E-commerce websites introduced a new trend in marketing. Since E-commerce websites providing a convenient way for buying and selling products, many organizations start to develop their own e-commerce websites to sell their wares online. As the number of e-commerce websites increases it is vitally important to use advertisements to promote your e-commerce websites. Unlike traditional marketing the existence of a new e-commerce website is unknown to the world until it arrives in search result of search engine or in social media like Facebook, google+ etc.

Seven key points that highlight the importance of paid ads for promoting e-commerce websites are discussed below.

1. Display what you have to those who are seeking for it.

By using paid advertising you can expose your offers and messages to potential customers who are looking for a product that you are selling through your e-commerce web site. For example consider Google AdWords, a paid advertising solution offered by Google. When you search for a particular item in Google, the search result page not only include the output of the Google search – algorithm but also contains advertisement related to your search key word.
 

Figure 1: Google search result for sunglass. The first three results which are shown with a yellow tag named ‘Ad’, are advertisement related to sun glass. Moreover you can see some advertisement of sunglass in right side of search results.
 

2. No need to worry about advertisement budgets.

Paid advertising service providers are used to provide options for you to customize the ads according to your budget. You can advertise on whatever amount you can have and you need to pay only for clicks on your advertisement.

3. Advertise globally or locally

Paid advertisement can be shown locally or globally according to your reachability needs and budgets. Suppose if your e-commerce website is delivering products within a country or city then there is no need to advertise your e-commerce website globally. The local advertising option provided by many online advertising service providers will help you to promote a product in a particular city, state or country.
Paid advertising service providers are reaping the advantages of location based services to advertise in a particular geographic area.

4. Change your advertisement on the go

Paid ads will attract lots of people to your website. When more people start to buy from your e-commerce site you may wish to modify the current offer you are providing at any moment. Paid advertisements can take out or change at any time according to your wish.

5. Analyze your advertisements.

You can analyze whether you’re paid advertisements is worth for the money you invested, using analyzing and reporting tools provided by the service provider. These analyzing tools will help you to determine what is working and what is not working and how to improve your ads

6. Your advertisement will reach to the right people

You may be selling products suitable for a particular age group or to a particular sex group and there is no need to show your ad to other age group or sex group. Paid ads can be shown to only some people who find it interesting and useful. For example Fig 3 shows the advertisement appear on the Facebook pages of a male user (who is engaged recently) and Figure 4 shows the advertisement appear on the Facebook pages of a female user.

7. Advertise to any device

A lot of people used to visit internet from other devices like cellular phones and tablet other than PCs, so to have a successful advertisement campaign you should display your ads in these devices also. Gartner says companies will generate 50% of web sales via their social presence and mobile applications by 2015. Paid advertisement can be presented to any device like tables, mobile phones, PDA etc.

8. Behaviour based advertisement

Paid advertisements use users browsing history to study their behaviour shows ads according to it. Browsing history can be collected using cookies a small file saved in your computer. When you visit a page the advertiser parses through your computer for cookies to discover your likes and dislikes, and then you are fed Internet advertising based on your online behaviour.

References
Google AdWord http://www.google.com/ads/
Facebook ads https://www.facebook.com/about/ads/
Gartner http://www.gartner.com/technology/home.jsp