Promoting E-Commerce Sites

September 9, 2012 5:45 PM

Which channels of advertisement do you use to promote your e-commerce business? Also, what is the percentage of your advertisement budget divided by your annual turnover? Some candidates that I can think of: Free subway papers, flyer distribution in the street, regular daily newspapers, radio ads, tv commercials, google ads, google products, bing shopping, facebook ads, twitter promoted ads, backlinks in other websites, SEO to raise in organic search results, word of mouth from satisfied customers. If you use several vectors of advertisement, most of which I tried to list above, do you think they are the optimum combination? Thank You!
posted by raphael19 to Work & Money (5 answers total)

There is no correct answer to the question without more details. For instance, what is the demographic you are most interested in reaching? Is it a service that is driven by immediate demand? Is it a business that benefits by branding? The one thing virtually all businesses can benefit from is referral/word of mouth. You can roughly categorize advertising by directional and non-directional. From there there are many variants. If you would give a hint as to the nature of your e-commerce it might be a bit easier to address. thanks, jcw
posted by jcworth at 6:46 PM on September 9, 2012

The clientele is from low income to high income, including the middle. People shop for brands in which they see value and durability. The business I am talking about is an e-commerce website that sells the same trademark commodity sold in the stores, but at much lower prices thanks to its low (or none) operational costs such as rent, employer fees, utilities, etc.
posted by raphael19 at 7:53 PM on September 9, 2012

We spend roughly 10% of our expected sales each month on PPC (read: Google AdWords). We find that to work very well, and we're hoping to see it become even more effective now that we have a firm doing A/B testing each month to really fine tune our keywords and copy.

We do flower bulbs, so our situation is not terribly different than your followup comment.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 8:19 PM on September 9, 2012

Great service and Word of mouth is fantastic, if you can zero-in on a community which talks to each other. But from what you described you are probably looking for Google adwords. Make sure you also put your stuff on eBay and Amazon ... surprising how many things I search for which have high google rankings but are amazon or eBay links. Also ... google shopping.
posted by jannw at 3:25 AM on September 10, 2012

You're likely to find a better conversion rate online. People who buy things online are already online, so they're already using online tools like search (Adwords), blogs (Adwords or other) and local media online.
posted by dripdripdrop at 8:37 AM on September 10, 2012