Work / E-commerce and paid social
B2C ยท E-commerce and paid social
Two online stores, built and run on paid social and Google Shopping
The problem
With my business partner I built and ran two online stores from nothing. The first was a direct-to-consumer beauty and wellness store sold through Facebook. The question was simple: how fast could we drive traffic, build engagement, convert it and make at least 2x our money back in four months? The second was a baby health accessories store that had to win on Google Shopping, where margins, competitors and cost per click decide everything.
What I did
- Store one: a Shopify store from the ground up. Multiple mapped domains, back-end plugins, copy, media and imagery, and calls to action built around three consumer triggers: trust, value and instant gratification.
- Facebook build. A business page developed for social proof (shares, comments, likes, follows and tags) before any ad spend.
- Research, then budget. Audience Insights to find the right buyer persona, balancing too narrow against too broad. A potential reach of 650,000 people in the first defined audience.
- Test, then cut. 77 campaigns and more than 700 ad sets: 18 campaigns built for engagement and 59 for purchases. I A/B tested ad copy, placements, ages and interests, and switched off whatever did not convert.
- Scheduling. Used a lifetime budget and ran ads only at peak weekday and weekend hours, to save money and time.
- Retargeting. Moved to lookalike audiences and website-engagement audiences, then pulled emails from the site for segmented retargeting.
- Email. Custom Mailchimp templates and 25 campaigns, with segmentation tests.
- Store two: Google Shopping. Researched demand with Google Trends, then built a spreadsheet of keywords against monthly searches, cost per click, competitor prices and margin, so only products with room to earn were advertised.
- Store two: the store itself. Built and fully optimized the Shopify store from scratch for search, with a site speed score of 70 on mobile and 93 on desktop, a warranty add-on at the cart, and a reviews program that collected 1,155 reviews.
The result
View as a table
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Test goal | 2.0 | minimum we set |
| Facebook, engagement | 2.0 | 18 campaigns |
| Facebook, purchases | 2.25 | 59 campaigns |
| Industry average | 2.87 | all industries |
| Google Shopping store | 7.5 | baby accessories |
Source: my case studies, from Facebook Ads Manager and the Google Shopping store report.
View as a table
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | +90% | increase |
| Ad spend | -13% | decrease |
Source: my case study for the baby accessories store.
How this was measured: from the Facebook Ads Manager totals in my case study: about $46,365 spent and $104,129 in purchase conversion value across 59 campaigns and 514 ad sets.
How this was measured: from Ads Manager in my case study.
How this was measured: from the Facebook post in my case study. This is one video, not the whole campaign.
How this was measured: from Google Analytics in my case study. This is all store revenue, not only ad-attributed.
How this was measured: from my case study for the baby accessories store, which also shows $83K+ in gross revenue over the program.
How this was measured: from the reviews app dashboard in my case study.
How I got there
I treated each store as a test. I set a return goal first, ran many small campaigns, cut the ones that did not convert, and moved budget to the audiences and times of day that did. For Google Shopping I checked the margin on each product before spending a dollar on its clicks.