Need Help: High Ad Costs, No Conversions – Where to Go from Here?

Start a Business
1

Hi everyone,

I’m reaching out for some advice as I’m feeling stuck with my eCommerce store’s marketing efforts. I’ve invested in several paid ad campaigns (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok, Reddit), but unfortunately, the costs have been quite high, and I’ve had little to no conversions. Despite testing different targeting strategies and tweaking ad copy, nothing seems to be working.

Here is my store.

I’d really appreciate any advice on:

  1. Products and products presentation
  2. More effective ways to reach my target audience - opened to targeting suggestions.
  3. Affordable marketing strategies that might work better.
  4. If anyone has experienced a similar challenge and what helped turn things around for them.

Thanks so much in advance for any guidance or insights!

2

@YCW1 Get common feedback here https://community.shopify.com/c/store-feedback/bd-p/ecommerce-gallery

The ads are probably targeting demographics that don’t actually want what’s being offered, or that can immediately tell the offering is low quality stuff that can be had on tens of thousands of other stores.

Self awareness is key walk the graveyard of the cliché you’ve created.

https://community.shopify.com/c/forums/searchpage/tab/message?q=no%20sales

Ignore all the glossy non-solutions you’ll find there that make people feel good and create busy work but do not actually solve real business problems.

Look for patterns, look for what makes stores into survivors.

Get rid of all the annoying nonsense junk on the website, would you walk into a retail store that treated you like this?

It’s seriously just annoying not creative at all.

Pick a product , make it something people actually want, make it quality and focus on it.

PaulNewton_0-1727990046395.png
PaulNewton_0-1727990046395.png1369×679 221 KB

Then after that you’ve got to get past the hurdle of people not wanting drop shipped AI-generated slop which will increasingly become a larger and larger informed audience.

All the “reviews” reek as fake.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg :mountain: , good luck.

3

Thank you for sharing your opinion and for your time, Paul. While you say it is not creative at all, I think the designs are good and creative and the main issue is the targeting as you say. I’ll give it some more time before I follow your advice to call it quits. All the best!

4

Reread it “not creative at all” is not the critique of AI art, it is specifically in the context of adding nonsense doodads and widgets for spurious reasons that only serve to get in way of what a customer is actually their for and encourage higher bounce rates.

You literally have hero image with a call to action that no one is gonna see because there are no less than 2 other things fighting for space on top of it.

5

Point taken - I removed the 15% off social share from home page and the sales notification altogether. I’ll keep the free shipping & the cookies banner. Thanks again for the feedback!

6

Hello!

I have a couple of tips that might just make the difference in your conversions:

The very first step I suggest you take is figure out your ICP (Ideal customer persona). This must include their age, gender, marital status, occupation, interests, hobbies, etc-basically anything that can help you fully understand who would be converting when they visit your website.
I’m sure that you will come out with 2-3 types of people. Try out different variations and see which is the platform that they’re most likely to be active on, eg. younger audiences (12-24year olds) are more likely to use Instagram as compared to Facebook or Reddit. Target accordingly.

Next, segregate your products into two groups based on those that are more likely to convert (i.e,. they’ve received more clicks and engagement) and those that have not performed well in the past. Group A will contain products with a history of higher clicks, impressions, or conversions- try to analyze what makes them stand out. While allocating the budget, ensure this ad group gets a bigger share.

For those products that are not performing, you might want to segregate them into different categories and compare them to their counterparts that are performing well. Notice the differences and try to run these (albeit, you’ll be better off allocating the lesser share of budget to these products as some products simply don’t work well)

**SEO—**Since you run ads on multiple platforms, I’m sure you’re already familiar with the concept. However, I cannot emphasize enough how impactful SEO can be when used right.

  1. Use the right keywords, negative keywords (use tools like Ahrefs or Mox).
  2. You might have already done this, but make sure your website is mobile, tablet, etc friendly.
  3. To get more visibility, use structured data and interlinking to help with indexing (i.e,. letting search engines discover your website)

Social Media

  1. You seem to be quite active on social media, I suggest collaborating with an influencer, trying out posts that improve engagement and community building. This can increase trust and lead to more conversions.

Retargeting
An age old tactic for marketers that has never seemed to fail anyone. Opt for dynamic remarketing campaigns. These campaigns take your ads, customize them according to the audience’s behaviour using AI and target them to customers who have previously shown an interest in your brand. They work as a sort of “gentle reminder” to visit your website and make conversions.

Affiliate marketing

Try affiliate marketing (using third party promoters to promote your products). Since affiliates earn a commission each time a product is purchased, there is a higher incentive to promote your products to different audiences.

Campaign

Ensure that you’re picking the right campaign for marketing. My suggestion to you would be to experiment with a Performance Max campaign since it is purely conversion-driven.

Hope this helps.

Bhakti

2 Likes
7

Thank you for your time and detailed response, I have done some of that but will continue working on it incorporating your advice.

8

Hello there @YCW1 I don’t have enough insight into your marketing strategies used to comment on that but I can make some helpful comments as regards your store. The store is just very well set up and designed but it did feel like you tried to put up too many products into the homepage making it feel a bit crowded with not enough CTA content so maybe that’s something to tweak a bit. With the extra space, maybe you could use it to display 2-3 FAQs on the homepage which you think could help in convincing customers more.

I wish you and your store the best of luck!

1 Like
9

Thank you very much for the good words and the advice, I will consider that. Be well!

10

Paul here sounds just like a prima donna insensitive imbecile

Get a personality Bud !

11

Don’t listen to Paul here of all people my God !

The guy is here to monetize his personal desires.. click on some of his stuff and see how it is leading you to promotional stuff just like he’s advising you against.. as a matter of fact your website looks fine there’s not a dang thing around with it !

I’ve seen better stuff on dropshipping websites then you can get at Walmart so I would ignore that advice and negative language being spoken about what you may carry that is a dropship item… All these " gurus " here make me laugh.. let them produce some results before they start directing everybody else… Furthermore everything is subjective so opinions really don’t count for much… Look for similar people I guess that sell similar items to you and ask them what advertisers they’ve used to lead to success.. that’s what led me to read this thread too. I’m looking for an advertiser outside of miserable social media which is worthless and pop up and pop under worthless stuff to find some viable solution and it’s not Google ads either !

12

I wouldn’t spend much time listening to Paul here

In fact I would ask him what his qualifications are !

13

There is no social media that converts… SEO takes time and is not a solution without requiring more spending… All the blogs and blah blah blah and free business listings and blah blah blah are also useless.. don’t waste your time… Just keep pushing your link out there and decide your space because that’s all it is.. it’s work and generating traffic… If you’re not doing something in your day to generate traffic then you have no place expecting a sale to begin with… Ecommerce owners should ask themselves how often are you staring at your customer account for the day and what are you doing to increase that number … SEO is not going to do it at least not for 6 months… Social media sharing certainly is a joke anybody who can considers that and says that it works is flat-out lying or can’t or won’t produce results… Blogging and inserting two links into a blog that contains four paragraphs is worthless as well..