Sponsored Product Ads: Your New Key to Driving Marketplace Sales

*This post will feature the latest updates to Sponsored Product Ads and best practices throughout Q4 2020. Check back regularly for the latest tips and tricks. Happy selling! 

Pro Tip: Determine how specific you want to be when segmenting your groups. The more granular the better.

After you’ve defined your Sponsored Product Ad campaign goals, you’ll want to arrange your ad groups accordingly. In Q4, that usually means sales. And you know to put your best performers out there. Within that set of products, consider grouping products that share common features. This is especially critical if you found these features are commonly used search terms. For example, if you want to grow monitor sales one ad group you can create is ’24” office monitors.’ Naturally your campaign will consist of  SKU’s that fit the bill.

We advise that sellers utilizing automatic targeting should select either the near or loose match types. These two match types will serve product ads for searched terms that are more closely associated to the selected SKU’s. That is why it’s critical that your product pages have enriched content with the appropriate terms.

If you’re using manual targeting, you’ll have the ability to select the keywords you want your ads to surface for. Finding the right keywords to match for will be a bit of trial and error. However, if you were harvesting keywords in the planning stages you’ll know exactly what search terms to monetize. If you don’t know, no worries. Get in touch with your category manager to figure out what terms are best since these will fluctuate throughout Q4.

Setting up a consistent campaign structure is a vital step, but it isn’t the only one. For more tips on optimizing Sponsored Product Ads, check out this article.

*This post will feature the latest updates to Sponsored Product Ads and best practices throughout Q4 2020. Check back regularly for the latest tips and tricks. Happy selling! 

Pro Tip: Prepare to fail. Fail to prepare. Running an effective Sponsored Product Ads campaigns means you’re doing your homework. Here’s a quick checkoff list you can work with.

• Harvesting – At this stage, you’re analyzing what your competitors are doing on any given marketplace. You’ll want to take a look at what products are surfacing for certain keywords. Take note of what models, features, price points, and additional perks are being marketed. You’ll then use this information to examine your own product assortment and select accordingly.
  • Identify popular search terms
  • Match products based on your findings
  • Pay attention to what your competitors are offering-models, pricing, and content.
• Dress to impress – After identifying the SKU’s you’ll use to build your campaign, ensure the content tip top shape. Consider taking advantage of A+ Content services to spruce up your listing. Finally, offer competitive pricing or bundles. Remember, during peak shopping seasons customers have a much higher intent to buy.
  • Audit product titles, descriptions, and images
  • Don’t price high and expect to convert. Having your ad clicked only to fail at converting will drain your coffers quick.
• Flexible Budgets – Establish engagement rules prior to the campaign. Talk to internal stakeholders to confirm what budget and ranges you’re allowed to work with. Getting in front will save you the trouble of making adhoc decisions that you might not have clearance for.
  • Increased online shopping compared to previous years is expected producing higher digital traffic. Increase your budgets to capitalize on this trend because SPA campaigns are expected to grow conversions by 60% this season.
• Monitor Campaigns – Stay on top of it.
  • Newegg SPA provides users real-time, detailed analytics. Keep an eye on your campaigns, sales, impressions, CTRs, CRs, and ACOS. Regularly checking puts you in the habit of identifying areas you can improve on.

Location, location, location. The old adage from the real estate world holds true in e-commerce as well, driven by competition for prime placement in the customer’s digital shopping path. More eyeballs means a better chance to snag a sale, and in the world of online marketplaces any advantage sellers can get to edge out the competition builds the momentum needed to create a sustainable online presence.

Fortunately for those on the Newegg Marketplace platform, the new Sponsored Product Ads tool gives sellers the power to control the placement their products receive from on-site search, driving exposure in highly relevant search queries. This not only gives brands and resellers the ability to control their exposure and marketing budget, but also drive sales. This article will explore the Newegg Sponsored Product Ads tool, what sellers can do with it, and how to use it.

Sponsored Product Ads are promoted placements of products in the Newegg search engine results pages (SERPs), and the tool is designed to help sellers and brands maximize their product visibility and run an efficient advertising campaign. Sponsored Product Ads results appear elevated in the search results page, ensuring that more customers see these products than by organic ranking alone.

The Sponsored Product Ads tool within Seller Portal shows sellers valuable analytics about their product campaigns  for measuring digital marketing success, such as:

The goal of this marketplace advertising method is to drive increased visibility for high-intent searches to enhance conversion, with a low-cost sales model.

