For many customers across Southeast Asia (SEA), online marketplaces have become a popular shopping destination, offering unmatched deals and extensive product choices.
Retailers, in turn, have embraced marketplaces to boost online sales. And those ahead of the curve have struck on a marketing strategy that extends beyond marketplaces to supercharge their success on the latter.
Already, 82% of purchases in SEA take place on marketplaces, according to estimates in the “E-commerce in Southeast Asia 2024” report by venture firm Momentum Works. And the gross merchandise value of SEA’s e-commerce market is projected to rise from
$159 billion in 2024 to $370 billion by 2030.1
The allure of marketplaces for retailers is clear: They help businesses scale up by offering tools like innovative ad formats, loyalty programmes, and performance analytics. This has attracted even established brands with their own e-commerce platforms, and offline merchants to tap into marketplaces for growth.
The rising popularity of marketplaces, however, has meant that it can be harder for retailers to stand out on the platforms.
You can set your brand up for success by optimising your product listings on marketplaces with high-quality images, clear descriptions, competitive pricing, and reliable information about product availability. Additionally, you can tap into user-provided data and insights from the marketplace to improve performance.
But to truly win over customers, retailers will need a marketing strategy that extends beyond marketplaces. The reason: Although purchases happen on marketplaces, the customer journey spans more than five touchpoints and 65% of shoppers use Google platforms like Search and YouTube for discovery and research.2
So the key to expanding your reach and driving incremental sales on marketplaces lies in connecting with customers beyond the e-commerce platforms that they’re on.
How to send more converting customers to your marketplace store
Performance Max for Marketplaces lets you find and reach potential customers across all of Google's channels, including Search, YouTube, and Discover, and send more traffic directly to the products you sell on a marketplace.
All you need is a Google Ads account that is linked to the marketplace. With it, you can use product data from the marketplace to run a single campaign across all of Google's channels, capturing valuable searches and multiplying conversions from customers you might have missed.
Because it’s powered by Google AI, Performance Max for Marketplaces will generate campaign settings that help you get more value from your advertising, including improving your bidding, audience reach, and creative.
Additionally, the campaign lets you track performance and the return on ad spend (ROAS) so you can further optimise your marketing strategy. Already, thousands of merchants have achieved an average ROAS of 500% with Performance Max for Marketplaces.3
Performance Max for Marketplaces was first launched in partnership with the e-commerce platform Shopee, and it’s now also available on Lazada in six markets in SEA — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
How brands unlocked sales with data-driven campaigns
The AI-powered ads solution for marketplaces is not just for brands with an online presence. Performance Max for Marketplaces can also help offline retailers establish themselves as serious players in the e-commerce space.
Using Performance Max for Marketplaces, L'Oréal’s dermatological beauty division in Thailand delivered AI-powered ads across Search, Google Shopping, and YouTube to reach and direct valuable customers to the Shopee Mall stores for three of its brands — Cerave, La Roche-Posay, and Vichy.
The result was a 15% sales uplift, and L'Oréal Thailand earned $5 for every $1 spent on Google Ads.
L'Oréal Thailand’s digital and media manager for its dermatological beauty division, Jureeporn Trisuchon, says: “After implementing Performance Max for Marketplaces, we were thrilled by the strong results, with ROAS of as high as 5X per brand. It has let our brands unlock opportunities for connecting with customers and driving robust path-to-purchase journeys.”
The organic baby product brand, Kindee Kids, which used to be an offline business, started its online journey by partnering with Google and the marketing agency Saensuk Consulting to launch its Shopee store.
It focused first on listing 100 top-selling items, and used Performance Max for Marketplaces to drive traffic to its Shopee store. After achieving an increase in sales and a profitable ROAS on its initial Performance Max for Marketplaces campaign, it expanded its campaign to include the rest of its products.
That partnership, and use of the AI-powered ads solution, led to a 40X increase in online sales and a 2X improvement in profitability.
As online marketplaces grow in popularity and market value in Asia, you will need to find ways to stand out and win new customers as a retailer. Performance Max for Marketplaces lets you reach customers across multiple touchpoints and all of Google’s channels where they’re discovering and researching, to drive traffic and profitable sales to your marketplace store.
Contributors: Minh Nguyen, Head of Commerce Ads, SEA; Ganesh I, Performance Max Specialist, SEA
