Leverage the power of programmatic in 2024

The ecommerce industry has grown steadily every year since the 2000s, and in 2024, global ecommerce sales are projected to reach $6.3 trillion. By 2027, this jumps to $8 trillion.

Big ecommerce platforms for SMEs include players such as Shopify, Wix Stores and WooCommerce, with Shopify a strong market leader in this space, particularly in the US. But for medium to large businesses with heavy order volumes, BigCommerce is making waves as a go-to provider.

According to the BigCommerce 2022 annual report, the company saw a 48.3% increase in ARR between 2020 and 2021, propelled by the pandemic, followed by a sizeable increase of 16% ARR from 2021 to 2022.

For brands already using BigCommerce, its growth is good news. But how can they capitalise on the sea of data the ecommerce platform amasses?

Plugging into programmatic to get closer to customers

Medium-sized and enterprise ecommerce businesses typically have larger budgets for marketing and advertising. According to the Spring 2023 CMO Survey, the average marketing budget accounts for 10.9% of overall revenues, with over half (53.8%) of those budgets going towards digital marketing including programmatic.

In previous years, third-party cookies made programmatic one of the most effective channels. However, given the shift towards greater transparency and consumer privacy in the form of GDPR and cookie deprecation, the focus has turned towards the importance of harnessing zero and first-party data - data that your customers give to you intentionally and data you’ve collected directly from your audience, drawn from website and mobile app interactions and purchase history, for example.

So can brands run effective programmatic campaigns using first-party data? By investing in technologies like AI and machine learning to help extract actionable insights from first-party data without compromising consumer privacy, brands can actually bid on more effective ad placements than before. This is because these tools enable marketers to optimise targeting and messaging based on real-time consumer behaviours and preferences.

So how can brands leverage programmatic advertising for their BigCommerce-hosted stores?

Using data with app integrations

A medium-sized or enterprise ecommerce business has likely already amassed vast amounts of zero and first-party data, which will be essential when the remaining third-party cookies are put to rest in Chrome later this year. But such data also has the power to increase the effectiveness of programmatic advertising, via a BigCommerce app integration.

A smart-bid integration can enable BigCommerce merchants to use programmatic technology to maximise the potential of zero and first-party data, regardless of their budget.

Smart-bidding technology enables brands to bid on individual impressions, rather than being restricted to a predetermined price floor. That creates a cost-effective strategy because it allows the brand to pay what an impression is worth based on three critical factors of display advertising: time, users, and ad slots, before ever showing the ad.

Benefits of using a smart-bidding app integration

The main benefit for brands when implementing a smart-bidding technology is to gain access to a wider range of placement options, while reducing wasted impressions, and therefore budget.

Other benefits of a smart-bidding app integration include:

• Easy implementation. Since this ad-buying technology is available as a BigCommerce integration, brands can get set up with programmatic advertising in just a few clicks - without having to learn the inner workings of complex programmatic platforms.
• Less reliance on expensive external advertising agencies. While many medium or enterprise organisations feel they need to use a specialist ad agency to implement their programmatic campaigns, this typically comes with a hefty price tag and weighty budget commitments. Using a pre-configured integration in place of an agency can cut considerable supply chain costs, without impacting the effectiveness of campaigns.
• Suitability for brands of all sizes. It’s not just big brands who benefit from using a smart-bidding integration with BigCommerce. Since you can implement smart-bidding technology with no minimum budget, you only pay for the traffic where your ads are running. So for brands big or small, choosing an all-in-one DSP with a low minimum ad spend will help drive ROI from the outset.
• Smart-bidding is privacy-safe. Since the technology works using customer journey data and machine learning, brands can rest easy in the knowledge they are using safe targeting methods, and that customers are enjoying a privacy-friendly environment.

As ecommerce continues to rise, and we continue to navigate in an industry with evolving data changes and regulations, getting branded content in front of the right eyeballs at the right time with a smart-bidding integration tool will be one of the most effective ways to leverage BigCommerce data in 2024.

Also published in: Marketing Donut