CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT

Online advertising is the heart of e-commerce: without it, the online shop would be like a vendor situated in the middle of a barren desert, with no people in sight. Online advertising means investing heavily in various digital media channels, and such investments must be programmed and controlled in order to achieve the expected investment/turnover ratio.

In the past, if you wanted to open an online store, it was pertinent to choose the proper online payment Gateway when investing in a sales platform. Then, you just had to organize your logistics in order to efficiently receive online orders without expending too much on SEO optimization. Today, this is no longer the case. Once the e-commerce site is set up and published, it's only 10 percent of the work and you're only ready to receive customers. Nonetheless, customers must still be found and convinced to enter the store. SEO certainly remains a channel, but it is of almost no importance to young shops and, in any case, only has the ability to bring up to 40% of customers. 

First of all, you need to understand the behavior of potential customers and decide when it is best to intercept them. This also means choosing an effective message. Ideally, if customers are already interested in buying the products, this message should convince them to take a look at your offer. This task can be relatively easy to accomplish, by investing in search engines and retargeting campaigns. Yet, it will limit the store's sales potential to a maximum of 10%. To maximize your potential, you must invest in identifying potential customers who may be interested in buying. The goal is to stimulate their curiosity and develop their interest in the product as well as the store. 

The first thing an e-commerce marketing office needs to do in terms of programming digital campaigns is to create a communication program, which is divided into two macro-categories of campaigns:

• VERTICAL - Thematic campaigns scheduled over a well defined period (from/to).
• HORIZONTAL - Generic campaigns or automatic audiences without a (continuous) defined period.

More specifically, vertical campaigns focus on events that characterize the buying interest in the online store: Valentine's Day, Black Friday, Christmas, etc. Horizontal campaigns are those that we program in digital media channels without a well-defined start and end date. They use automatic user ID ratings, such as from users with specific interests or users who have visited the store recently. Within macro groups, campaigns develop into second-level groups that identify the type of advertising traffic:

• PROSPECTING - New user who does not know the campaign in payment channels.
• RETARGETING - A user who already knows the campaign in payment channels.
• AFFILIATION - Users from campaigns in affiliation programs or partner sites with traffic tracking.
• INFLUENCER - Users sent by online and social influencers.
• DIRECT - Traffic from direct marketing campaigns such as email, mobile, etc. Usually users registered in CRM.
• ORGANIC TRAFFIC - Users directed to the site by search engines, untraced referrals, etc.
• OTHER  - Other types of untracked and unrecognized traffic.

The last level of detail in a campaign is the digital media channels in which it launches and invests.

Each horizontal/vertical campaign (or prospecting/retargeting/etc.) must then be published in the digital, paid or direct, or organic media channels. A good practice is to create an inventory of digital media channels that brings the users to the e-commerce site. The inventory is a list of channels, defined one-to-one by the type of traffic they represent and the supplier. In short, each channel is characterized by:

• MEDIUM - Channel traffic type. This is usually the second level of organization of campaigns. The campaigns types are prospecting, retargeting, affiliation, influencer, direct, organic.
• SOURCE - Traffic provider. Such as Google, Facebook, Adroll, Pinterest, etc.
• NAME - The name you assign to the channel.
• SPONSOR - Flag identifying the paid traffic channels.

 

So, a supplier like Facebook can characterize several digital media channels. For example: Facebook Prospecting, Facebook Retargeting, Facebook Organic (shop pages), Instagram, messenger, whatsapp, etc.

Each campaign/channel must also have a tracking link that allows Analytics systems to track the source of traffic and classify data, all in an organized manner within campaigns and their channels. To do this, tracking variables must be added to the Landing Page link. The most common ones are those used by Google Analytics called UTMs. In the case of Slymetrix Analytics, there is only one variable that identifies the campaign/channel relationship. The Google Analytics UTMs used are:

 

• utm_medium - to populate with medium name (traffic type);
• utm_source - to populate with vendor name (traffic name);
• utm_campaign - to populate with the name given to the campaign.

However, for those who don't use Google Analytics, traffic is attributed to the medium/source/campaign based on the organizational logic of the individual channel. Additionally, once the channel inventory has been established, a new organizational logic will be developed for UTM. Beginning from the first day of application, Analytics will create inequality in the channel for the previous days. 

Lastly, as it is the final advertising campaign of programming activity, the investment budget must be allocated to each campaign level, as well as its channels of launch and investment. The budget is derived from the marketing budgeting strategy of e-commerce. Each period (e.g. month) represents the investment value to be split amongst each campaign level.