Monitoring of Banner ads in e-commerce

Banner ads are among the most popular promotion methods in online stores. Their number is often annoying to users. However, it is still one of the best ways to communicate with the client regardless of the industry. It is worth remembering, that one image is often worth more than 1000 words, which is why this type of marketing is very effective. 

So what are the banners in the online store for? 

The most important goal is, of course, to persuade potential customers to buy the promoted products or services, but in more detail: 

• promoting new products 
• presentation of special offers and promotions 
• informing customers about product features and advantages 
• informing about price changes 
• PR activities 
• Cross-sell and upsell 

Of course, the banner locations on the online store websites are used not only by producers and distributors but also by the stores themselves to show their advertisements. 

How can we use information about banners: 

What should the data describing the banners include: 

• the content on the banner 
• products (sometimes there are several of them) recognized for unambiguous identification 
• the page on which the advertisement is located 
• location on pages 
• evaluation of the banner’s visibility on the website – preferably the point score depending on the location 

• banner size 
• type of banner, e.g. whether it is on its own or a slider 

If we have collected information about banners, we can proceed to use them. 

Verification of views of purchased banners 

Buying a banner ad, as a producer or distributor, we want the store to meet the agreed conditions as to the place of displaying ads, frequency, period, etc. Such verification is not simple and is often based on banner screenshots provided by the store, with the date and time on the system bar. From talking to stores I know, that they have tools to generate such “evidence” automatically, not even to cheat someone, it is simply faster. 

The best way to solve this problem is to use an external tool that will regularly check whether the ad is displayed, and send notifications to the user when the campaign does not meet the purchased assumptions. 

Compare the visibility and quantity of banners with the competition 

Using a tool for advertisements and banners monitoring, it is worthwhile analyzing competitors’ activities. In particular: 

• which products do they advertise? which product is crucial? 
• what features of the products they advertise 
• price changes 
• what audiences they are trying to reach 
• in what periods does it promote its offers 
• in which store promotions the competition promote its products (e.g. 0% financing, multi-buys, free shipping, etc.) 

All the data enable analyzing brand promotion and communication strategy,  but what’s more important, it allows for comparing strategies between the analyzed brands. 

We should remember to pay attention to the location of the banners, not only the quantity, because even a large number of ads placed in poor locations may bring less profit, than one at the top of the home page of the store. 

Analysis of what impact competitive promotional activities make on your sales 

The collected data can also allow us to analyze the impact of competitors’ activities on our products. In particular, we can verify what types of promotions or promoted products of the competition, affect the sale of our products. Such information allows us to react properly as well as enables better sales forecasting. 

Summary 

Online stores are a very important place, which allows convincing the customer to buy our product. It is a real showcase for our offer, and banner advertising is a significant part of the brand’s exposure (more about brand monitoring here). Therefore, to make the right business decisions regarding the marketing strategy, we have to have data on the visibility of our products compared to the competition.