When running paid acquisition campaigns like Google Ads, you should be targeting a payback period. That means, on average a customer has paid back their acquisition costs by a certain point of time. Basically you want to know at what point a customer has produced enough profit to pay for the advertising that attracted them. …
Tag: advertising
Start smaller projects instead
We were planning to finish our basement this winter and spring. It’s a significant space in our house and would be a great office for me. But there are only a limited number of contractors accepting projects and the prices are high right now. Too high to make it worth the investment. So we decided …

Quick formula to learn what you can afford to pay per click for a Shopify customer
When you’re trying to make advertising work, there’s a simple calculation you can use to get a rough idea on how much you can spend per click. Multiply your purchase conversion rate by the first order’s average value (AOV) and your margin. For example, 3% conversion rate X $50 AOV X 20% margin = $0.30 …

Make your advertising budgets fluid as customer behavior changes
Starting in November I had to lower my own advertising budgets because there was a high demand which was driving prices up. I ended up dropping my own advertising to 1/8th of the prior levels. But now that the holiday season is winding down I’ll be starting to increase it again. You should treat your …

How I almost gave up too soon advertising my Shopify apps
Last week I started experimenting with Facebook ads for JSON-LD for SEO. The app page does a great job of converting customers so I wanted to see if I could buy some traffic for it. I set the ad campaign to run for a week with a fixed budget. First I wanted to test some …

Leveraging randomness
I’ve been doing some work with Facebook ads recently. When setting up my last set of ads I wanted to try three different images to see which one would work: An image of my app banner. An image representing the concepts of my app. A dog wearing a blanket robe. Yes. To advertise my Shopify …