The aggregator business model is the most popular online business model of the past decade. Amazon is the largest internet company in the world revenue-wise and is thriving even during the pandemic. Netflix has over 182 million subscribers. Uber is used by 110 million people across 65 countries. Swiggy, Lyft, eBay, Spotify, Airbnb, Etsy, Doordash, … the list of popular aggregator businesses goes on.

Customers love aggregation, merchants love marketing their products or services through marketplaces. Even social media giants like Facebook and Twitter are essentially aggregators of user-generated content.

The scope in the business model of aggregation is deepening with the use of sophisticated technologies like ML and Big Data Analysis. Here are 3 ways through which you can tremendously grow your marketplace and come closer to becoming an industry leader:

#1 Sponsored Product Listings
Aggregator marketplaces attract massive online traffic because of the easy buying processes, diverse shopping options, and reliable support. The heavy footfall results in large datasets of shopping trends and behavior that can be utilized for natively promoting the product listings.

Promoted product ads have the following direct benefits:
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Add a parallel revenue stream
Monetizing the shoppers’ and merchants’ data to serve relevant product listings makes an excellent case for revenue-generation (funded by the merchants). No wonder all the leading e-commerce marketplaces like eBay, Etsy, Amazon, Rakuten, etc. are native-ads-rich platforms.
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Help merchants market their products better
‍Promoted products empower merchants to reach their potential customers much faster than organic discovery. They can also promote newly-launched products to boost initial sales.

Enhance product and brands discoverability
The myriad of choices available for the shoppers makes some products and brands difficult to find. Pushing some of the sellers or products over others rebalances the visibility equilibrium.

#2 Brand Advertising via Display Ads
Display ads add visual storytelling to native advertising. You can monetize the real estate on your online marketplace across the page types like category pages, add to cart pages, product detail pages, etc. Display ads, funded by brands and merchants, have the following advantages:

Widen your advertisers base
Display ads can attract a wide range of advertisers, not just from within the marketplace (brands and merchants) but also from outside, i.e. the third-party advertisers who’re looking to promote their product or service.

This adds value to the bottom line of the marketplace through advertising spends. You can also execute co-op advertising with a diverse set of advertisers to create attractive campaigns on the marketplace.

Native ads with better CPMs
With a range of attractive ad formats and placements, better CPMs can be achieved for your advertisers. The ads-platform can accumulate varying requirements of the advertisers and deliver back multifold value to their ad spends.

#3 Off-the-marketplace Advertising
Popular digital advertising channels like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Bing, etc. are known for giving back great ROIs. However, merchants may not be equipped with the science of digital advertising to turn the advertising activities in their favor.

Marketplaces can provide an ML-based, self-serve advertising platform that fits into the merchant’s panel of the marketplace. The merchants can use the platform to easily promote their products on popular advertising channels.

Empowering merchants and other advertisers with extended audience networks has the following upside:

Boost Merchant Monetization with Unlimited Inventory
Extending the audience base for merchants gives them limitless access to the target audience. You can thereby garner boosted revenue via advertising spends and added-sales of the products from the external networks.

Merchant-funded Marketing
When products are promoted across channels like YouTube, Facebook, etc. the marketplace gets advertised as well. Shoppers are attracted from diverse online networks to the marketplace and indirect marketing of the marketplace is achieved.

Strengthen the Value Proposition
It’s uncommon for online marketplaces to provide an ads platform to the brands and merchants for advertising on external networks. Merchants and brands will appreciate this unique value-added service of your marketplace and will prefer the marketplace over others at any given time.

Summing up,
Introducing merchant and brand funded ad-serving on and off the marketplace can give a tremendous boost to the bottom line of your business. It is an excellent way to make the most of the large datasets and infrastructure already available.OnlineSales.ai is helping marketplaces across the industry verticals like Paytm Mall, Sendo, Souq, Swiggy, Konga, Daraz, etc with its smart, self-serve Monetize App Suite. The ML-led Apps enable brands and merchants on a marketplace to perform marketing and analytics at the click of a button. Contextual ad-serving combined with advertising automation has helped the above marketplaces efficiently monetize the resources they already had.

Want to know more?
‍Looking for ways to leverage your first party data and traffic to earn additional revenue? Our AI ML powered retail media tech, Monetize, helps you enable every advertiser to run ads on your platform to achieve their marketing goals and ensure higher yields for you. To learn more, contact us today.

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