For those familiar with running Google Shopping Ads (formerly Product Listing Ads or Google PLA), the Newegg Sponsored Product Ads is a very similar tool, however focused on specifically Newegg.com. If you are looking to take a more hands-off approach to your marketing, Newegg also offers a marketing service which utilizes our expert SEM (search engine marketing) team that runs paid ad campaigns for brands and sellers to drive sales from Google search queries.

With Newegg’s Sponsored Product Ads, keyword targeting is used to match customer search queries with product ad campaigns that sellers choose to promote. This is done through a keyword bidding system, where each keyword related to the product campaign has an associated cost-per-click (CPC), which is charged to the advertiser when a customer clicks on that product. 

The CPC model works on a market demand basis, where the cost is determined by a few different factors. The more popular a keyword is (in other words, the more search volume that it incurs), and the more competitive it is (the more advertisers that are bidding on it) both play into the market value of a click. 

Suggested bids are built into the system to give advertisers a guide on what amounts they should be bidding to have a better chance at winning top positions. Sponsored Product Ads have dedicated real estate in the first and second rows of the search results pages.

With so many tech products on Newegg Marketplace, there is a hefty amount of competition for customer attention, and the Sponsored Product Ads tool gives marketplace sellers the ability to take control of their ranking with high-purchase intent customers. Through the first half of 2020, Newegg has on average over 10.5 million searches per month, and increasing the placement in those results increases the conversion potential.

One of the biggest benefits of a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program like the Sponsored Product Ads tool offers is the reliance on a performance marketing basis for payment. On some platforms, merchants pay on an impression-based model, which means that advertisers can pay for impressions that may have never delivered eyeballs on the product. Even if the products were seen, without user intent to actually click on the listing and explicitly show interest, the basis for payment is built on metrics that are impossible to prove. 

Sellers can group specific products and campaigns around keyword groups to optimize their advertising spend, focusing on different strategies for different products. Additionally, a huge benefit of the Sponsored Product Ads tool is the ability for advertisers to scale up or down as they need – instantly. If a seller needs to increase exposure and wants to sacrifice a little cost of sales to do so, they can ramp up the bid. If a seller wants to lean out a campaign and focus on driving maximum optimization, it is as simple as a few keystrokes. Campaigns can be run for a specific time or indefinitely, the control of cost is totally in the advertiser’s hands. 

Of course, having prime placement in the SERPs is only part of the equation. Leveraging enhanced product page content solutions like A+ Content with rich imagery and product specifications helps actually convert those customers coming to the page.

In fact, A+ Content leads to on average:

With a targeted marketing tool like Sponsored Product Ads, customers are served an advertised product based on what they are explicitly searching for, which indicates a high purchase intent. This in turn, leads to a far greater conversion on average than other advertising methods, which either may be based on broad segmentation or a completely static “one-size-fits-all” approach. 

The placement in search results is prominent so customers can instantly see your advertised products, and know that these are highly relevant to their search query. Due to the ability for sellers to target based on keywords, products that are added to advertising groups should be relevant to one another, and share similar related keywords. This will help to ensure that the product relevancy is high between the user search and the advertised product, and click-through as well as conversion rates are also higher.  

Additionally, Sponsored Product Ads can deliver insights into the customer’s view of the items for sale that help to advise both bidding strategy & pricing, content strategy, and other elements to make for a finely tuned marketing plan. 

There are two types of keyword targeting logic that are available for sellers to utilize: automatic targeting and manual targeting.

  Automatic targeting: Allows the Newegg algorithm to analyze  the SKUs being promoted and automatically match them with either closely related keywords or with other similar products. It also automatically sets the bid pricing for ads so that you don’t have to manually do this. This option will also optimize the campaign to maximize performance, which is great for those new to keyword bidding systems. To help this process, you need to set the default bid for the system to know what you are aiming to spend.

  Manual keyword targeting: Sellers are given all the control to promote the SKUs for a specific keyword, and control the bid pricing of each individual SKU. This is a good option for those who want to regularly update the performance of the campaign.

Setting up Sponsored Product Ads is simple to start, but can also be something that is refined over time to optimize for greatest conversion. At the end of the day, the more strategy and consideration that is placed in the campaign development, the more successful a campaign will be.

As a scalable solution for sellers to manage their own advertising dollars, increase conversion, and drive sales, the Sponsored Product Ads tool gives the power to promote directly to consumers (D2C).

If you are looking to launch Sponsored Product Ads for your listings, simply visit Seller Portal, navigate to the “Manage Promotion” tab, click “Manage Campaign”, and enter the seller ID number in the upper right corner to begin. The easy step-by-step guide can be viewed at any time for guidance. If you have any questions, reach out to your Account Manager or contact us here at MarektplaceMarketing@Newegg.com.