E-commerce advertising strategies: How to drive sales, traffic, and growth

For over a decade, e-commerce advertising has been defined by two channels: search and social. 

Although both are often considered inexpensive lower-funnel tactics, with e-commerce accounting for over 23% of total retail sales worldwide in 2025 and expected to account for nearly a quarter of all retail sales by 2030, it’s arguably never been more difficult to capture attention and drive conversions online.

To stand out from the crowd, success today requires more than activating ads in one place—it requires connecting with customers across the entire buyer journey.

To do that, brands need to move beyond isolated tactics and connect media, data, and measurement to engage shoppers more effectively and understand what’s actually driving results.

Whether you’re marketing for an emerging DTC company, a fast-growing e-commerce retailer, or an established enterprise brand, here are the e-commerce advertising strategies you need to know to reach the right customers and drive more sales.

But first, a few basics for beginners. Skip ahead if you want to go straight to the strategies.

What is e-commerce advertising?

E-commerce advertising is the use of paid digital ads to promote products and drive traffic to an online store or product page. It helps brands reach customers across digital advertising channels such as search, social, display, retail media, and connected TV (CTV) to increase visibility, generate conversions, and grow online sales.

By 2028, more than half of people worldwide ages 14 and older are expected to shop online, making e-commerce advertising essential for connecting with shoppers across nearly every generation.

What are the benefits of e-commerce advertising?

E-commerce advertising helps brands increase brand awareness, reach high-intent shoppers, and drive traffic and sales more quickly than organic tactics alone. With the right programmatic advertising platform, marketers can also access detailed performance data, allowing them to optimize campaigns and better understand what’s influencing conversions.

What are the main advertising channels for e-commerce marketers?

The average person spends hours checking their inbox, scrolling through social media, reading articles online, and streaming TV, providing e-commerce marketers with countless opportunities to reach potential customers in different moments throughout the day.

Here are a few of the most common advertising channels e-commerce marketers can use to connect with shoppers across the buyer journey.

Paid search advertising

A cornerstone of e-commerce advertising, paid search helps e-commerce marketers reach high-intent shoppers who are actively searching for specific products online.

For example, when someone searches Google or Bing for trail running shoes, a paid search ad can help put your brand in front of them at the moment they’re most likely to compare options and make a purchase.

Best used for: Capturing existing demand and driving conversions from shoppers already searching online for the types of products you sell.

Display advertising

Display advertising uses banner ads across websites and apps to keep a brand visible as shoppers browse online. 

Although often seen as an upper-funnel channel, display ads can help build awareness, stay top-of-mind, and reconnect with potential customers throughout the path to purchase.

Best used for: Building awareness, retargeting site visitors, and maintaining visibility across the buyer journey.

Video advertising

Video advertising helps brands use sight, sound, and motion to showcase products and build awareness in a more engaging way than static ads alone. 

For e-commerce marketers, channels like YouTube and social media platforms are especially effective for demonstrating how a product works, highlighting its benefits, and influencing purchase consideration earlier in the buyer journey. 

Marketers can also extend that reach through programmatic video advertising placements on websites where shoppers are researching products, helping brands capture attention while potential customers are actively exploring what to buy.

Best used for: Product education, building awareness, and influencing consideration earlier in the buying process.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising helps e-commerce brands reach shoppers based on their interests, behaviors, and previous interactions with a brand.

Unlike more traditional channels like search, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest give brands a more visual, interactive way to engage consumers as they browse content, discover trends, and explore products they might not know about.

Best used for: Product discovery and driving demand through more visual, interactive ad experiences.

Email marketing

Although not a paid advertising channel, email marketing is still an important part of many e-commerce marketing strategies. It gives e-commerce brands a direct, cost-effective, and reliable way to stay connected with shoppers. At the same time, brands can collect valuable first-party data on customer preferences and how they engage with content, which can inform future campaigns.

Email marketing is especially effective for reaching customers at key moments in the buyer journey, whether that means sending personalized product recommendations or reminding shoppers to return and complete a purchase after leaving items in their cart.

Best used for: Increasing customer retention, cart recovery, and repeat purchases through personalized follow-ups.

Recommended reading: Learn how to create a first-party data strategy

CTV advertising

E-commerce marketers can use CTV advertising to reach audiences with high-impact video ads in more premium, immersive environments—like popular streaming services or live sporting events—than many other digital channels.

Although CTV advertising is often treated as an upper-funnel awareness play, CTV ads can also help influence lower-funnel performance by keeping brands visible throughout the buying journey. In fact, one-third of US viewers have used their CTV devices to complete a purchase after viewing a CTV ad.

