Small Budget, Big Results: Creative Tips to Organically Increase Your E-Commerce Ad Spend
If you run an e-commerce site, paid ads are essential for driving traffic and sales.
But ad spend can get expensive fast, eating into your margins.
The key is growing your ad spend gradually and sustainably over time through optimization, not throwing more money at the problem.
With some strategic tweaking of your existing ads, you can increase their performance and expand your reach on a budget.
This lets you scale your advertising organically without breaking the bank.
In this Substack, I'll walk through the step-by-step process for optimizing your e-commerce ads to maximize results without increasing your ad budget.
With the right small tweaks, you can get your ads performing better and more efficiently.
Set Up Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is essential for optimizing your ad spend because it tells you what actions people take after clicking your ads.
This could include purchases, signups, downloads, or any other goal you want to track.
Without conversion tracking, you're optimizing your ads blindly.
With it, you can see exactly which ads, placements, audiences etc are driving conversions and double down on what's working.
To set up conversion tracking:
1. Decide what your conversion goal is. This is the action you want people to take after clicking your ad. e-commerce stores will likely track purchases, but you could also track email signups, app installs, etc.
2. Add the Facebook pixel or Google tag to your website. These will allow Facebook and Google to track conversions.
- For Facebook, go to Events Manager and create a conversion event.
- For Google, go to your ads account and create a new Conversion Action.
3. Insert the tracking code on confirmation pages. For e-commerce, put it on your checkout confirmation or "thank you" page so each purchase is logged.
4. Connect your ad accounts. In Facebook or Google Ads, link your new conversion event to start tracking.
5. Test tracking by making a test purchase or taking the conversion action yourself. Check your ads interface to confirm it's being logged.
Now you'll be able to see your most important metric - conversions driven per ad.
This is crucial for optimizing your ad spend going forward.
Audit Your Existing Ads
Before you ramp up ad spend, it's crucial to audit your existing ads to identify top performers.
This will help ensure your increased budget goes toward scaling winners, not wasting money on underperformers.
Analyze performance data over the last 30-90 days to uncover:
Your best performing ad copy. Look at clickthrough rate (CTR) and conversation rate (CVR) by ad.
Your highest converting ad images and videos. Assess CTR and CVR by each visual asset.
Your most profitable placements. Break down performance by ad unit, position, platform, geo-targeting and other placement criteria.
Your ideal bid range. Review costs, conversions, and return on ad spend (ROAS) at different bid levels.
Any seasonal or time-of-day trends. Are particular ads working better during certain time frames?
Regularly auditing your ads provides invaluable intel to inform where you'll get the most bang for your buck as you scale budgets.
You'll be able to double down on what's working and pare back inefficient spending.
Define Your Target Audience
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