Is it worth reopening my store after ad issues with Facebook and Apple?

[Doug54]

I closed my store last year when Facebook and Apple changes resulted in inablity to advertise effectively.  I am interested in re opening the store but not sure if there is an alternative to the advertising we used to to on Facebook.  Any suggestions?  Is to even worth trying to reopen?

[Brendan-Optily]

Hey @Doug54 

You're not alone here I'm afraid. Lots of stores struggled during the summer of '21 after those iOS updates. What's been happening since is interesting:

• More stores are relying on Facebook/Instagram for upper funnel activities as that seems to work well. By upper funnel, we mean finding customers who are in market for the product but not actively searching. This approach works well if you then build out a strong remarketing campaign both in FB/Insta but also on lower funnel channels such as Google. What we see is when there is spend in FB/Insta, the conversions rates and ROAS from Google Shopping campaigns increases.
  
  
• Google has introduced a new PMAX ad campaign format. It takes your product catalog and any other assets (images, video) you have and creates campaigns that work in multiple placements. We've seen upwards of a 40%+ improvement in sales over traditional shopping campaigns. These campaigns are doing two jobs - growing your audience and closing out in-market shoppers.
  
  
• Since the iOS stuff, TikTok has really started to fill the gap. Shopify announced a big partnership with TikTok recently and with good reason. TikTok's audience is growing and is also older than you might think. In addition, TikTok had doubled-down on e-commerce so we're starting to see performance from there to ramp up. Generally you're able to find audiences more cost effectively there than in some of these other channels.

I hope that helps...

[dropship_helps]

That was general or niche store?

[Andrew]

Hi @Doug54, 

I can understand why you were discouraged by the changes to Apple's iOS 14.5 and 15, and while we cannot predict how these changes will impact any one store or marketing plan, we do have suggestions for how you can adapt to these changes.

Those suggestions are kind of directed at bigger companies with marketing teams, but the same principles apply to smaller businesses. With that said, I did write a post myself that discusses how independent brands like your own can leverage first-party data for marketing purposes using Shopify Analytics.

And of course, branding and marketing aren't all about paid advertising on Facebook. A lot of it relies on your content marketing strategy, and of course, there are Google ads.

When it comes to reopening your store, we can usually only guarantee that your store data has been preserved for up to 3 months after you closed it. After that, it becomes eligible to be wiped from our server.

What was it that you were selling? Are you thinking of reopening exactly the same store? Or would this be an opportunity to try something different?