Each channel plays a different role throughout the buyer journey. But, as we’re about to get into, the strongest e-commerce advertising strategies ultimately connect channels, data, and measurement together to create more coordinated customer experiences and clearer visibility into performance.

Best used for: Reaching new audiences in high-attention moments and supporting conversions by keeping your brand visible throughout the buyer journey.

What are some effective e-commerce advertising strategies?

Whether you’re looking to acquire new customers or upsell existing ones, here are some strategies you can use to reach more qualified shoppers and drive better results.

Personalize ads at scale with DCO

Serving the same ad to every shopper is rarely effective.

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) helps you tailor product recommendations, messaging, images, and calls to action based on audience insights, real-time data, and campaign performance—making it easier to deliver more relevant ads without sacrificing scale.

Rather than manually building countless ad variations, you can use DCO tools—like StackAdapt’s self-serve DCO solution—to automate creative variations, automatically adjust pricing or inventory based on real-time product data, and improve overall campaign efficiency.

Case in point: internal StackAdapt platform data shows that advertisers who used DCO saw a 32% higher click-through rate (CTR) and a 56% lower cost per click (CPC).

Read StackAdapt’s The State of Programmatic Advertising 2026 to learn more.

Reconnect with shoppers using dynamic retargeting

Not every shopper converts the first time they visit your site. In fact, many of them browse products, add them to their carts, and leave without making a purchase.

According to Statista, worldwide cart abandonment rates have been steadily increasing since 2013, with 70.2% of online shopping carts being abandoned in 2026.

That’s a lot of missed opportunities.

Dynamic retargeting helps you re-engage customers who have already shown interest in your brand’s products by serving personalized ads based on the specific items they previously viewed, clicked, or added to their cart, but either forgot about or weren’t ready to buy.

Leveraging first-party data from integrations through e-commerce platforms like Shopify, dynamic retargeting can be used in channels like native or display to reconnect with shoppers who have already shown interest in your products but need one last nudge to place an order, improving return on ad spend (ROAS) and customer lifetime value.

Use personalization to make ads and offers more relevant

Shoppers are more likely to engage with your brand when your marketing reflects what they actually care about.

But many retailers still have room to improve when it comes to delivering the kinds of personalized experiences shoppers now expect. 

A 2025 study found that 41% of consumers said their favorite retailer treats them “like strangers” and 68% said ads only felt “somewhat relevant” to their needs and preferences.

To improve personalization, use behavioral data to tailor product recommendations, discounts, and messaging based on each customer’s interests, preferences, and stage in the buyer journey.

This can be especially effective when different shoppers respond to different incentives, whether that’s a loyalty-based offer or tailored ads based on the product categories they’re browsing.

When used strategically, personalization can help you improve relevance, increase conversions, and build stronger customer relationships.

Expand your reach with lookalike targeting

If you target the same customer segments over and over, you’ll eventually see diminishing returns.

Lookalike audience targeting helps you find new customers who behave similarly to your brand’s existing buyers, making it easier to scale beyond your current audience and reach new shoppers who are more likely to convert.

Lookalike targeting is especially effective when built from high-value actions—like completed purchases—captured via a pixel or from first-party customer data in a CRM, helping you scale campaigns using audiences that closely resemble your brand’s best customers.

Use competitor conquesting to reach shoppers interested in similar products or brands

Competitor conquesting helps you get in front of shoppers who are already researching or buying from competing brands. 

Combining tactics like keyword rule targeting, third-party store visitation data, and category browsing behavior, you can narrow your audience targeting to reach people who are either actively comparing similar products or already engaging with competitor brands.

For example, a premium women’s swimwear brand could target shoppers who are browsing for one-pieces and also searching for competing brands in the same category. 

Instead of using broad audience targeting to tailor ads to potential customers based on generic demographics—like “women between the ages of 35 and 60”—competitor conquesting lets you reach the exact consumers who would be most interested in your (and similar) brands.

Narrow in on high-intent shoppers with intersection audiences

Broad audience targeting can help increase reach, but it often includes plenty of people who are unlikely to convert. 

A lesser-known strategy in the world of e-commerce advertising, intersection audiences allow you to combine multiple targeting criteria—such as browsing behavior and category interest—using first- and third-party data to focus your ad spend on a smaller group of more relevant shoppers.

For example, a luggage brand could target people who have recently booked hotel accommodations for an upcoming trip, are actively browsing luggage and travel accessories online, and have shown interest in premium travel products in the past. 

Instead of relying on a single audience segment, this strategy helps you narrow in on shoppers who are actually preparing for a trip and looking for the kinds of products your brand actually sells.

Although it could potentially narrow down your audience from 10 million prospective customers to a few hundred thousand, by focusing on a smaller, more qualified group of shoppers, you can improve efficiency and increase the likelihood of conversion.

