The 4 Ps of marketing. Marketing mix. Marketing fundamentals.

Whatever you call them, these elements determine your luck at the high-stakes table of e-commerce:

• Product.
• Price.
• Place.
• Promotion.

Get these right, and you’ll create a loyal fanbase that you can count on for repeat orders, high lifetime value , and customer advocacy.

Neglect or miscalculate them, and they’ll derail your entire process, have an adverse effect on revenue and margin, and allow competitors to overtake you.

Here’s how to consider each of these principles in the context of ecommerce and paid media

Product

As in every business, your product is fundamental to ecommerce success. Even the most amazing marketing campaigns can’t compensate for a broken product or lack of product-market fit.

Think of brands that cycle through many advertising agencies over the course of a year.

Chances are they tend to blame poor planning, subpar campaign execution, or some other deficiency common to all those agencies. The most likely solution is that their product just doesn’t resonate with consumers

Statistically, it’s extremely unlikely for a brand to go through multiple agencies and for all of them to be poor at their craft. When this does happen, it’s usually the agency evaluation process that needs work.

There’s a reason marketers talk about product-market fit over and over.

A product that solves a problem and marketing that puts it in front of the right people are core fundamentals and work like gears in a complex system. Take one out, and the whole process will grind to a halt.

Pricing

Pricing is such an intrinsic part of ecommerce and paid media in general.

If you think people who see your ad aren’t also searching for competitors and doing comparison shopping, your performance numbers will confirm otherwise.

So before you start chasing clicks or even setting budgets, your merchandising play needs to be as accurate as possible.

Consider both absolute pricing and competitiveness to make sure that your product is positioned where you want it to be while still capable of being profitable against your manufacturing and procurement processes.

Google Merchant Center has a price benchmarks feature. It looks at your product feed and shows you how your products compare to other products, brands, and categories of similar natures.

This is highly useful data that can help determine if you’ve priced your products correctly or whether they even fit in the market.

The last thing you want to do is spend thousands on ads only to realize that you got too ambitious or too conservative with your margin.

Additionally, once you’ve started running a campaign in Google Ads, auction insights allow you to see which brands are coming up against you in Search and Shopping auctions.

Use this data to see how your pricing compares to theirs, fine-tune accordingly, and run tactical promotions.

Place

Starting an ecommerce business is not easy – but for those who are able to fund and find initial product-market fit, digital advertising allows brands to bypass the limitations of traditional distribution.

Geography and access to certain distributors become irrelevant when you can sell and ship directly to consumers.

However, this also presents several new challenges:

• Platform Management: Ecommerce advertisers have a wealth of options when deciding where they want to advertise. This includes traditional networks like Google, Meta, and Amazon, as well as emerging and niche platforms like TikTok and YouTube. However, choosing the wrong platforms or overextending yourself before you’re ready can cause more harm than good.
• Media Mix: Advertising on multiple channels can be advantageous if you have the budget and expertise to do so, even though some brands are predisposed to putting most of their budget in a primary platform. But doing all this when you’re just starting means you’ll have less to spend on campaigns, spreading your efforts too thin and limiting how much data you can acquire. You’ll also need additional people or agencies with expertise managing those different channels in order to get the best returns for your spend.
• Performance Measurement: Brick-and-mortar commerce was comparatively straightforward, and advertising and in-store promotions skewed more toward non-linear measurement. Online advertising has made us crave the need to track every dollar spent and every product sold, and draw a line back through each performance metric. But even good conversion tracking is never perfect, and ad platforms are prone to fluctuation and error as they grow more automated.
• Attribution Measurement: Knowing which platforms are driving sales is critical to making sure you’re investing in the right places. This is more challenging when you have multiple platforms in your media mix , none of which freely and fully share data with other platforms. Attribution will only get worse over time as the ability to track degrades due to privacy concerns. This imperfection doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have some form of attribution, but treat it as a reference point instead of a source of truth.