Performance marketing dla sklepu e-commerce 2024

Performance marketing for the eCommerce industry is a difficult category. Ads are getting more expensive, customer acquisition costs are rising, and the constant push to lower margins is stronger than ever. On the other hand, a host of new improvements in advertising platforms, working on data or better coverage of user intent are coming to market.

Managing all this can give even the most experienced marketers a headache. With so many choices, brands and companies fighting to be noticed, the question is: what can I do in 2024 to grow my eCommerce business? Performance marketing is one of the most important areas!

Today we track and optimize everything from the number of steps and caloric intake to sleep patterns or even the efficiency of focus throughout the day. In business, tracking and optimizing marketing performance for your eCommerce business makes sense and should be a priority. Performance marketing uses this data to optimize campaigns for volume and value results.

What is performance marketing?

Performance marketing is a category of marketing that is optimized to achieve a given, measurable result. This result can be sales, ROI, contact acquisition, website traffic, app activity, etc. In most cases, these results can be measured in real time.

Performance marketing differs from traditional advertising in virtually everything. Suppose you placed a billboard in the middle of an active street…. You won’t guess how many people saw your ad, nor will you ever be able to count it.

Unlike digital advertising and performance marketing… Here you can see exactly how many people you’ve reached, how effective those visits were and what return on investment you’ve achieved. By focusing on tactics to generate specific results, you can optimize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by optimizing ads, targeting more accurately, leveraging data or remarketing.

Additional in many cases, performance marketing allows you to pay only when you achieve a goal, e.g. generate a site visit or a customer contacts you.

What is performance marketing for e-commerce?

Performance marketing for e-commerce uses available marketing tools to increase online sales. The use of this marketing strategy is based on the use of advertising only in the online area with a complete disregard for non-digital formats.

By using data, you can determine where and when your customers are spending time online and how to accurately reach them. For example, if your e-commerce company sells watches and you know that your target customer is 35-40 years old, lives in big cities, frequently shops online and is one of the gadget fans – you can set up ads in Meta Ads to specifically target him . Based on this, you can also identify other attributes common to purchasing customers, and then optimize your ads to further target the people you know will become customers. In many cases, you’ll discover new criteria or customer attributes you hadn’t thought of before.

What makes performance marketing different from other types of marketing?

The ability to pay (or optimize) for action (effect) is what differentiates performance marketing from other, more traditional advertising channels. You can place an ad in a newspaper and assume you’ll reach all your audience, but you’ll never be sure how many people read it and what kind of people they are. 

Most advertisers expect to know exactly how effectively the advertising budget is being spent, how many people are interacting, how many are buying and what return on investment has been generated. This type of knowledge allows for faster decisions, scaling investments and taking actions that are relevant to the competition.

Benefits of performance marketing for eCommerce

1. Cost-effective

Performance marketing allows you to pay only when an interaction or conversion occurs, this makes it cost transparent and easy to make decisions.

2. Low risk

Every business has to take risks, but it’s better to know the risks. Performance marketing strategy involves lower risk compared to others – first of all, you monitor the cost on an ongoing basis, you can always withdraw from the investment or change the strategy.

3. traceability

One of the biggest pluses of performance marketing is access to data, virtually in real time. You know how many people have seen your posts, purchased a product or sent an inquiry. Every metric can be tracked, so you know exactly which areas need improvement and which strategies or platforms are working.

Take the challenge and plan a new marketing strategy for your store!

Tell us about your offer, target customer and goals. We will take care of the rest and prepare an e-commerce strategy for you!

Let’s talk!

Start with storefront preparation

You can attract thousands, hundreds or millions of visitors to your store, but if the site is not fast, clear and mobile-friendly, you will not generate satisfactory results. 3 out of 4 shoppers say that they will leave an e-commerce site if the site itself is slow to load, and almost half start thinking hard when they notice that published reviews look artificial or suspicious.

Is the shopping experience easy to navigate? Is every call to action clear and one-click accessible? Also consider what happens after purchase. Do you have automation set up to contact shopping cart abandoners?”

Follow these suggestions for developing an effective eCommerce site:

• Get branding that will set you apart
• Think like a website visitor, ask a few people around you to go through the buying process
• Always use high-quality images that scale appropriately on mobile devices
• Write in such a way that content is enjoyable to read (headlines, fit, uniqueness)
• Use social proof
• Make it easy to navigate categories and make the search engine work properly
• Payment must be simple – use quick transfers, BLIK, payment cards or installment payments
• Test responsiveness

Set realistic goals and stick to them

Performance marketing in eCommerce is all about data and you need to build on it. The first step for you is to create a marketing plan and set clear goals, embedded in time. The most obvious goal is sales, profit versus cost, but think further about user lifetime value, recurrence, return on investment ROAS etc.

Frequently people start their marketing strategy by creating posts on Instagram or writing a blog. Try not to get distracted by these types of things in the short term. While they can certainly be helpful, they are not a performance marketing tactic that will lead to a sales result relatively quickly.