What are the most important KPIs for e-commerce marketers?

Measuring performance in e-commerce advertising requires more than looking at clicks alone. 

To understand what’s actually driving traffic, sales, and efficiencies, you need to track a mix of engagement, conversion, and revenue-focused KPIs.

Here are some common e-commerce advertising metrics you should track:

KPI	What it measures	Why it matters
Conversions	The total number of times a desired action—such as a purchase—takes place after someone interacts with your ad.	Helps you understand which ads are driving engagement and sales.
Click conversions	The number of users who completed a conversion after clicking on an ad.	Shows how effectively your ads and landing pages work together.
Cost per acquisition (CPA)	The average amount you spend to generate each conversion.	Helps you evaluate how efficiently your strategy is driving purchases or other high-value actions, such as email signups or loyalty program registrations.
CPC	The average amount you pay for each click generated by your campaign.	Helps you assess how cost-efficient your ads are at driving traffic to a product page or online store.
CTR	The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.	Indicates how compelling your creative, messaging, and targeting are to your audience.
Conversion rate (CVR)	The percentage of clicks that resulted in a conversion.	Helps you understand how well post-click experiences—such as landing pages, product pages, or checkout flows—are turning traffic into customers.
ROAS	The amount of revenue your campaign generates for every dollar spent on advertising.	Shows whether your campaigns are generating sales growth, not just clicks or conversions.

How do you measure the success of e-commerce advertising?

Measuring the success of e-commerce advertising campaigns involves more than tracking clicks, impressions, or ROAS. 

To understand what’s actually driving conversions, revenue, and long-term growth, you need to understand how channels work together to influence customer decisions and shape brand perception.

Here are four ways you can do that:

Understand how each channel contributes to performance with cross-channel attribution

Cross-channel attribution helps you measure how different advertising channels work together to influence conversions and revenue. It does this by connecting campaign, site, and conversion data across channels to show how each touch point contributes throughout the customer journey.

Unlike last-click attribution models, cross-channel attribution provides a more complete view of what’s driving results, making it easier to optimize campaigns, understand channel influence, and make more informed media buying decisions.

Use incrementality testing to measure true campaign impact

Incrementality testing helps you understand whether e-commerce marketing campaigns are driving net-new conversions, sales, or revenue beyond what would have occurred organically without ad exposure.

In StackAdapt, incrementality testing compares an exposed group that saw your ads with a similar control group that didn’t, making it possible to isolate the true sales lift and incremental ROAS generated by your ad campaigns. 

In doing so, incrementality testing provides a clearer view of real business impact, helping you justify ad spend, improve budget allocation, and prove the real value of programmatic advertising in acquiring net-new customers to internal stakeholders or clients.

Gauge influence beyond clicks with view-through conversions

View-through conversions measure when a shopper sees an ad, doesn’t click on it, but later completes a desired action—such as making a purchase—within a defined attribution window.

Think of view-through conversions like a goal in a soccer match: the scorer may get the majority of the credit for the goal, but the play often depends on a series of passes from other players that made the goal possible in the first place.

The same is often true in e-commerce advertising. Although a shopper might click a search or social ad right before converting, that conversion often depends on many earlier touch points through other advertising channels, which help introduce your brand, build familiarity, and move the customer closer to a decision.

When running cross-channel campaigns, view-through conversions provide a more complete picture of performance by showing you how ad exposure can influence sales beyond what last-click attribution can capture alone.

Measure shifts in awareness and perception with brand lift studies

Brand lift studies help you understand whether your campaigns are changing how people think and feel about your e-commerce brand. They typically work by surveying people who were exposed to an ad and comparing their responses to those who weren’t, measuring metrics like awareness, ad recall, and brand favorability.

In StackAdapt, brand lift studies can be set up directly in platform through a self-serve workflow, making it easier to launch studies quickly, monitor results in real time, and evaluate the impact of upper-funnel campaigns.

E-commerce advertising case studies

Now that you know how to build an e-commerce advertising strategy and measure what’s actually driving results, here are some examples of how digital marketing agencies have partnered with StackAdapt to drive growth for the e-commerce brands they work with.

Gelpro grows national awareness with programmatic advertising

Gelpro, an e-commerce brand in the collagen and whole-food supplements space, wanted to grow its national presence in an increasingly competitive market. By partnering with Adcreators and using StackAdapt’s targeting capabilities, the brand achieved a 1,000% ROAS while reducing CPA to $13 USD. Read the full case study to learn more.

