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.
What we keep finding
Four things that are true in almost every one of these businesses.
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 a tenth is being taught 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 rot quietly
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 disapprovals pile up.
What we measure here
The numbers this sector lives on.
Every business gets the fundamentals. These are the ones that matter here and would be a waste of money somewhere else.
- Item level events from product 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
- Feed health checked on a schedule rather than on a complaint
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
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
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
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 affordable?
Thin margins are the argument for it rather than against, but only above a certain size. Below roughly two thousand a month in advertising, our fee is a bigger problem than your measurement is, and we will say so.
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.
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.