Why eCommerce Businesses Need to Make Every Click Count During a Recession

With cost of living increases and the threat of a recession lingering, it’s a tough time for online retailers, and unfortunately many eCommerce businesses are struggling to make ends meet. During any financial crisis, it’s common for brands to spend less and save more in a bid to weather the storm, however history shows us that businesses that continue to invest in marketing are more likely to survive and thrive in the longer term. 

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Rather than reduce budgets, consider digging deeper into the effectiveness and efficiency of your campaigns, and concentrate on extracting as much value from every click throughout the customer journey, from discovery to purchase.

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Focus on quality over quantity

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Marketing campaigns that deliver high volumes of traffic may initially seem successful, however as with likes, views and impressions, traffic quantity should be regarded as a vanity metric. The numbers that really matter are conversion rates, basket value, revenue and profit, so as an eCommerce marketer you should look to improve the quality of visitors, particularly during an economic downturn when consumers are likely to reduce non-essential spending.

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Having a clear understanding of your customer personas is a solid starting point, as it enables you to build carefully targeted ad campaigns - including retargeting ads - that show the right messages to ready-to-buy shoppers. Research-driven SEO is also critical to steer relevant users to your store, along with personalised email campaigns and a value-focused content marketing strategy that drives genuine brand engagement.

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Deliver an optimised experience

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Even when you attract droves of key demographic visitors to your store, if your site is insufficiently optimised or delivers a poor user experience, you’ll quickly lose potential customers that you’ve worked hard to engage. It takes shoppers less than a few seconds to judge an online store, particularly one that’s slow to load, with most customers quick to abandon sites that don’t meet their digital expectations.

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Sluggish eCommerce stores are also much more likely to be penalised by Google, resulting in lower rankings within its search engine results, as mobile loading speeds, user interactivity and visual stability of web pages are key factors in its current algorithm. 

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That means that conversion rate optimisation should form part of your marketing arsenal, with the aim of streamlining the purchasing process and ensuring that your site scores highly across Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics. 

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Keep your traffic clean 

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On top of regularly reviewing which channels work best for your business, it’s also recommended that you drill down into the efficiency of your marketing efforts to ensure that you don’t waste your budget on low return campaigns. While most marketers understand that PPC ads need to be regularly monitored and adjusted to avoid overspending in the wrong areas, invalid traffic is a huge hindrance to return on ad spend (ROAS) that’s often overlooked. 

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Through a combination of malicious, non-malicious, and accidental clicks across your digital ads, your business runs the risk of losing up to 30% of its advertising budget to traffic that will never convert, making it essential for you to implement a combination of eCommerce fraud detection and eCommerce fraud prevention measures. 

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One of the largest issues facing eCommerce advertising budgets is the threat of returning users navigating to your website using brand search campaigns; meaning search engine spend is wasted on returning customers. The action is not malicious, but can drain huge amounts of spend which otherwise could be driving new, conversion-ready traffic to your website. As experts in the specific requirements of eCommerce and online retail brands, we built a feature designed to mitigate this threat; shadow campaigns. Shadow campaigns put you in total control of how many times a user clicks on your ads across your standard shopping campaigns, preventing budget-draining repeat clickers. This not only saves your budget for users who are more likely to convert but also helps to reinvest into higher profit-margin products for your business. The result? Massively reduced your customer acquisition cost (CAC) while still maintaining visibility on the search engine results page. 

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As global specialists in this field, TrafficGuard beats other eCommerce fraud prevention companies with our full funnel approach, which protects your business every step of the way. By using smart technology to detect, mitigate and report on digital ad fraud before it even hits your advertising budget, TrafficGuard not only keeps your site traffic clean, but also empowers you to achieve maximum ROI across your marketing strategies. During times of economic downturn, protecting your eCommerce business from the effects of invalid traffic ensures your marketing ROI and bottom line remain healthy.

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Ready to find out more? Uncover how much invalid traffic is costing your eCommerce performance by booking an expert audit, and receive a free personalised report for your business.