Ecommerce ads: the practical guide

A store with one good creative has a good week. A store with a rotation has a good quarter. Everything below is about building the rotation.

The three jobs your ads have

• Introduce, a stranger meets the product. Broad, visual, one claim.
• Convince, someone who is interested needs proof. Reviews, comparisons, close-ups, guarantees.
• Close, someone who left needs a reason to come back today. Offer, stock, delivery date.

Most struggling accounts are running three versions of "introduce" and wondering why the funnel does not fill. Look at your active creatives and label each one with one of those three words. The gap is usually obvious within a minute.

Formats that earn their place

• Product on a clean surface, one line of copy, the workhorse, endlessly reusable.
• In-use in a real room. Sells size and context better than any spec line.
• The review screenshot, set properly instead of pasted. Cheapest trust you can buy.
• Before and after, where the category allows it.
• The comparison grid: yours against the way people solve it today.

A rotation you can keep up

Ship three new creatives a week, retire the two worst, and keep the best performer running until it has been beaten twice. That is roughly forty new creatives a quarter, impossible by hand, ordinary once the ideas arrive per product instead of per blank page.

The landing page is part of the ad

If the ad promises "two-day delivery" and the product page mentions it in the seventh line, you paid for the click and lost it at the top of the page. Whatever the creative says should be the first thing the page repeats.

Scaling an ecommerce account is mostly a creative supply problem wearing a media-buying costume.