What is the number one thing any online store owner wants? Traffic, traffic, and more traffic. It is no surprise why: an eCommerce store without site traffic is like a corner store without customers through the door.
Traffic leads to potential shoppers. Potential shoppers lead to sales.
Here are the top 7 ways to drive traffic to your online store.
1. Paid Search Traffic
Google currently boasts 3.5 billion searches per day; if you want to be seen and heard, search pages are where it’s at.
While SEO is a long game, paid search traffic with Google Ads is a leading traffic driver. If you’re new to Google Ads, navigating your way around optimization can seem like a full-time job.
Here are some tips to get you started:
1.1 Keep it Real and Relevant
It is essential not to mislead potential shoppers to get clicks. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they will click off your landing page and remain with a negative impression of your brand.
Additionally, it will affect your Ad Rank and quality score, pushing your ad to the bottom of the pile and making it less likely to be displayed. Keeping your keywords relevant to the URL page’s content ensures your ads are relevant.
1.2 Use Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are those terms you use to eliminate words you don’t want to appear on. For example, if you’re selling reading glasses, good negative keywords would be “drinking glasses” or “wine glasses.” You can edit these by using the Google Ads Keyword Tool.
1.3 Don’t set and forget. Optimize instead
Google Ads campaigns cannot be set and left – they need constant monitoring and optimization to ensure you balance what you spend and your ROIs (return on investment). By monitoring, pausing, and tweaking daily budgets, bids, text, and URLs, you will get the best results for your budget.
Besides Google Ads, you may also try advertising on Microsoft Advertising (Bing), Advertise.com, or Amazon Advertising.
If you don’t have the time or know-how, this is one area you may want to outsource to a PPC agency that takes the guesswork and hassle out of bringing in traffic.
Further reading:
- How to Leverage PPC to Grow Your eCommerce Business
- How To Use PPC Ad extensions to improve your sales
- How to Use Google Ads for eCommerce [Ultimate Guide]
2. SEO
Yes, SEO is a long-haul game, but it’s a necessary way to drive traffic. When it comes to PPC vs. SEO, a winning strategy has both.
Good SEO practices will not only ensure you get consistent traffic long-term but will ensure you’re optimized correctly for good Ad Rank scores, which we mentioned above. SEO is not only about providing your meta descriptions are on point, and your titles are tagged; it involves much more.
Here are the top four things online stores can do to improve their SEO continuously:
- Don’t delete out-of-stock product pages. Instead, add relevant similar products to the page as an alternative and use the page to let shoppers know when the product will be back in stock.
- For discontinued product pages, it is not enough to delete them. If a newer model replaces the expired product, a 301 permanent redirect from the older page to the newer model’s URL tells Google you want this page ranked instead. Your SEO value will be retained.
- Add content to your product pages, prioritizing those pages already getting good traffic by adding good descriptions, including internal link architecture, using breadcrumbs, and adding a Relevant Products feed.
- Use a website translation tool to make your content and products available to multiple audiences and languages. Linguise comes with multiple eCommerce integrations like WooCommerce, OpenCart, Magento, or PrestaShop.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing may be “old school,” but it is one of the biggest traffic-driving machines and the cheapest.
Often overlooked by new store owners – with 49% of new small businesses reporting they don’t know where to begin and 40% saying they don’t have the time – developing a good email marketing strategy is imperative for marketing remarketing strategies to bring in good traffic.
The first step in taking advantage of email marketing is building your email list.
Some ways you can get those valuable email addresses to include the following:
- Use social contests with email entries to help you catch new potential shoppers while building brand awareness and social followers.
- Offer site visitors a discount or coupon in exchange for an email address.
- Adding a blog to your online store is a content marketing strategy “must,” however, it is also an excellent way to get subscribers using lead magnets and subscription buttons in your blog section.
The most effective way to use email marketing is to segment your emails to target the right people with the right content, getting the web clicks you want.
In fact, according to MailChimp, segmented email campaigns have an open rate of 14.32% higher than non-segmented campaigns. You can do this by tailoring your sales email campaigns so that people get products they love straight to their inboxes.
4. Display Advertising
Display advertising refers to those ads that appear on websites and other content. These can be banner or block ads, including text, images, video, or audio, and drive traffic to your store. The advantage of these ads is that they will cost you less than search ads but need to be on-the-money with text and images to ensure you get the right clicks and views: i.e., AKA ROIs.
Your biggest display advertising platform is Google Display Network, and it can be a significant traffic booster.
Other display advertising platforms include Microsoft Advertising, Propel Media, BuySellAds, Propeller Ads, and Media.net.
5. Paid Content Distribution
If you have added a blog to your online store to boost SEO and drive content marketing strategy content, this one’s for you. The problem is that you compete with millions of blog posts posted daily.
The paid content distribution will get your blog content on relevant sites, displayed as ‘related’ or ‘sponsored’ posts at the bottom of relevant content.
The main content distribution sites available are Revcontent, LockerDome, Adblade, Taboola, Outbrain, Nativo, Content.ad.
6. Social Media Paid Advertising
Social media is the second largest traffic-driving source for online sellers. However, when there are currently a whopping 2.8 billion global social media users, competing for social space to get traffic means putting money where your mouth is with social media advertising.
Facebook is the top two traffic-driving social media advertising platform for online stores.
According to Statista, Facebook racked up 70 billion dollars in revenue from its ad system last year, making it the king of social media advertising.
They currently have 6 million advertisers, and it’s growing monthly – and chasing Google Ads in the number two traffic-driving spot.
The trick to getting excellent store traffic with Facebook is targeting custom audiences, optimization, and remarketing.
Here are some beginner Facebook advertising tips:
- That video ads are tops.
- Tweak ad placements and distribution times to ensure better results for your spending
- Change headlines and images on high-performing ads every so often to prevent ad fatigue.
- Set up retargeting campaigns to match ads to the ideal potential shopper
- Use lookalike audiences to reach more potential shoppers who match your current customers.
- Keep audiences small and segmented to deliver highly relevant ads.
Besides Facebook, you should check the following social media networks and see which one is tailored best to your primary audience: Twitter Ads, Linkedin Ads, Instagram ads (through Facebook Ads), Pinterest Ads, or why not the new kid in town, loved by the teenagers and not only – TikTok Ads.
Here, at Today’s, we can help you create results-driven Facebook advertising campaigns to increase sales and expand your brand reach.
7. Third-Party Resource Platforms
Resource platforms such as Medium, Quora can be a vast, free traffic-driving force. To get these results, merely pasting a spammy link to your store won’t cut it.
The trick of this way to drive traffic to your eCommerce business is to master these platforms is to offer relevant, helpful, resource-backed expert information in your niche. The bonus of this is traffic and positioning yourself as the top authority within your niche.
Conclusion on Ways to Drive Traffic
The key to driving traffic to your eCommerce store is that you need many traffic streams to bring in the traffic and, ultimately, the sales you want.
We hope these 7 top ways to drive traffic to your store give you a significant boost in adding to your streams and getting more people onto your site.
Relevant case studies of Todays.Agency
- We reached CPAs under 1 Eur in Google and Facebook campaigns
- Temper the Campaign because It Brings Too Many Clients, Too Fast! How to Outstand with an Economic Google Ads Campaign
- A small change to the website increased the conversion rate by 133%
- How we increased sales and decreased CPA from 21,52 £ per purchase to 4.12 £ in Facebook Ads
Have questions or have you discovered a unique way to drive traffic and sales to your store?
We’d love to hear from you, so drop them in the comments below!
