Online shops
The margin is thin enough that being wrong about which advertising works is the whole difference between a good year and a flat one.
You sell physical or digital products online, through Shopify, WooCommerce or something built for you, and you buy at least some of your customers.
The platform says one revenue number, the ad accounts claim another between them, and the bank says a third. Nobody can reconcile the three and everybody has stopped trying.
What we keep finding
Four things that are true in almost every shop.
Returns are missing from the numbers
The ad platforms are fed revenue at the moment of purchase and never told when it comes back. Every business with a return rate above about 10% is teaching its advertising to buy the wrong customer.
Average order value hides two businesses
One group buys the cheap line once and never returns. Another buys properly and comes back. Averaged together they look like one mediocre customer, and the advertising is aimed at that invention.
The checkout is measured as one step
Basket, details, delivery, payment. Four places to lose somebody, reported as a single abandonment rate that tells you nothing about which one to fix.
Product feeds go out of date quietly
The product list your ads are built from drifts away from the shop: prices change on the site and not in the feed, items go out of stock and stay advertised, and nobody finds out until a customer complains or the ad platform starts rejecting products.
The whole loop in one frame: the listing, the order, the box. Every step of it is measurable, which is exactly why being wrong about one costs so much.
What we measure here
The numbers a shop lives on.
Every business gets the fundamentals. These are the ones that matter here and would be a waste of money somewhere else.
- Every product tracked from view through to purchase and refund
- Cost per customer by product line, not only by campaign
- Revenue sent to the ad platforms net of returns and cancellations
- First order against repeat order, so the real value of a customer is known
- Checkout broken into its actual steps, by device and payment method
- Product feed checked on a schedule rather than after a complaint
Questions people ask
The questions we hear most.
We use Shopify. Is its own reporting not enough?
It is good at what happened in the shop and blind to what happened before somebody arrived. The gap it cannot close is which advertising produced the order, and that is usually the expensive question.
Our margins are thin. Is this worth doing?
Thin margins are a good reason to do it. When there is little room between cost and profit, knowing which ads actually lead to orders matters more, not less. If your spend is small, the sensible first step is usually just getting the tracking right, and we will tell you honestly if that is all you need.
Can you work with our existing agency?
Often, and it can work well: we make the results measurable, they run the campaigns against numbers everybody trusts. It needs both sides to want it, and we will tell you early if that is not the case.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
We showed Google which callers actually booked a ride, and it went and found more of them.
A different sector with the same fault: buying volume that looked good in the report and could not be traced to money.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click in their market
$2.10
average cost per click in their market
Where to start
The two services we usually begin with.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Find out which of your adverts bring paying customers.
Tell us about the business and the report you have stopped believing. Within a working day we will tell you what it is really saying and what it would take to fix.