Advertising comprises of anything that will direct good attention your way. Online marketplaces have millions of people browsing through them each month. Flipkart alone witnessed web traffic of 132 million in January 2016. Amazon.in had 185 million visits that month and Snapdeal 86 million. According to these figures all three marketplaces have an exceptional amount of traffic coming through every month. All they need to do is direct it efficiently for the best results.
This is where advertising comes into play. Online marketplaces are using different advertising options to monetize their large volumes of traffic and help their sellers get eyes on their goods. The ads are easily visible to shoppers and attractive ads get assured clicks. In addition to that, marketplaces also provide sellers with ad campaign reports. This way, sellers know what they need to work on to improve.
Display advertisements are a powerful tool in marketplace advertising. They are the first thing you see on a marketplace and they easily elicit clicks from shoppers. Display ads are visible in the following locations (images acquired from amazon.in):
Display ad banners are created by the sellers, giving them better control over what appears in their advertisement and how it looks once it is approved by the marketplace and goes live. These display advertisements can be category specific, where clicks on it lead to a specific product category of advertiser. Display advertisements can also be specific to one product, multiple products, price slots (e.g. 499 and below) or a particular brand.
This form of advertising is only available on Flipkart. It is a new feature offered to sellers registered on Flipkart as well as other brands that do not sell on the marketplace. That’s right! It’s not only the online sellers who can benefit from this kind of advertising.
Brand Story ads are a type of native advertisement available on the Flipkart app. It is a platform available to brands so they can reach out to larger masses in the country. Opting for this form of advertising gives brands intelligent data about consumer’s reactions to the ad. With this kind of information sellers and service providers can control their reach, their impact and measure it all effectively.
The three front runners in Indian ecommerce allow this kind of advertising. Flipkart calls its sponsored ads PLAs, Amazon provides sponsored products and Snapdeal keeps it simple by just calling it Snapdeal ads. Each marketplace has its own sponsored ads format. The mechanism behind it differs on each marketplace. For example Amazon uses keywords to display the ad to the right audiences.
Despite providing seller products with prime listing positions, sponsored ads on marketplaces also offer accurate results in terms of fast moving and slow moving SKUs, customer response and behavior. This helps you identify which components of your products need work. (e.g. product displays – includes descriptions, images and product titles.) In addition to this, you will learn which discounts are appropriate to get your products moving, how much inventory you need to maintain and how to create the selling strategies that work.
Besides these advertising options, marketplaces also provide promotional schemes like deals of the day or lightening deals. These last for only a couple of hours in a day. Some marketplaces allow sellers to participate in these based on requests, others approach sellers to take part in these promotions.
So which marketplace promotion do you use?
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