Marketplace Advertising Best Practices – Vendor Portals

Effective e-Marketplace Virtual Advertising

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

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

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. In particular, if the buyers are getting what they want and if they're happy about their experience, they're going to keep coming back and buy more, and it's going to scale.

Therefore, fundamentally it is really critical that with any type of marketplace advertising and promotions, we’re leveraging a feedback loop that incorporates data about the buyers’ experiences and what the buyer is seeing as valuable, and what they're seeing as noise and spam. We want to stay away from spam within the marketplace. We don't want to have a bunch of ads that are interrupting the natural subconscious flow that users are accustomed to.

One of the things that really helps with this is to enable internal ads that take up a very small amount of real estate relative to the organic results for different ads or search results and other screen space. Any type of promoted items should also take up very little screen space relative to the naturally occurring result set that we would see.

We would also decorate those in some way, typically with a simple advertisement that's subtle but consistent, or promoted content—something that the user can see, so they might go, “oh, I see, this is a promoted piece. Well, this actually is helpful. I'm going to click on it.”

But they want to have this consistent representation of what we're showing them and build that trust in the platform and the marketplace. In order to build that trust, whenever there are advertisements and promotions, we’re going to let them know and be very upfront about it. We don't have to be belligerent, but we do need to make sure that there's that credibility and trust of the marketplace itself. Our goal is to give the buyer what they need.

A lot of times, marketplace advertisements and promotions are extremely helpful to a buyer. They can help the vendor bypass several steps of the process, and maybe bypass technical issues with people not finding their products unless they search for them a certain way. So, it can be a really powerful tool to get the right items that are really high quality into the buyer’s hands and give them what they need.

Typically, the format for ads is that these are going to live within the search results, the grid, the list view as additional items in the results, but they’ll be marked as such that they are ads or promoted items. It usually also makes sense to have horizontal or vertical sections that are clearly visually separate, either above, below, or to the right of the search results—or all three, depending on how vigorously you want to do this. And whenever those ads are clicked on, there is a cost per click function for the vendor who is promoting the ad, or we can operate with other formulas for managing the costs for the vendors.

But basically, the vendors will have the ability within their vendor portal to 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 we can see conversion rates.

For example, 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.

We also like to provide guidelines to the seller, whenever they’re doing virtual advertisements or promotions so that they can incorporate best practices that we're seeing within the marketplace. The guidelines are also there to enforce consistency and an optimal interaction between buyers and sellers because we want both parties to win. We want both parties to be successful, and we want, most of all, buyers to keep coming back. Without buyers, the vendors don't have anything within that marketplace that’s valuable. There have to be buyers, and in order to keep buyers coming back, they have to have that integrity and trust with the marketplace.

In addition to in-search results and in-product detail pages and header, footer, 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. We can also include promotions, advertisements, and recommendations 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 vendors and for sellers.

Additional Resources for e-Marketplace

• Key Marketplace Considerations
• Filtering and Categorization of Products
• Content Sourcing Practices & Workflows
• Best Buyer Dashboard Features
• Best Cart Features & Workflows
• Create a Marketplace Website
• Best Checkout Workflows & Payment Methods
• Establishing an eMarket - Vendor Portals
• eMarket Success - Vendor Portals
• What is a Marketplace?
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals
• Marketplace Advertising Best Practices – Vendor Portals