Guide to managing Shopee My Ads in Singapore

Apr 05, 2024

Since its inception in 2015, Shopee has grown to be one of the leading e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia. It is an excellent platform for businesses to leverage their reach and use its unique features to increase business. One of them is ‘Shopee My Ads’.

What are ‘Shopee My Ads’?

The ‘My Ads’ feature on Shopee’s platform enables sellers to run ads for their products and reach targeted audiences. Similar to other marketplaces, this helps a seller increase their chances of selling a product and increase their profitability.


Unlike some other forms of paid marketing, running ads on a platform like Shopee helps you reach people who have the intent of purchasing a product.

Shopee My Ads account: Four key areas of functionality

A common problem that many businesses face when setting up ads on most platforms is its complex nature. Shopee paid ads are super simple for its sellers to set up, run, easily see the reports, and make seamless payments.


Here are four of the functionality that the platform gives you:


1. Promotion

This section under the Shopee My Ads helps you set up the bid for the products you want to advertise. Similar to other platforms, the ads on Shopee paid ads also work on a bidding system where the highest bidder for a particular category of ads is shown first. 


The two main types of promotional ads you can run on Shopee are Keyword ads and Targeting ads.


The keywords ads will let you bid for keywords you want your products to show up for and targeted ads will let you bid for recommendation sections and areas on the platform with high traffic. 


2. Report

The report section lets you see how your ads are performing and make tweaks accordingly. Running ads is always a trial and error method.


So your targeting for either specific areas on the platform or specific keywords might not always be correct. The reporting tool will help you decipher this and take further steps.


Apart from analysis during the time frame within which you are running ads, the reporting function also lets you measure your advertising spend against the sales you got from it. So it is a critical tool to calculate your return on investment from Shopee’s platform ads.


3. Billing

Your billing section holds a record of all the payments that you have made for the paid ads you run on Shopee. Billing for Shopee ads is done on a per-click basis. So only when a Shopee user clicks on your ad is when you will be charged for it. 


This is great for sellers as they are not spending money for their products to just be shown on the platform but rather actually have people interact and engage with your product listing.


4. Top-up

Shopee My Ads lets you top up your account with ad credits so that your ads don’t stop running in the middle due to insufficient balance on a card. There is nothing more disappointing than starting to run ads and realizing that the campaign stopped midway due to a lack of funds. 


The ad credit system for Shopee paid ads helps you avoid this and makes it super simple and easy for sellers to run ads seamlessly. 

Different Ad types in Shopee

Product search ads

Among the different types of Shopee paid ads that you can run, the product search ads are very effective in reaching people with an intent to buy your product. They allow you to bid for specific keywords that describe your product or product category and show up in the search results of potential buyers.


Ideally, you should use search ads when your product can be easily described with specific words that people would use to search them.


For example, if you sell toasters, it is very obvious that you would want to bid for the keyword ‘toaster’.


You can take the targeting a step further by bidding for well-known brands of toasters that you sell such as ‘Morphy Richards toaster’ as people aware of the brand and what they are looking for might just search for exactly what they want. 


All in all the product search ads help you boost your exposure and increase sales by reaching relevant buyers.


Shop search ads

Shop search ads are a type of banner ad that shows up on the search results of buyers when they search for specific keywords.


The difference between product search ads and shop search ads is that instead of showing a single product, shop search ads showcase a clickable link to your entire shop.


While many shoppers on a platform like Shopee usually know what they have come to buy, there will still be many who are just browsing and exploring options. So the shop search ads are a great way to reach people with an undecided mindset and build awareness for your brand as a seller.


You should use shop search ads for keywords that are broader and more generic as people searching for these kinds of terms are looking for different options and your shop just might be the place where they find a relevant product.


For example, if you sell a wide range of fashion apparel, then people searching for generic terms like ‘sneakers’ or ‘hoodies’ might be worth bidding for.


Discovery ads

Discovery ads on Shopee can be an extremely powerful tool to reach relevant audiences who are in the consideration phase of buying products.


Discovery ads help sellers to capture the attention of shoppers who show an interest in products like yours. These ads are listed on the product detail pages of similar competitor products or complementary products making the ads highly relevant to whoever comes across them.


Apart from this, Shopee also has a ‘Daily Discover’ section on their app and web platform that shows users product recommendations and discovery ads based on their activity with similar products to yours in the past 30 days.


You should use discovery ads when there are relevant competitors to you on Shopee with similar products or when there are other businesses selling products that are complementary to yours.


For example, if you notice a lot of sellers selling bed frames and your business sells mattresses on Shopee then it makes sense to run discovery ads for your mattresses on products like bed frames as people looking for it might also need a mattress.



Boost ads

Boost ads on Shopee can be considered as a healthy mix of all the other three ad types that you read above as these ads are shown to people in search results of relevant keywords you target, on the product detail pages of similar or complimentary products, and the Daily Discover section on the platform.


Boost ads should be used by sellers when they are not sure which specific type of ad they should run.


Rather than having to choose a specific type of ad, the boost ads help sellers cover all possible bases and see what is working and what is not to make future ad targeting decisions.

How to manage Shopee Ads?

1. Monitor your ads performance

An important aspect of any sort of advertising effort where you are paying money to reach more people and get in front of audiences is to measure and keep monitoring how your ads are performing.


You need to see whether the keywords you are bidding for or the ad space you want to show up in through ads is getting you any results. Based on the performance, you should keep tweaking and figure out the best way to optimize your ad spend for Shopee paid ads. 


2. Choose appropriate payment for ad credit top-up

Keeping track of the money you spend on Shopee My Ads is as important as keeping track of the ads themselves. Make sure you choose a controlled recurring payment source for topping up your credit on the Shopee platform.


3. Enhance your product listing detail page

The last thing you want to do is run ads for your products without filling out the details about them which helps someone make the buying decision.


If a person comes across your product but does not find enough information on the product page to convince them about the legitimacy and its credibility, then they might just leave and look for other products.


4. Consider these keyword metrics

Quality score - Shopee ads allow you to see a quality score for your ads which is a measure of how attractive your ad is and how relevant is it to the keyword you are bidding for.


Search Volume - This metric on the platform shows the number of times a keyword was searched for in the last 30 days. 


Suggested bid - Shopee also suggests bid prices for the keywords you want to target.


5. Allow Shopee to optimize bid prices automatically

Shopee’s ad system is capable of optimizing a bid price automatically if it sees that there is a chance of better conversion for your product.


Suggested reads: How to sell on Lazada Singapore

How to manage Ad spending on Shoppe?

Set Ad budget - When setting up Shopee ads, you need to set a total budget for the campaign you want to run. This budget will be deducted from your ad credit as and when people click on your ads. 


Set cost-per-click bid price - Setting a cost-per-click bid price refers to limiting how much you are willing to spend for a click compared to others.

How can Volopay help manage Shopee My Ads?

To manage the payments of your Shopee My Ads, you would ideally need to use a credit card to top up the ad credits. But doing so with any business card can be tough due to availability and tracking reasons.


This is where having an account with Volopay can help you. 


Our platform allows you to create unlimited virtual cards for online payments and all the transactions are recorded in real-time on the dashboard. This will help you keep track of your Shopee paid ads spending as well as other marketing expenses.


Volopay is an all-in-one payable management solution with a unified dashboard that helps you track and manage all kinds of business expenses.


With the ability to create unlimited virtual cards for all your employees, you can keep track of every penny that goes out of the business. The virtual cards will help you set limits so that your spending never exceeds the ad budget intentionally or by accident. 


Interesting read - 7 best travel credit card in Singapore for businesses

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