Lonbali lowers CPA by moving beyond social ads

Maktagg had traditionally relied on social media to drive conversions. That changed when the agency tested programmatic advertising with StackAdapt for its e-commerce client, Lonbali. Using a multi-channel mix of native and display ads alongside the StackAdapt pixel, Maktagg was able to track the path to conversion, attribute revenue more clearly, and improve performance, reducing CPA by 53%.

Pit Viper increases CTR by 110% with custom native and display ads

The Stable wanted to reach new audiences in more engaging ways while hitting a 400% ROAS spend goal for its client, Pit Viper—a performance eyewear brand. Working with StackAdapt’s award-winning Creative Studio, they developed custom countdown display ads that helped build urgency around key promotions, increasing CTR by 110%. Learn The Stable’s full programmatic e-commerce advertising strategy.

TUSHY turns multi-channel strategy into 65,000 conversions

Effective Spend wanted to help its client, TUSHY—a modern bidet brand—increase awareness and grow sales through its e-commerce site. Using a multi-channel strategy with StackAdapt, the agency generated more than 65,000 unique conversions, achieved a 0.13% CTR, and delivered performance below its target CPA.

The future of e-commerce advertising in 2026 and beyond

As e-commerce advertising evolves, brands will have more ways to reach shoppers, streamline their workflows, and orchestrate campaigns across channels. 

Here are four trends shaping where e-commerce advertising is headed over the next few years:

AI shopping assistants will reshape product discovery

AI chat platforms are starting to play a larger role in how shoppers research and compare products online. OpenAI, for example, introduced shopping research features in ChatGPT last year and, more recently, new ways for advertisers to reach shoppers through ChatGPT ads via partners like StackAdapt.

As a result, EMARKETER projects that AI platforms could drive up to 13.7% of e-commerce sales by 2029 if adoption of AI-assisted shopping accelerates.

That growth ultimately depends on how comfortable shoppers become with AI playing a larger role in purchase decisions.

Over time, as AI becomes more embedded in everyday life, AI shopping assistants could move online shopping from AI-assisted discovery toward more autonomous agents that help narrow choices, recommend products, and handle more aspects of the buying process.

In the meantime, because trust in fully autonomous agents is still evolving, e-commerce brands should focus on making product information easy for AI systems to crawl, interpret, and surface in AI-generated conversations and test emerging LLM advertising formats like ChatGPT ads to increase visibility as more shopping journeys begin inside AI chat tools.

Learn more about how to run ads in ChatGPT with StackAdapt and get early access.

Commerce media will expand reach for e-commerce brands

Although retail media networks have grown quickly in recent years, they don’t always allow e-commerce brands to activate their data in retailer-owned environments, making it harder to extend reach beyond a single retailer’s ecosystem.

Commerce media networks in the travel, last-mile delivery, and finance spaces are filling the gaps.

By leveraging first-party data from transactions, customer behavior, and loyalty programs, e-commerce brands can reach shoppers with more relevant ads based on what they browse, buy, and engage with elsewhere.

According to McKinsey, commerce media is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 21% from 2023 to 2027—outpacing display, CTV, and even search. By 2027, it’s expected to account for 20% of total advertising budgets. 

As that growth continues, e-commerce advertisers will have more opportunities to activate commerce data across a wider range of channels, giving them more ways to reach shoppers than ever before.

Generative AI speeds up creative production

Creating ads is typically time-consuming for most teams. But generative AI continues to speed up the process at record rates.

According to the IAB, AI usage in advertising is increasing, with 83% of ad executives now saying their company has deployed AI in the creative process, up from 60% in 2024.

The main reason? Cost efficiency and time savings, with 64% of survey respondents citing lower production costs as the main benefit, followed by 60% who said AI helps their teams save time.

For e-commerce marketers, that means producing and updating ad creatives faster, testing more variations, and bringing campaigns to life more efficiently. 

For example, tools like StackAdapt’s AI-powered Creative Builder can help teams generate, adapt, and resize assets more quickly, making it easier to keep creative fresh and maintain brand consistency across ad placements.

E-commerce advertising will become more consolidated

As e-commerce advertising becomes more complex, many brands are finding that fragmented tools and channel-specific platforms make it harder to manage campaigns efficiently and understand what’s actually driving results.

Running CTV ads in one platform, retargeting site visitors through another, activating display ads somewhere else, and then measuring their performance across separate systems creates unnecessary silos and makes it difficult to connect media, data, and measurement across the full customer journey.

That’s why the future of e-commerce advertising is more consolidated.

By bringing channels, data, and measurement together, brands can streamline execution, activate first-party data more easily across channels, and make data-informed decisions to improve performance.

To learn how StackAdapt can help you orchestrate e-commerce marketing campaigns from a single platform, speak with our team.

E-commerce advertising FAQs