Mastering Paid Advertising For Shopify

Paid advertising is the fastest way to get sales on your Shopify store. Succeeding paid advertising requires certain plan, strategy and tactics.

In this post you’ll learn;

• What is paid advertising?
• How paid advertising works?
• Paid advertising models
• How to create your campaigns?
• FAQ

What is paid advertising?

Advertising is the eldest business strategy to create awareness, get new customers and retain your existing customers. After long years without any targeting and measuring on TV, radio, outdoor or magazine advertising thankfully now we can create run targeted, measurable campaigns on different platforms. Based on campaign model, cost increased based on either impression, click or conversion.

Biggest benefit of paid advertising is the speed. When a campaign created, it can start working within one-hour to 24 hours. When compared to other marketing channels, it’s super fast.

Other benefit of paid advertising is the control over the budget. A paid advertising can be started even $5 per day. Not required huge budgets and budget can easily be adjustable.

Generally all of the paid advertisement platforms let you to target the audience based on different criteria and you can measure all activities easily with little effort like Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, TikTok Pixel, etc.

How paid advertising works?

All digital marketing platforms have easy-to-use user panels. You can create your own account within a few minutes and start advertising. Almost all of the advertisement platforms works based on the auction model. If your bid becomes too low then your campaign won’t work. Biggest bid first appears. There are three different cost model for paid campaigns;

• Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC campaigns cost you based on the number of clicks.
• Pay Per Impression (PPM): PPM campaigns cost you based on the number of impressions. PPM bids’ defined based on the 1,000 impressions.
• Pay Per Conversion: Generally affiliate campaigns works with this model. You pay for the conversions.

Before starting your campaigns you need to know about the Quality Score metric. All paid marketing platforms measure your campaigns and accounts performance and score quality of your campaigns based on different metrics.

If your campaign has just the right targeting, has eye-catching creatives and high click through rates, your landing page highly related with your campaign and most of the people like your content, keep browsing your website after clicking on the ads, then your quality score will be high.

On the other hand let’s say you have poorly designed campaign creatives, your page-speed is low and targeting is not right, then your quality score will be low.

Lower quality score campaigns cost more than high quality score and if you don’t increase your quality score constantly some of your campaigns may not work even you willing to pay.

Paid Advertisement Models

There are four major paid advertisement models.

1. Search Engine

This is the most common paid advertising model. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex or Yahoo has advertising models to show ads on search result page.

Best benefit of search campaigns is ability to target visitors based on their search terms.

Let’s say you’re selling organic, high-end, well-designed baby clothes. Then you can bid for searches like “organic high quality baby clothes”. Since these searches looking for products just like yours, you just get interested people to your store. These visitors more likely to complete purchases soon when they find the best products they’re looking for.

2. Social Media

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Linkedin, Pinterest, you name it. All ads on the social networks can placed in this category.

Most of the time targeting depends on demographic informations like age, gender, location or interest groups.

Also these platforms has some AI driven engines for understanding people’s interest based on their behavior. Let’s say someone liking baby clothing posts, then they can show your ads to this people

3. Display

There are lot’s of different ads network working with display ads. Ads you saw on news, blogs or mobile apps with banners or videos classified as display ads.

Display ads generally works with placement targeting.

For example you can target blogs, websites, mobile apps or YouTube channels popular among new moms for our hypothetical stores.

4. Hybrid

This is the new ad model thanks to Google Performance Max campaigns.

Google performance max campaigns works with different networks like search, shopping, YouTube, gmail and ads network combined to perform best results.

How to create your campaigns?

“Without a strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” – Morris Chang

1. Planing

Paid campaigns great source to create traffic for your sales funnel. Before starting campaigns, it’s important to prepare your funnel in detail.

Campaigns helps to generate traffic for specific areas of sales funnel. When there is no funnel, it becomes impossible to get success.

Create your ideal customer profile and empathy map, decide to target which stage of the funnel you’re targeting and then decide platform and ad model to use.

Check How to Build High-Converting Sales Funnel For Shopify for more details about sales funnels.

2. Prepare Your Creatives and Landing Pages

High quality advertising equals to higher conversion probability and lower cost.

Both your ad creatives and landing pages you’ll use for the advertising should be well designed.

Especially your landing page should be fast, mobile friendly and communicate your store, brand and value proposition successfully.

3. Setup Tracking

Iteration is a must have for all kinds of paid marketing campaigns. You have to measure your traffics behavior on your store from first click to last exit.

Make sure you configured Google Analytics 4, Meta Pixel and other platforms tracking code on your store.

Place a few test orders and make sure events like view item, add to cart, checkout begin, checkout completed send successfully.

After setting your tracking you can start your campaigns.

4. Analyze and Optimize

After your campaigns start to get traffic, start analyzing your results from the first day.

It’s vital to check each details and optimize it based on your reports.

Sales won’t happen with the first click, it’s okay. This is why tracking micro conversions is vital.

Email list subscription, adding product to cart, visiting detail pages like about us, shipping policy or visiting collection pages.

The most important red flag for a paid marketing campaigns is bounce rate. High bounce rate signals of one of these two options;

• Poor landing page experience. Check heatmaps and user recording to discover possible UX or UI problems.
• You’re not targeting your ICP. Change your targeting or campaign models.