Introduction: Leading your Customer from “Total Ignorance” to “Problem Solved”

Picture that, at its best, advertising seamlessly enters the conversation of their customers.  It’s not disjointed, it’s not ill-timed, and it provides a solution to a problem they’ve maybe considered… or might be totally unaware of.

Here enters the difficulty of effective marketing: each customer you reach out to may be at a different level of “customer awareness.”  Does the customer already know you exist, and they are in the process of comparing you to competitors?  Or are they so behind the 8-ball that they don’t even know they have a problem? 

Inspired by marketing guru Eugene Schwartz, this blog post explores how properly framing the “five levels of customer awareness” brings precision and personalization to your customer outreach.  It is essential to make sure you don’t come across as “spammy” or “pushy” while marketing your services online.

Different Segments of the Audience Require Different Messaging

We’ve made clear in previous posts that custom audiences are essential for honing your online ad campaigns.  However, we haven’t yet discussed that the level of “product awareness” everyone has may vary wildly.  You don’t want to send the same ad to a customer regular as you do to someone who has never even considered your solution to the problem.  It will either come across as pushy, repetitive,  or go directly over their heads.  Below are the five stages of customer awareness listed out:

1. Unaware:

• The customer is completely unaware or unable to frame their problem.  You can help by providing educational, entertaining, and engaging content to make them aware of the issue!

2. Problem Aware

• The customer now knows there’s a problem, but are stuck or too busy to consider solutions.  Emphasize the priority of the issue and how they could minimize their stress by considering a solution!

3. Solution Aware

• Here is the transition point.  You tell the customer that your store has the proper solution to the problem you framed earlier.

4. Product Aware

• Now, the customer is fully engaged with solving their issue… but they haven’t decided between you and other competitors.  You need to expand on your product’s benefits, and why buying from your store will exceed their expectations.

5. Most Aware

• These are customer regulars who appreciate genuine outreach and “special offers,” like VIP coupons and the sort.  Because they have a proven track record of buying from your store, feel free to sweeten the deal for them!

Real-Life Example of Ad Messaging Through the “5 Stages of Customer Awareness”

Let’s stay you’re a hair styling company selling unique, all natural hair products.  The customer, using the same cheap hair products for years now, is totally unaware of the damage being done to their hair.  So, you start your targeted ad campaign with the following intent:

A. Make customers aware of the problem with the chemicals in certain hair products – such as sulfates, parabens, or formaldehyde.  The Ad banner could read, “Chemicals in common shampoos could be doing damaging your hair and health!”

B. Offer a solution.  It could read, “How to pick the perfect hair products for your type of hair”

C. Now it’s time to push your e-commerce site!  The ad banner reads, “Check out our website for the most healthy, nourishing products for each hair type!”

D. At this point, the customer’s cursor is hovering over “click to buy” – You may want to offer these folks a deal-sweetener to close the deal.  This could include free shipping on their first purchase or maybe 10% off.

Conclusion: Organizing your Custom Audience Based on the 5 Levels of Awareness

For some business owners, organizing custom audiences based on their awareness is a bridge too far.  It seems overly complicated, bogged down in details, and out of reach.  Designing specific ad banners catering to each level of awareness is quite the undertaking – but it is the key to boosting sales to your e-commerce store.  To have to marketing message resonate with buyers, you need to show a dynamic evolution in your customer outreach.

So, try a free demo from Ad360!  We can help analyze your target audience based on their awareness, generating custom ads tailored to each stage of the process.  We’ll provide support on how to organize and run the promotions step-by-step, funneling your audience from totally unaware to loyal customers 😊

Introduction: Google Announces they are sunsetting Universal Analytics

E-Commerce business owners beware! The previous generation of Google Analytics – Universal Analytics or UA in short – will soon be sunset, Google announced today.  What is still the most widespread version of Google Analytics used in e-commerce websites will become unusable starting July 1, 2023. This means that it’s only a matter of time before everyone is using Google Analytics 4 (aka GA4). GA4, which was first introduced in July 2019, comes with many changes.  The data analysis is more granular, user-friendly, and up-to-date on privacy controls.  We’ll get into some of that below while to explain the significance of this announcement!

Before we do, it is important to note that, for existing business owners, historical data cannot be transferred over from Google Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4.  However, there is no need to get worked up – universal analytics will be sunset only next year, meaning business owners can learn to leverage the perks of Google Analytics 4 alongside their Universal analytics account in the meantime.  That means as you “learn the ropes” to leverage GA4, you can continue using your existing Google Universal Analytics account.

