What Growing Digital Ad Spending Means for E-Commerce

Recently, digital ad spending surpassed TV spending by $31 billion worldwide. Of those digital ads, mobile ad spending accounted for 70.3 percent of investments, meaning advertisers have concentrated their dollars on mobile traffic as consumers continue to spend more time on mobile devices. As an e-commerce marketer, this shift in ad spending may not come as a surprise to you. Quite honestly, it’s about time digital ad spending took the No. 1 spot. Instead, what you should be focused on is how to capitalize on this generated web traffic. How do you engage with consumers so they’re more likely to buy?

The Challenge E-Commerce Marketers Face Today

Consumers today have an attention span of 8.25 seconds, and only convert at a rate of 1 percent. The challenge for most e-commerce marketers is that users have a thirst for content that's difficult to satisfy. They expect to be entertained and engaged when they visit a website, which requires constant curation and tools to automate content presentation. Video has long been the perfect medium for this; it enables retailers to deliver engaging online experiences that are scalable and optimized for conversion. Consider a few fun video facts:

• by 2019, 80 percent of internet traffic will be video;
• the average user spends 88 percent more time on a website with video;
• videos on social media generate 1,200 percent the amount of shares than text and images combined; and
• 95 percent of a message is retained when watched in video compared to 10 percent when read in text.

The truth is companies that currently use video grow revenue 49 percent faster than non-video companies. Video has proven to be the best way to improve conversion rates for e-commerce sites as it engages visitors, improves search engine optimization, and boosts conversion rates by three times to five times.

Optimizing Your Conversion Strategy With Video

OK, so let’s say you have a video player in place that helps you present video on your site. How do you then go about optimizing video to improve your site’s conversion rate? A great place to start is by understanding your viewers to better market to them. By creating video audiences you can better understand content viewing habits and begin to segment and deliver highly targeted video content that’s catered to each type. This enables you to then develop and deploy unique branded remarketing strategies that leverage optimized video content and boost conversion rates.

Fortunately, there are smart video platforms out there specifically designed for video commerce. They allow marketers to source video content that can be matched with recommended products and presented as personalized, shoppable video. These platforms even take it a step further by dynamically testing video performance to deliver highly optimized video content throughout your site. They help bridge the gap between video and commerce, allowing you to optimize your conversion strategy with video and create a memorable shopping experience to better cater to today’s online consumer.

Allon Caidar is the CEO and co-founder of TVPage, a video commerce cloud that enables merchants and publishers to deliver engaging, shoppable video experiences that increase product sales.