A look at Flipkart Ads, and how the e-commerce giant fared as an advertising platform in 2016

Flipkart Ads ends a successful year and delivers results as it promised.

India is emerging as one of the fastest growing markets today. With brands leveraging all the possible options available to increase their visibility, new platforms that can further their visibility are attracting marketers' attention.

Given the current scenario, Flipkart's Ad Platform garnered a lot of attention in 2016 with a remarkable number of brands already making use of it. Flipkart Ads, the advertising platform which was launched in 2015 to enable sellers to gain more visibility initially, now has top notch brands on board as advertisers and it also facilitates cross selling.

It is an end-to-end commerce advertising platform that let's brand seamlessly engage with the online shoppers. It enables the brands to acquire the maximum value for their products by reaching out to online shoppers right when they are willing to buy a product by showing them relevant ads. Thus, maximizing marketers' ROI and help brands expand their business across various geographies.

Up till last year, thousands of brands on Flipkart were utilizing the ad platform to target their audience. Brands like Google, Airtel, Lakme, Microsoft, Maruti Suzuki, Nike, Philips, Intex, Micromax, LG etc. were also on the clientele list of Flipkart.

The platform offered a lot of options for the brands to make use of. Be it product launches, building brand awareness, increasing considerations or improving conversions, Flipkart Ads have an array of inventories that promise to deliver on all angles, which is seconded by the fact that more than 40 advertisers used Flipkart Ads, generating 2 billion impressions with a click-through rate of 3%. To start with the inventories offered, the Premium Ads are placed on Flipkart's home page at specific points where the user's eye would invariably fall. The Brand Story Showreel lets the brand weave a story around their products and is positioned below the premium ads in the form of a canvas. In addition, the Brand Story Card uses scrollable cards to advertise.

The inventories also reaped the results they were meant to deliver. During last year's Big Billion Day sale, Flipkart claims to have clocked over 14 billion in revenue in a single day. As far as products are concerned, 100 phones were sold every second in the first hour, 50 million products were added to wish list across India, 1 Headphone was sold every second, and 15.5 million units were purchased in total by customers, all in the five-day shopping festival. Going by the numbers, there is no doubt that India's biggest online sale had opened the doors of great marketing opportunities for the advertisers as well. http://ads.flipkart.com/presentation/a-journey-with-flipkart-ads-this-october/

Flipkart claims that the biggest beneficiaries of the sale were brands like BOSCH with 31.9 million impressions, HUL which had a 50% higher CTR than other FMCGs, Air Asia which generated 22,000 leads, and Samsung with 111 million impressions.

This kind of performance speaks volumes about the success of Flipkart's Ad platform, which ended the year gone by on a successful note. What makes Flipkart stand apart from the traditional advertising platforms is its wide reach, high engagement coupled with a high purchase intent.

Seeing the results of 2016, this business has proved to become quite significant for Flipkart and the e-commerce company seems to have big plans regarding the same. The company is looking to launch Flipkart Ads version 2.0 in the near future.

With all that said, the platform seems to have struck the right note with brands and is able to drive relevant reach for the advertisers with its focused approach. Albeit, a lot remains to be seen on how it will fare vis-a-vis other ad platforms in the future.