That being said, business owners will want to migrate sooner rather than later to Google Analytics 4 – learn about some of the key feature updates below!

Integration with All Device Across Web & Mobile

First, it’s important to note that Google Analytics 4 will streamline and consolidate user data from both web and mobile platforms.  Google’s new system will empower business owners to track user data across each device they use, painting a more complete picture of user behavior.  

Business owners used to need a Firebase and Universal analytics account to share data, but GA4 brings all the customer data from mobile and web under one roof.  Multiple data streams – all from different devices and web apps – can be viewed together seamlessly. 

No More Cookies

We know they sound cute, but user cookies are a key weakness in user privacy.  At this point, they are basically archaic, and tightening user privacy laws will make cookie tracking technology obsolete within the next few years.

Google Analytics 4 gets out in front of this issue by preparing for this “cookieless world.”  All data, while connected to a web ID for the user, is completely anonymized.  Powerful software fills in the gaps when you are modeling user behavior, meaning businesses can still predict customer behavior effectively while not jeopardizing their personal data.

 If you rely on third-party data to collect user info, it is time to get acquainted with Google Analytics 4.  It will allow you to continue gathering valuable user data without endangering their privacy or coming across as an “invasive” online company.

Everything is an Event

While Google Universal Analytics struggled to patch together a coherent picture of user behavior, Google Analytics 4 treats every user action as an “event,” creating a constellation of user data that clearly tells a story through their online behavior. 

Before, business owners had to essentially infer parts of user data because the data simply was not streamlined or categorized together.  You had to pick through different data streams, identify the same user, and manually put together a picture of the user’s online behavior.  With Google Analytics 4, every single event is tracked and stored in the same system. 

For example, imagine a potential customer first checked out your site on a Facebook mobile ad.  Then, after getting home from work, they visited your online website from their computer, where they “signed up” for an account and e-mail alerts.  After that, later in the evening while browsing on their phone, they receive an email with a “special deal” and decide to download your business’s app to formally place their first order.  Google analytics 4 would trace that entire series of decisions, recording each as a unique “event” that illustrates how users are discovering and utilizing your online business!

Furthermore, these user events are organized to provide advanced analysis reports and helpful data visualizations that far exceed the power of Google Universal Analytics.  Purchase probabilities, funnel reports, custom audience segment overlap, visualizations of user activity down to the “per minute” detail are just some of the features business owners can now leverage with the release of Google Analytics 4.

Conclusion: Ad360 Can Help Businesses Migrate to GA4 & Fully Leverage New Features

Clients of Ad360 will receive support transferring data and migrating to the new Google Analytics 4 interface.  While the new Google Analytics interface does look different, remember it serves the same purpose: helping online businesses increase sales and thrive in the e-commerce ecosystem.

This is a significant step forward in data privacy and user data analysis, and we are so excited to be at the forefront of the upcoming Google analytics revolution!  If you want support when learning how to best leverage the new features of Google Analytics 4, reach out for a free call with Ad360 today!

The “Ecommerce Success by Ad360” YouTube channel hits 50 subscribers!

Today we’re celebrating an important milestone for our YouTube channel.

“Ecommerce Success by Ad360” is a YouTube channel where we share tips, news, best practices to help business owners be happy, productive, and successful!

We make daily videos reviewing ecommerce businesses websites, giving them tips and advice to improve their conversions and better their marketing, advertising.

Making merchants happy and successful

Ad360’s mission is to make millions of merchants happy and successful. We take care of all your promotional activities, allowing you to focus on your passion & core business.

These videos are an important way for us to provide value, free advice and free website reviews to business owners. Our goal is to be informative, educational, while being useful as the same time, providing actional tips that e-commerce business owners can take home and implement right away.

We cover a variety of topics and discuss all things e-commerce, advertising, marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), conversion rate optimization (CRO), website design, branding, retargeting, social media, communication, and many other themes that could help businesses be more successful.

