We started online marketing with Google ads through Google given specialist spending considerable amount in different campaigns including Max with no results the generated sales through the ads where ridiculous compared to the amount of money we spent. Now we don’t have budgets requested to spend anymore and we are unable to continue as an online shop. Does Google ads really work? How can we now continue to generate sales?
Hello Nutrida, thank you for your question and for joining the Shopify AMA. My name is Emmanuel, founder of FeedArmy, and your host for today’s AMA.
Sorry to hear about your bad experience with advertising. It’s very tough, I have managed accounts for 15+ years, and some do fail under my management. And what I have learned over the years is that not everything can be sold at a profit. This can have a lot of reasons. For example the most common reason I found in my case was that what they sold was very unique, limited exposure, meaning to get noticed you need to spend a lot of money on getting traffic, meaning getting sales is very limited.
For example if you sell your own manufactured product, but the market is already flooded with so many other merchants, how can you compete?
There are many ways you can attack this. But the first thing I recommend you focus on is, researching your competitors and analyze what they don’t do great, but you do great. A great way to find this out is to read the competitor reviews. See what the most common pitfalls are. Then find a way that you can do better. Is it a service, is it a product feature. Then setup your advertising, and your product landing page, to highlight these specific benefits.
Without really knowing what you sell, there are many other things that can be recommended tailored to your business. So there is no one size fits all. What I do for one client, will not always be the same for another, or not even possible.
Performance max is kind of an advertising campaign that works well, but not if you have less than 30 sales. So I recommend that you first focus on using standard shopping.
This does require more work, but allows you to be more specific what to target if you setup an advanced strategy concept, which I explain here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiRIDzRrHno
This allows you to control how you spend more, and target specific search terms.
But that is not the only part, you also need to improve your data feed quality and improve every single attribute that is applicable to your product, here is a full list: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7052112?hl=en
Now, you did say you have no more budget to spend, so I don’t know if you meant you have limited budget, or absolutely nothing.
If you have nothing, then I don’t really have much to suggest from an advertising budget.
If you have limited budget, focus on your top sellers, and step by step do a DIY advertising, follow guides, tutorials etc.
Stay away from so called gurus, or agencies that claim to be dominating, etc. It’s all wishful thinking.