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.

Custom Audiences = Complexity Explosion

In our previous article reviewing the basics of Facebook Ads, we touched on the importance of building custom audiences with Facebook’s features. 

Age, gender, location, and Interests can all be modified for custom audiences… and… well… the sheer number of combinations that can be made from these factors alone is remarkably complex.  Even the term for its growing sophistication takes your head for a spin… combinatorial explosions.  Sheesh. 

But no worries – this blog post takes a deeper dive into the complexity that comes with building multi-factor custom audiences on Facebook.  While each essential for succeeding with a modest marketing budget on Facebook, so all Shopify business owners, take out a piece of paper and #2 pencil!  This analysis goes “all in” on the complexity of creating custom audiences for Facebook

Why Are Custom Audiences So Important for Facebook Ads?

The first point to note:  you need to build multiple custom audience combinations for marketing success on Facebook.  It’s a response to the sea of 2 billion users out there, being exposed to ad banner after ad banner as they scroll down their news feed. 

Think of it like this – if you had the time and resources to create a unique, tailor-made ad for each individual customer, sales would increase infinitely. So long as the data-gathering methods are clearly stated, consumers vastly prefer customized ads to overly generalized ones. Because you can create up to 500 custom audiences on Meta, we suggest taking full advantage of that by creating more custom audiences, not less.

Now, here’s where the concept of “combinatorial explosions” comes in – curating an individual ad for anything over a few customers is impossible.  That would mean creating a “custom audience” of one, potentially thousands of times over.  What if you are trying to reach a customer base of 50,000?

The Basics of Building Custom Facebook Audiences

After clicking “custom audience” on Facebook ad’s interface, there are four broad categories you can break the “audience factors” into:

Data source

Helps you target potential customers based on how they have engaged with your online store so far.  Have they visited the site already?  Specific web pages?  Have they spent a substantial amount of time browsing?  And are you pulling from web traffic, Facebook page engagement, Instagram, or some other data source?  Remember, these customers may be in varying stages of the “AIDA” framework (awareness, Interest, Desire, Action).  Therefore, breaking down your custom audience by analyzing their story through data points will inform how to further engage them to increase sales.

Demographics

Pretty straightforward – are you aiming for male, female, or nonbinary audiences?  What age brackets?  For example, if you are selling cheap vintage tees with a female cut, you are likely targeting women ages 16-35.  Overall, demographics are a key component of creating effective custom audiences that drive sales.

Location

Aiming to reach the entire USA is far more costly than trying to reach a single state or region.  So, make sure to tinker with different location settings based on your customer data.  If you cast too broad a net, you’ll dilute the ability to keep engaging with that customer base; it will become too cost-prohibitive.

Interests

This is where things get interesting.  Stacking and layering interests is key to creating target audiences.  As you narrow down and tailor each custom audience, you can add interests that create a fuller picture of the users you are trying to reach.  Most importantly, focus on the fact you can target individuals with “Interest A or Interest B,” as well as, “Interest A and also Interest B.”  Both serve very different functions, as explained below!

“Stacking” or “Layering Interests” – Be Specific as Possible to Increase Ad Effectiveness

Specificity is crucial to have your ads compete with larger-budget businesses.  For example, you could adjust the settings to advertise only to males 18-34 on the East Coast who have an expressed interest in sports or sports apparel

Even more, you can “stack” or “layer” interests to bring laser-precision to your custom audiences.  Using the example above, interest stacking could set an audience that shows ads only to males 18-34 on the East Coast, who have an expressed interest in sports/sports apparel or have liked the official NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL Facebook pages!

In contrast to “stacking,” interest layering more effectively narrows down your target audience. You could set an audience that shows ads only to males 18-34 on the East Coast, who have an expressed interest in sports/sports apparel and also have liked the official NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL Facebook pages!  Effectively “layering” interests for your custom audiences mean each ad creative will be tailor-made for different segments of your audience.  The more layers, the more precise the audience.  You can also exclude certain segments of these audiences to make the ad campaign’s target outreach even more efficient

Depending on the size of your business, the “sweet spot” may be anywhere from 50,000 to 1 million+  Just remember… the budget goes up the larger audience you have!  On modest marketing budgets, it’s better to reach an audience of 1,000 with multiple ads to drive engagement, rather than reach an audience of 100,000 just once.  The latter will be breezed over by users, driving no traffic nor sales to your store.

Conclusion: Deal Better with the Complexity of Custom Audiences thanks to Automated Software

Figuring out which custom audiences to create, based on which data sources, demographics, locations, and interests, becomes an exercise in compounding complexity.  There are hypothetically hundreds to thousands of effective custom audience combinations for your store, and knowing which ones optimize your store for sales success is a full time job, if even possible.

Therefore, we recommend deploying automated software provided by Ad360 to bring laser-precision to your custom audience curation for Faceboook Ads.  Not only do we specialize in analyzing user data for promotional campaigns, the time saved going through it yourself will be a massive burden lifted from your shoulders. 

Concluding, Ad360 offers a free demo to help optimize your Faceboook ads and custom audience curation. We’ll handle the complexity of combinatorial explosions for you 😊  Cheers, and happy selling!