content should also take up less screen space than the naturally occurring results from a search or automatic product recommendations.

There should also be some indication that content is promoted or sponsored. Something subtle but consistent, so the user can easily spot when something is promoted. They may find it helpful and click on it, and they may not. But it's vital to have a consistent representation of what you're showing them to build trust in the platform and the marketplace. Being transparent about why the platform is showing them a piece of content or product recommendation or search result is what helps build that credibility and trust.

Oftentimes, marketplace advertisements and promotions can be helpful to a buyer and seller. They can help vendors bypass technical issues with people not finding their products unless they search for them a certain way (or in other words, if a vendor isn't great with SEO, or search engine optimization, to allow a broader search to find their products where they are relevant).

Advertisements and promotions can therefore be a powerful tool to get the right items that are high-quality into the buyer's hands and give them what they need.

Paid Advertising in Marketplace eCommerce

Typically, these ads live within the search results, whether grid or list view, as additional items in the results, but they're marked as ads or promoted items. It also makes sense to have horizontal or vertical sections are are clearly visually serparate, either above, below, or to the side of the search results—or all three, depending on how vigorously you want to do this.

Whenever those ads are clicked on, there is typically a cost-per-click function for the vendor who is promoting the ad, though there are also other ways to manage those payments.

But basically, within the vendor portal, vendors can turn on advertising by a product, subcategory, or category. They can also do it for their entire store; they can advertise so that people will come into their store and see all of their items within the marketplace. Vendors could also promote particular items and control the presentation depending on the type of ad space via their vendor dashboard.

We also typically recommend having multiple ad sizes and locations where the vendors can promote their store and items. Just as you would expect with any publishing framework where an advertiser can provide their items, we also incorporate the ability to have tracking and analytics that’s directly tied into the results from those paid clicks and impressions, and where vendors can see conversion rates.

For example, it might be that for every thousand impressions there’s another extra item that’s purchased, and the margin on those items is $27.32. And the vendor paid something like $12.87 for those impressions. As an advertiser, they’re going to continue to scale up that purchasing as much as they can.

Guide Vendors to Virtual Advertising Best Methods

It's important to provide guidelines to the seller whenever they're doing virtual advertisements or promotions so they can incorporate best practices within the marketplace.

The guidelines are also there to enforce consistency and an optimal interaction between buyers and sellers. Both parties need to be successful, and you want to ensure buyers keep coming back. And one of the fundamental aspects of buyers coming back is having integrity and trust within the marketplace.

Engage Customers with Marketplace Advertising Strategies

In addition to search results and product detail pages and header, footer, and sidebar promotions and ads, it's also typical for buyers to opt in to receive notifications about items that might be out of stock, items that may be left in the cart, abandoned cart emails, and other notifications. There can also be promotions, advertisements, and recommendations included into these emails.

These are transactional emails that are based on the interaction that that buyer has with the with the marketplace. It is very common to provide promotional spots within those emails. The eCommerce marketplace application will dynamically build those ads and incorporate the tracking for those so that the vendor can see what their results are.

Needless to say, it's definitely a very powerful component to help boost the interactions within the marketplace. It's also very helpful from a monetization perspective to help monetize the marketplace and give it more resources so that the advertising and promotional dollars that are invested from the sellers can go back into making the marketplace even more powerful, and automate more of it, and make it more capable of delivering value both for buyers and for sellers.