Which traffic acquisition levers should you use for your e-commerce site?

Do you want to attract more visitors to your site but don't know how to go about it?

Do you want to find the most effective strategy for your business and the right solutions for your budget?

Here's what you need to know about the different traffic acquisition levers.

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Traffic acquisition is essential: why?

Without traffic acquisition, only your existing customers will be in contact with your e-shop. You won't be able to gather enough information to optimise your offer and thus build customer loyalty, increase your conversion rate or attract new prospects.

Without traffic acquisition, your sales will stagnate or even decline - even your most loyal customers won't be enough to make you profitable. You won't be able to increase your turnover and raise the budget you need to expand your brand awareness.

Having established this, let's take a look at what you can do!

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1st lever: natural referencing

SEO and SEA... what's the difference?

Natural referencing or SEO ("search engine optimisation") is "free" (apart from the time you have to devote to it and the possibility of delegating some of the work to a service provider).It is "free" (apart from the time involved and the possibility of delegating some of the work to a service provider), and differs from paid search or SEA ("search engine advertising"). The two can be combined.

SEA is responsible for the results that appear at the top of Google search pages, with the word "ad" (or in the "Google shopping" section). These fast-paying advertising actions consist of "Adwords campaigns" (Google's advertising network) initiated by sites to appear in the first results of a search and therefore be more visible.

This is a definite advantage, but it comes at a high cost - so pay attention to profitability.

Then there are the sites that have been referenced thanks to SEO, an action that is free but whose benefits can be seen after several months.

The benefits of SEO

SEO should be seen as a long-term investment, because if you manage to position your free website correctly in the Google search results, you'll be sure to get continuous traffic and new visitors every day.

This means you can predict your turnover and plan your investments.

In short, SEO has less immediate results than SEA, but they are also less random and more sustainable .

How Google works for natural referencing

Google obviously doesn't reveal everything about how it works, but there are a few key lessons that will help you optimise your site's SEO and, above all, banish certain practices that will earn you Google's wrath.

Google uses a robot (or GoogleBot) that constantly analyses new pages to record ( index) them. It uses hundreds of parameters to judge where your site should be ranked. The two main criteria? Relevance and popularity.

To be relevant, your site needs to provide effective answers to the questions people ask when they search for something. Popularity means getting qualified links to your site.

If you don't have the budget to entrust SEO to a service provider, you can take a less expensive SEO training course that will allow you to manage your natural referencing internally.

Second lever: social networks

Social networks are now an essential communication strategy, but they are also an important lever for attracting qualified traffic.

Social networks: an essential tool for raising brand awareness

Buyers of e-commerce sites like to find out beforehand via social networks to check whether the brand corresponds to their expectations and desires, read reviews, check its reputation... A small number of subscribers will not be reassuring. On the contrary, a large community will suggest that your brand is too 🙂

Above all, people who subscribe to a brand via its networks are more loyal to it. By regularly seeing your posts, then liking and commenting on them, your brand will be more and more present in their minds and they will think more spontaneously of you when making purchases.

Not to mention the virtuous circle of the Facebook or Instagram algorithm : the more engagement you show with a brand's posts (by viewing, liking, commenting, saving or sharing them), the more it will appear in your 'feed' (the stream of posts you see when you open Instagram or Facebook) and that of the brand's other fans, because Facebook will judge this content to be relevant.

Social networks: a "free" but time-consuming tool

These days, it's hard to imagine a brand not having a presence on social networks. But getting involved means agreeing to devote a minimum amount of time to building and animating your community.

Your fans and followers will expect you to provide them with attractive content (although communities are more tolerant of smaller brands), interact with them, answer their questions... In short, like your website, your networks must help solve your customers' problems.

So there's no point in opening up your networks unless you're sure you can play by the rules. If a fan of your brand notices that your networks are inactive, they will be disappointed and you will lose credibility. The sentence will be even more terrible if they notice that you don't respond to comments from unhappy customers.

But rest assured, up to a few hundred subscribers, you can manage your networks yourself by monitoring them morning and night. Beyond that, you can call on the services of a Community Manager.

Social networks should not be an end in themselves

However, be careful not to "keep" your fans solely on your networks. Encourage them to visit your site (you can put links in your Facebook posts, in your Instagram bio - and in your stories if you have more than 10,000 subscribers) and to sign up to your newsletter to build up a valuable database.

The most direct way of attracting traffic from your networks to your site is through sponsored posts and advertising campaigns. Here too, there are many rules.

Third lever: advertising

The costs of advertising

Although advertising generates traffic almost immediately, it comes at a high cost, which means you need to think carefully about your campaign.

👉 If your campaign is profitable, you'll have even more cash to plough back into advertising to further increase your sales.

👉 If it's not profitable, you'll lose cash, which could jeopardise your business.

How do you optimise advertising?

To be effective and encourage conversion, a campaign must be attractive and broadcast to a sufficiently large target audience. Otherwise, you're investing at a loss.

As network users are increasingly exposed to advertising messages, you need to be even more inventive to capture their attention. Advertising non-quality content will not work and the investment will be useless.

What's more, advertising is subject to an increasingly expensive bidding system for exposure to your targets, making low investment counter-productive. Competition is fierce and places are expensive!

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Fourth lever: influencers

Before benefiting from its own reputation, your brand can rely on the legitimacy of third parties, in particular influencers - instagrammers and youtubers in particular.

Win over a community that is already loyal and in tune with your values

Although they may not be as fooled as they used to be, the people who follow an influencer lend them loyalty and credibility. If they speak positively about your brand, they are engaging their whole image, encouraging their fans to take a less suspicious look at the promise of your products. You will then benefit from a legitimacy that would take you longer to build yourself.

Drive traffic to your site via influencers

You can organise a competition with an influencer to encourage their followers to follow you too. In this way, your networks will be the first gateway to your site.

You can also initiate a partnership with an influencer by offering their community a discount that will make a visit to your site more tempting. The "chance" discovery of your products, if they are convincing, could win the loyalty of these new customers.

"Choosing your influencers

While it's important to target influencers who are in line with your values, the final choice will often depend on your wallet.

The better known an influencer is (and therefore the larger their community), the more expensive the negotiation. You run the risk of not attracting their interest if your budget or reputation is too low.

Betting on more modest or even "micro" influencers will certainly generate less visibility for your brand but potentially more engagement, as influencers with small communities often have very loyal and committed fans.

Deals with influencers who are still building their communities can also be free 😉

Natural referencing, social networks, advertising, influencers: it's up to you to choose the lever(s) suited to your site, your budget but also what you want to dedicate time and effort to 🙂

Guest article. Expert contributors are authors who are independent of the Appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.