How to Optimize Campaigns for your eCommerce Website

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the eCommerce sector, you’ll have seen that sales don’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s long been understood that effective marketing campaigns are essential if eCommerce firms want to ensure decent growth and reliable revenue streams. But is your eCommerce store performing as well as it could be?

Campaign optimization can give your sales figures a significant uplift and generate long-lasting customer loyalty but many organizations don’t know where to begin when it comes to optimizing their existing marketing efforts or launching new ones.

Fortunately, today there are a number of digital tools available to help businesses with campaign optimization. From improving your keyword strategy to automating your email outreach, there are several different routes you can take to optimize your eCommerce campaigns.

In the below article, we’ll outline exactly what we mean by campaign optimization and how you can leverage it to take your sales figures to new heights. Keep reading to find out more.

What is campaign optimization?

Campaign optimization simply describes any strategy used by marketers to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. It can be applied to any process that attempts to deliver the best possible results from a campaign. In practice, what this means may vary depending on what the particular goal of an eCommerce campaign is. Do you want to increase clicks? Are you trying to boost conversion? Or are you simply attempting to improve engagement? Whatever your ambition is with a particular campaign will go a long way to determining how you optimize it.

The eCommerce sector is particularly competitive, with 24% of all retail purchases expected to take place online by 2026. Given the rapid expansion predicted for the sector, marketers are well aware of the importance of campaign optimization. The eCommerce market represents a huge and growing opportunity but competition has never been more intense. Campaign optimization is the means by which eCommerce firms can stand out from the crowd.

How to achieve campaign optimization

One of the first things that businesses looking to optimize their campaigns must do is assess their current performance. For this, gathering data is key. How much traffic are your ads generating? And what are the sources? Collect as much information as you can about your existing campaigns as this is the only way of knowing what is working well and what isn’t.

Once you’ve conducted some degree of analysis concerning your existing campaigns, it’s time to think about ways of improving them (or launching a new, optimized campaign). Start by planning your campaign carefully. Take a look at your landing pages and product pages and evaluate whether they are effective at convincing visitors to your eCommerce site to convert. Customer feedback can help here in understanding the customer journey.

Remember too that the eCommerce market is a much more fragmented place than it once was. In the past, brands could have been fairly confident that any online sale came directly from their website. Today, however, online retailers operate in an omni-channel environment. Customers could engage with a brand via email, social media, or traditional brick-and-mortar stores. It’s important that any campaign optimization efforts reflect the multi-channel nature of modern eCommerce.

Campaign optimization basics

Although campaign optimization strategies will vary from company to company depending on geography, customer demands, competitor insights, and more, there are several steps that are common to most campaign optimization efforts:

• Set your goals

It’s very difficult to optimize your marketing campaign unless you’ve got a clear objective you're aiming for. This will determine the metrics you measure and how you determine whether your campaign is a success or not.

Setting campaign goals and their corresponding metrics can ensure that your campaign supports your broader marketing objectives. Whether you want your campaign to lead to more site visits, a higher click-through rate (CTR), increased conversion numbers, or greater lead generation, clearly defining your goals will ensure you can keep your campaigns progressing in the right direction.

• Research

Optimize your eCommerce campaign by making sure you’ve conducted all relevant research. Compile data from right across the entire sales funnel and then see where it aligns with your campaign strategy. Identify where leads are emerging and look at how your campaign can convince them to convert, such as using personalized ads, for example.

As well as conducting research by monitoring customer interactions with your brand, don’t forget about reaching out to them directly. A customer survey can provide invaluable information regarding your eCommerce ad campaigns and how you might improve them.

• Diversify

If you’re looking to optimize your campaign, it’s important to not be too restrictive. Diversifying your campaigns across multiple channels, different forms of media and using a diverse range of tactics can give you a much better chance of reaching your target audience. This also grants you access to a broader spectrum of data, which can help inform current and future campaigns.

However, don’t let a diverse approach lead to confusing messaging. It’s important to be consistent across platforms, with customers led to standardized branding and product offerings. Consistency also helps you avoid wasted spend in your marketing campaigns.

• Choose your tool

There are a number of different digital solutions on the market today all promising to help with campaign optimization, so if businesses are looking for an external vendor to support their eCommerce efforts, it’s important they choose wisely.

Look for solutions offering essential campaign optimization features like feed management to help with product promotion across multiple marketplaces. Robust analytics features can also support optimization by making use of real-time performance data aligned with your KPIs.

• Evaluate performance

You won’t know if your campaign optimization strategy is successful unless you keep track of its performance. Collect relevant performance metrics, run A/B tests on your marketing copy, and analyze as much data as you can.

Once you’ve collected enough information about your campaign’s performance, it’s a good idea to carry out a formal review. As well as post-campaign evaluations, you may also want to consider mid-campaign reviews so you can adjust ongoing campaigns. Remember to carefully evaluate your campaigns and put the insights you gather towards making the next one even better.

The benefits of campaign optimization

As mentioned earlier, campaign optimization means different things to different businesses. For example, simply improving your product categorization can deliver significant uplift for your campaigns by making it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Making sure your eCommerce portal works well on mobile devices is also a popular tactic brands are using to optimize their campaigns. Automating your keyword strategy is another.

Whatever route to campaign optimization you take, your eCommerce platform could enjoy a huge range of benefits. This includes improved campaign performance, with data-driven insights around things like target keywords, traffic, and conversion leading to higher sales figures. Optimization can also improve your decision-making by providing data to validate any campaign initiative.

Campaign optimization is likely to lead to higher levels of ROI. Not only will optimization mean that it is more likely for your brand’s products to end up in front of your target audience, but it also makes it easier to clearly measure your ROI. With the right campaign optimization strategy, you can make more informed decisions on your marketing spend because you can accurately track the performance of each campaign.

The advantages of campaign optimization stretch beyond any individual campaign too. By providing clarity around your eCommerce campaigns, organizations no longer need to pursue marketing strategies on a hunch. Instead, they can follow a clear plan leveraging research, data, and analytics. Not only will this help ensure each campaign achieves its goal but also that overarching marketing ambitions are met.

Campaign optimization provides a path towards your company’s wider goals.

Are you ready to bring your ads to the next level? Enjoy the many benefits that eCommerce campaign optimization can deliver by taking a free and personalized online demo of Channable’s solutions. No strings attached!

Take a look at our customer success stories to see how you can achieve campaign optimization and the kinds of benefits it delivers.