You can use the SMART methodology when developing performance marketing goals, which should be

1. Specific – target a specific area in need of improvement, e.g., increase the value of a shopping cart by $20 in 3 months
2. Measurable – quantify the rate of progress, e.g. reduce customer acquisition cost by 10%
3. Assignability – specify who will do it. Testing the appearance of the shopping cart will be handled by Adam, we will work out 3 concepts to experiment.
4. Realistic – determine what results can realistically be achieved given the resources available. A great goal would be 10x more sales in a month, but that’s impossible. Considering that we increase the budget by 50%, expect at least 35% higher sales.
5. Timing-related – determine when the result(s) can be achieved. Always have the perspective of a specific date, if you are targeting, for example, a ROAS of 750% take actions that will verify this in the perspective of a given period, for example, three months

Build target customer profiles

To build marketing campaign structures, you need to know your customer well. Define different target groups for the people you think will convert. Use the data you have as strongly as possible: existing customers, surveys, research among friends. Get to know your competitors to see how they communicate and what kind of customer they are targeting with advertising.

The goal of the target audience research process is to be relevant and effective. Ideally, you should use your current customer base to create these personas, but the more information you have from the beginning, the better. For your analysis, you can use a script with questions to which you will collect answers:

• What purchase motives drive the customer
• What influences the purchase decision?
• Who influences the purchase decision?
• Where and how do you reach potentially interested parties?
• When exactly does your target audience buy most often?
• How often does the purchase of certain products take place?
• Which products are preferred?
• What financial situation do your customers currently find themselves in?
• How much is the influence of price on purchasing decisions?
• How much price is the target group willing to pay?
• What is the income range of the target group?

What is your value proposition for your audience?

Why should someone buy specifically from you (whatever you sell)? How will your offering improve their life? How will they feel? What will you provide for them? What is your promise? It is very important that this message reaches your customers. Don’t just tell your customers that your product is the best, let them know how it will solve a problem and how it will improve their life or well-being. In 2022. 73% of customers made spontaneous purchases compared to 59% the previous year. So in most cases you are talking not about product parameters, but about feelings. You must have built your unique selling proposition

Channels in performance marketing

Social media

Research shows that the number of social media users worldwide has exceeded 5.04 billion (Kepios, 2024), and will reach 6 billion in 2027 (Statista, 2022).

These statistics are not just dry numbers, but show the opportunities you can take advantage of to reach your target audience. Social media offers paid and organic opportunities to promote your eCommerce brand and measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Social media offers paid and organic opportunities to promote your eCommerce brand and measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

You can start performance marketing campaigns by paying for social media ads, gaining views, new followers, store transitions, or purchases. Social media advertising can help you achieve a wide range of goals, such as raising brand awareness, increasing site traffic, generating leads, or maximizing the value of purchases.

Social media advertising can help you achieve a wide range of goals, such as raising brand awareness, increasing site traffic, generating leads, or maximizing purchase value.

You can use the platforms: Meta, Instagram, X, Linkedin, TikTok or Pinterest.

You can use the following platforms.

Native advertising

Native advertising is a form of advertising that blends seamlessly with the natural appearance of a website in a way that does not make it look like an intrusive advertisement. In other words, rather than looking like an ad, this form of advertising aims to reduce annoyance by mimicking the site where it appears. 

The source of native advertising can be, for example, a recommendation box with e-commerce products.

Display advertising

Display advertising is one of the oldest forms of advertising, somewhat resembling a city billboard

However, display has a very serious challenge, because according to a study conducted by Infolinks on digital advertising, an average of 86% of consumers experience banner blindness (just automatically taking their eyes off the display ad). On the other hand, optimization opportunities using product catalogs, carousel creatives, or video make this form more engaging and interesting. Certainly, it can now be used effectively with solutions such as Performance Max.

Content marketing

Content marketing and performance marketing can complement each other. Performance marketing will not be effective if it is not based on unique, well-understood content. On the other hand, content marketing will always remain untapped if it is not promoted as part of performance activities. 

Metrics for evaluating content marketing can be quantitative (numerical) and qualitative (descriptive) You should pay particular attention to the free traffic generated in search results, number of impressions, traffic sources, click-through rate (CTR) and social media visibility.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

This performance marketing channel allows ads to be displayed on platforms such as Google Ads, Bing or Yahoo. SEM can be leveraged organically through search engine optimization (SEO) or through paid advertising (PPC).

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the more effective ways to implement performance marketing. It involves partnering with a third party such as an influencer, blogger, YouTuber, or website or app owner. This affiliate promotes your eCommerce store’s products on their own channels receives payment when they deliver agreed upon results to you. This is most often based on a percentage of sales generated.

Optimize, experiment and improve

Your campaigns have been launched, but it’s not over! Now is the moment when you need to take a good look at the data. Do the results match the goals and expectations you set at the beginning? Go back to your strategic plan and see if you’re achieving the goals you set for yourself.

Determine which channels are doing the best and which are doing the worst, and find out why. Are you doing things in your chosen media that you can use in others? Take a look at your budget. Are you spending your budget appropriately? In some cases, you’ve done everything to improve and optimize a particular ad or campaign, but it’s still not performing well. In that case, use what works and continue to promote successful groups or campaigns. Turn off what doesn’t work after the testing stage, but be sure to learn from those failures.

Prepare yourself a schedule of experiments, with assumptions and deadlines. Write notes there that will allow you to accumulate conclusions and continue the optimization process. Make the most of all the opportunities provided by performance marketing!