7 Shopify Advertising Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Bottom Line

If you're running an e-commerce business, then you know how important it is to get your products in front of potential customers. After all, without advertising, nobody would know that your store exists!

To help you avoid making some of the most common mistakes when Advertising your Shopify store online, we've put together a list of 7 advertising mistakes that you need to stop making!

By avoiding these mistakes, you'll be able to improve the performance of your Ad campaigns, effectively generate more sales and increase your bottom line.

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1. Poorly Optimised Landing Page

One of the greatest and most common mistakes e-commerce business owners make is failing to optimise their landing page.

Your landing page is the first thing potential customers will see when they click through to your website, so it's important to make sure it's well designed and structured to convert.

A few things you can do to optimise your landing page for conversions include: 

• Including a strong headline that accurately reflects either your point of difference, the featured offer in your Ad or an incentive
• Create compelling copy that speaks to the needs of your target audience
• Including a relevant and eye-catching imagery
• Using clear and concise call-to-actions

By taking the time to optimise your landing page, you'll be in a much better position to convert potential customers into paying customers.

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2. A Lack of Creative Assets

One of the biggest mistakes that Shopify store owners make is not including enough quality pictures of their products in their ads.

Remember, people are visual creatures and they want to see what they're buying before they commit to a purchase.

Include multiple content pieces of your product from different angles, user generated content, or videos, so that potential customers can get a good sense of what they're buying.

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3. Not Defining Your Target Audience

One of the most common mistakes e-commerce businesses make when advertising is failing to define their target audience. Without knowing who your target audience is, it will be very difficult to create ads that resonated with them and convert them into customers.

To avoid this mistake, take some time to develop buyer personas for your target customers.

Once you have a good understanding of who your target audience is, you'll be in a much better position to create ads that appeal to them and achieve a higher conversion rate.

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4. Targeting the Wrong Audience

Another common mistake is targeting the wrong audience with your ads. This can happen for a number of reasons; maybe you picked the wrong demographics when setting up your ad campaign, or maybe your ad copy isn't relevant to the people who are seeing it. Whatever the reason, if you're not reaching the right people with your ads then you're wasting your time and money.

To avoid this mistake, make sure that you spend some time planning out who you want to target with your ads. Once you know who your target audience is, then you can create ad campaigns specifically for them. This will help ensure that your ads are relevant and useful for the people who see them, which will lead to better results overall.

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5. Failing to Measure Performance Metrics

Once you've launched your ad campaigns, it's important to keep track of how it's performing so that you can make necessary adjustments along the way. Unfortunately, this is something that a lot of people fail to do properly.

Without tracking your results, it's impossible to tell whether or not your campaign is actually working and if it should be deemed a success.

As a result, you could end up wasting a lot of time and money on ineffective campaigns and continue to harm your bottom line.

To avoid this mistake, make sure to measure your results, analyse the data regularly and adjust accordingly. There are a number of different metrics that you should track, such as; 

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversion rate
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost per lead (CPL)
• CPM (cost per mille or Cost per 1,000 impressions)
• Bounce Rate
• Ad Frequency

By monitoring these metrics closely, you'll be able to tell whether or not your campaign is on track, where it’s flourishing or failing, and what necessary changes are needing to be made.

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6. Neglecting Negative Keywords

Another mistake that many Shopify business owners make is failing to use negative keywords in their Google Ads campaigns.

Negative keywords are key phrases or singular words that you don't want your ad to show up for.

For example, if you sell women's clothing, you might want to add "men" as a negative keyword so your ad doesn't show up when someone searches for "men's clothing" for instance. 

By using negative keywords, you can save a lot of ad spend budget by ensuring that your ad only shows up for relevant searches and in turn, increase the number of relevant clicks that you’re able to generate.

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7. Not A/B Testing

Finally, one of the most important things that you can do when running an ad campaign is A/B testing different elements to see what works best for your business. This includes things like testing different ad copy or images to see which performs better with your target audience. 

Without A/B testing, it's impossible to know what actually works and what doesn't. As a result, you could be wasting a lot of time and money on ineffective methods.

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Summary

Advertising your Shopify store can be an effective way to increase traffic and sales for your e-commerce business. However, it's important to avoid making common mistakes such as failing to define your target audience, not optimising your landing page, and not tracking your performance metrics.

By taking the time to create well-crafted ads with relevant creative assets and persuasive copy, you can ensure that your ads are primed to make an impact and profitably increase sales for your ecommerce business.

If you'd like to have an informal chat with an ecommerce digital marketing agency, feel free to get in touch and we'd be happy to help!

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