E-commerce growth isn’t just about acquiring new customers. It’s about making every single purchase count. One of the most effective, yet often underused, strategies for enhancing profitability is increasing what each customer spends – not through aggressive upselling gimmicks, but through smarter product prioritization and a finely tuned ad strategy. This is all about how to increase average order value (AOV).
The journey starts with identifying lead-in products and understanding how to build your campaigns around them. Done right, this strategy helps you improve profit per conversion and optimize media spend, all without necessarily increasing your customer acquisition costs. It’s about transforming simple transactions into more valuable, robust baskets.
What Are Lead-In Products? Your Gateway to Higher AOV
Lead-in products are those specific items in your catalog that consistently drive larger average basket sizes. They might not always be your most expensive SKUs, or even your highest-margin ones individually, but they share a common, valuable pattern: customers who start their purchase journey with these items often add significantly more to their cart before checking out. They act as a gateway – not just to a conversion, but to a more valuable one.
Consider these globally relatable examples:
The Popular Tech Gadget: A sought-after pair of wireless earbuds. Customers buying these are often inclined to add accessories like charging cases, protective skins, or even extended warranties.
The Festive Party Starter: A specific, trendy party decoration item for seasonal celebrations. This can lead to purchases of related party supplies, tableware, and other festive goods.
The Outdoor Adventure Essential: A durable, well-reviewed backpack. This often prompts customers to also buy hydration packs, packing cubes, or travel accessories.
The Skincare Routine Initiator: A popular facial cleanser or serum that frequently triggers purchases of toners, moisturizers, and other items to complete a skincare regimen.
The Home Coffee Bar Foundation: An affordable but stylish espresso maker, which can lead to sales of coffee grinders, specialty beans, milk frothers, and cool mugs.
Identifying these products through data analysis (which items are frequently bought together? which initial purchases lead to larger orders?) and understanding logical product associations is the crucial first step in optimizing for high-basket SKUs and building a smarter, more profitable feed.
Why Traditional Ad Automation Often Misses the AOV Point
Standard campaign setups and default ad platform logic typically optimize around ROAS or raw conversion rates. That’s fine if all conversions were created equal – but they aren't. If your "best" converting products according to the algorithm are low-margin, low-basket items, you might simply be paying to win a high volume of cheap orders, leaving significant potential profit on the table.
What if your campaigns could intelligently focus on SKUs that not only convert but consistently lead to bigger, more profitable checkouts? That’s precisely where Expanly’s logic comes into play – using your real transaction data to identify, flag, and strategically push these AOV-driving lead-in products to the forefront of your campaigns, automating the complex data enrichment needed.
How to Increase Average Order Value Through Smarter Feed Logic
To effectively drive AOV, your advertising strategy needs to shift its focus from sheer volume to enhancing the value of each transaction. Expanly facilitates this through a data-driven, automated approach:
Identify Lead-In Products with Real Data: Expanly analyzes your historical order patterns to pinpoint which products, when included in a cart, consistently result in higher total order values. These are your AOV drivers. Expanly then automatically scores these SKUs and enriches your product feed with this intelligence, signaling their AOV-boosting potential to ad platforms.
Optimize for High-Basket SKUs: Your feed logic should not solely chase bestsellers or high ROAS items in isolation. With Expanly, the focus shifts to also prioritize these identified high-basket SKUs – products that might not have the highest individual conversion rate but consistently lead to more profitable overall transactions. This includes products often bought in multiples, items frequently purchased with valuable add-ons, or those with built-in cross-sell logic that Expanly’s analysis uncovers.
Build an Ad Strategy for Complementary Products: Once Expanly has flagged your lead-in products based on their AOV potential, your ad strategy for complementary products can be built around them. This involves:
Using insights from Expanly to inform ad campaigns that strategically highlight bundles or related SKUs alongside the lead-in product.
Powering dynamic remarketing campaigns that surface relevant accessories or complementary categories to customers who have recently purchased a lead-in item.
Structuring PMax asset groups around entire product ecosystems or solutions (e.g., "Complete Home Office Setup" or "Ultimate Travel Kit") initiated by your lead-in products, rather than just focusing on individual items. Your campaigns, guided by Expanly's data-driven insights, begin to act like smart, informed salespeople – starting with the product most likely to drive a larger, more valuable outcome.
Boosting AOV With Feed Logic: At the crucial feed level, Expanly supports this AOV-centric strategy by automatically translating its sophisticated AOV-driving logic into a format that ad platforms understand. It enriches your feed with strategic tags and scores, often utilizing mechanisms like custom labels behind the scenes. The key is that Expanly handles this complex data enrichment for you, pushing these AOV-potential signals into the feed so you don't have to manually create or manage specific tags. This allows you to segment your product campaigns based on their AOV-driving potential, ensuring your ad system inherently understands what truly grows each order.
It’s Not About Selling More Volume — It’s About Selling Smarter & Growing Baskets
The primary goal here isn't necessarily to push your highest-priced SKUs aggressively. It’s about strategically positioning the products that naturally unlock bigger checkouts and create more comprehensive solutions for your customers. Lead-in products, identified and prioritized by Expanly, do exactly that.
By combining intelligent campaign targeting with Expanly's sophisticated, automated feed logic, your ads start to:
Attract higher-quality traffic with a greater propensity to build larger baskets.
Generate more profitable orders, improving your overall margin per transaction.
Utilize your advertising budget more efficiently on a per-transaction value basis.
And that’s how to increase average order value without overcomplicating your sales funnel or solely relying on post-click upselling tactics.
Smarter Baskets, Smarter Growth
The next frontier of feed optimization for Google PMax and other platforms isn’t just about chasing more conversions. It’s about boosting AOV with feed logic, automatically identifying lead-in products that drive this behavior through data analysis, and teaching your campaigns what long-term customer value and higher transaction profitability look like.
Expanly helps you achieve this systematically – flagging, prioritizing, and pushing your best AOV-driving lead-in products and their associated strategies into the algorithm’s decision-making layer. Because in today's competitive e-commerce world, not all conversions are created equal. The smartest teams don’t just chase the next sale; they build bigger, more profitable baskets that consistently grow the bottom line.