Sample Topics covered

Here are a few examples of videos we’ve made, to give you an overview of what you can learn from the YouTube channel:

Advertising

How much to spend on ads before you get sales
In this video we discuss about a business question on Reddit about how much they need to spend on ads before they get enough results to draw a conclusion.
https://youtu.be/4GZVrQU81RE

Money losing ad! What to do?
In the video, we’re discussing a few of the common advertising Key Performing Indicators (KPI) such as CPM, CPC, CTR. We’re giving a few tips to a Reddit post author to help them improve their ad results.
https://youtu.be/uM6TxGK9aNM

Homepage VS Product page? Which destination is best for advertising?
This video examines whether businesses should use their Homepage or Product page as a destination for their ads. We explain pros and cons of both, and why the best solution might be something else: a dedicated landing page. If you don’t know what this is, this video will go over the theory of why a landing page will outperform homepages and product pages.
https://youtu.be/aAyC2_7EseU

Marketing

3 marketing techniques to increase revenue
Successful companies like Apple or Netflix use these marketing rechniques all the time to increase their average order value (AOV) and sales: Value/pricing ladder, Price anchoring, Compromise effect.
https://youtu.be/loZtTmK5tps

Convert more by assuming your customer knows nothing
In the video, we’re discussing a few of the common advertising Key The concept of the “5 Levels of Awareness” by genius marketer Eugene Schwartz can really help you understand how to make your website better for the majority of your visitors, which will increase conversions.
https://youtu.be/g7w6h4KIDP0

Clueless about Website Traffic Generation
This video responds to a user on Reddit, asking for help with Website Traffic Generation. We cover different methods to generate traffic and how they can apply these to help their business grow: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Influencer Marketing, Advertising.
https://youtu.be/YiKaNWPU834

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Introduction to the concept of SEO and how to get your website crawled, indexed, and delivered as a response to users’ queries on Google (and other search engines!).
https://youtu.be/yjoIgfjBYkg

Words Matter! Boost sales with descriptions!
Why Google still advises in 2022 website oweners to use more texts to improve your website’s content and make your pages more discovarable as search queries results.
https://youtu.be/IwzDRjBW7dA

New factors to rank on Google – Desktop page experience search signals
What are the new Core Web Vitals and other page experience signals that are now used by Google as a factor to determine how to rank pages for Desktop searches.
https://youtu.be/a2doaoYTTyY

Website Design

How to generate trust to increase e-commerce sales
This video reviews a website shared on Reddit and gives several general tips you can use to improve the website structure, design, content to improve conversion rates.
https://youtu.be/T7nGgTts5pY

Don’t lose customers because of colors
Colors can be a tricky topic because they can be seen as a matter of personal taste. However, there are design guidelines for accessibility and some colors combinations are more efficient than others. If you’re foreign to color theory, we share in this video a free online tool that can help you pick better color combinations in just a few minutes.
https://youtu.be/MzpUUF04exQ

Make your Ecommerce Website Stand Out
Standing out is key in a market where “10,000 alternatives to buy from are but a click away”. Hopefully, this video helps illustrate this key concept and gives a few practical tips about what can be done to make your website feel different, and convert more.
https://youtu.be/gtiDZYXu_Dc

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

How to boost by up to 232% conversions by fixing CTAs
This video gives a few tips to this store owner to increase conversion rates by fixing the Call to Actions (CTA) buttons.
https://youtu.be/4HIov1ksii4

Why 75% of visitors abandon their carts
In this video we’re reviewing two studies about e-commerce statistics such as the cart abandonment rates, add to cart rates, conversion rates and average order values. Knowing key e-commerce statistics is important to gauge whether your business is doing fine or not, and which areas you need to focus on to improve your results.
https://youtu.be/aaLZoSsAEqk

85% Bounce Rate! How bad is it??
We give the definition of Bounce Rate and what the Google Analytics documentation teaches us about this topic. We also review a few tools that you can use to verify whether your website loads quickly, is responsive and mobile-friendly. These factors can impact bounce rate, as well as the ranking on Google, and are worth looking into.
https://youtu.be/cjn2Heyi460

Ad360 App Features Highlights

Public Release of Ad360 App for Shopify
This video announces that any Shopify user can install the Ad360 App for Shopify and grow their business with the easiest way to manage all promotional activities in one place.
https://youtu.be/-NX_bZcfXH8

What is Retargeting and why you must use it
In this video we’re talking about Retargeting, which is way too often overlooked by small businesses, whereas it is the most efficient form of advertising that you can do. Some studies say that Retargeting gets 1,300% Return on Investment (ROI). It’s definitely a big mistake not to employ it. Thankfully, we’re here to help you understand how to make the most of it, and get started with Retargeting thanks to Ad360!
https://youtu.be/YPr6V9rqPRg

Master hyper Local & Geo-targeted ads
We’re explaining why local-based ads are so important. We describe two advanced advertising techniques: Geotargeted ads & Hyperlocal ads. Both of these allow you to run ads that are personalized for specific areas, which will be more noticed and efficient to generate sales. Ad360 App for Shopify allows you to easily implement both of these techniques, in an easy way.
https://youtu.be/EIByOD0t9Cw

Get a free personalized review of your business

If you’d like help improving your website, and get a dedicated private call to review your e-commerce website, your marketing strategy and your advertising setup, feel free to book a consulting/audit call at any time on our website.

Introduction: A Dollar Spent, 10 Dollars Earned

Return on Ads Spent (ROAS) is a key metric for companies advertising online.  Businesses may have budgets of different sizes, but many of the core elements of running the campaign remain the same.

Successfully setting a daily Facebook ad budget, testing different ad sets, and engaging the target audience multiple times are all key to growing your Shopify sales.  A little marketing planning can go a long way here, so make sure to have a blueprint in place before you begin!

Setting a Daily Budget

First off, Facebook ads provides an option of setting a “daily” or “lifetime” budget – we’d opt for the daily budget while starting out.  It provides a chance for more flexibility as the promotional campaign developers.

An amazing feature of Facebook ads is that Shopify businesses do not have to “break the bank” to reach their audience – even $10/day is enough to have your ads be sent out across the 2.7 billion Facebook users!  If you consider yourself a “Small-to-Medium” sized store at the moment, aim for a daily budget between $10-30.  Your ads will be seen, and the data collected from their performance metrics will be invaluable in how you further develop the campaign.

Test Ad Sets before scaling up

When framing your Facebook ad campaign, remember it’s not just one ad banner you are sending out your entire audience!  Remember from our post on Facebook custom audiences that effective Facebook ad campaigns segment their audiences based on key factors (e.g. – demographics, location, interest).  For each custom Facebook audience, you likely will roll out a different “ad set.” 

Each ad set is specifically targeted to one of your custom audiences, and from there, you can try different versions of the ad as a form of A/B testing.  For example, you may have three ad sets prepped for three distinct custom audiences.  Within each ad set, you roll out two versions to see which one better drives engagement and boost traffic to your store!

Better to Reach an Audience of 100 10 times than 100,000 people Once

Finally, please note it’s better to concentrate your ad sets to smaller audiences you can reach multiple times, rather than blasting out a single ad to larger audiences.  Marketing research has shown that customers need to see your ads 7-8 times before they consider purchasing something from your store. 

Thus, it’s more efficient to have a small audience you show multiple ads to rather than a broad audience who briefly see your ads only once.  Facebook ads breaks up these factors into awareness, consideration, and conversion.  You may have also heard of concepts such as AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) that conceptualize how customers are funneled to drive sales to your store. As you scale up your ads, remember the average customer needs exposure to your store’s promotion multiple times.  Otherwise, your ROAS will suffer.

Conclusion: Who can Help Analyze my Facebook Ad Data?

After running a Facebook ad campaign, setting a daily budget, and releasing your various ad sets, it can feel confusing how to make sense of the data collected – that’s where Ad360 steps in!  We specialize in analyzing your customer data and subsequently optimizing future campaigns.  Better ads mean more sales, so please reach out to try a free demo by Ad360 today!

Welcome to Ecommerce Success by Ad360, the channel where we share tips, news, best practices to help business owners be happy, productive, and successful!

In today’s video, we’re reviewing a website shared on Reddit.

Firstly, they are doing a lot of things right! The website is beautiful, the content is great, the brand feels personal and relatable, and the products are beautiful!

In the video, we review the website, explaining how the business owner applied e-commerce website design best practices to make an efficient store.

Secondly, we review a free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool from Google to evaluate the page performance score. This matters increasingly as Google search engine results are now ranked partially based on the page experience (including loading speed).

Lastly, the video introduces 3 marketing concepts which are proven to increase revenue considerably, and which we believe could be hlpful for this website:

1/ Value & pricing ladder

2/ Price anchoring

3/ Compromise effect

Ssuccessful companies like Apple or Netflix use these marketing techniques to increase the average order value and their sales.

If you’d like us to do a more in-depth analysis of your advertising setup / targeting options / campaigns data, please book a free consulting call with Ad360’s team.