Digital Darts | Marketing consultant

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25.01.2022 With Black Friday just around the corner, stores are busy knuckling down and planning for what we hope will be the biggest BFCM yet. Google will become one of the largest battlegrounds as stores ramp up their bids and budgets to maximise sales. How can you make your Google Ads stand out in an ocean of advertisers? Here are 3 [MUST DO] simple ways to leverage your BFCM promotions in Google Ads. 1. Promotion extensions add value to your search network ads by displaying 2 extra ...lines of text below your ad with details of your promotion. For how much this extension makes your search ads stand out, makes it one of the most overlooked tactics during Black Friday. See an example in the image of this post. 2. Merchant Centre Promotions in Shopping Ads. Advertisers have seen an average increase of 28% in conversion rates using this feature. Be wary, as it can take up to 24 hours for the promotion to get approved and start showing in shopping. 3. Overlay your remarketing list across your campaigns. Savvy customers will start searching days or even weeks before BFCM, with the intention of purchasing at a discount during the sale period. Create a remarketing list capturing website visitors over the past 30 days, add them to your campaigns. On Black Friday add a +50% bid modifier. This way, you’ll bid more aggressively to appear for recent window shoppers and convert them into paying customers.

23.01.2022 If you're having trouble with LALs performing, it could be for two reasons. One, you aren't tracking hashed data, or two, your pixel needs more information, so use a customer list instead. More on advanced matching here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/611774685654668/

23.01.2022 Google Ads have a new type of tracking. It's called Google Conversion Tracking with Cart Data... or Basket Data. Google doesn't even seem to know what it is. It's still in beta. We're able to see the true profit of products in Shopping campaigns. Cost data is taken directly from Shopify's cost per item field on products, which you're able to include in your shopping feed using DataFeedWatch. After a rough month of testing with no data coming through to Google Ads, it's finally working for a few clients. Plenty of hot new metrics like the number of items per purchase. See how to create it and what insights to look for: https://www.datafeedwatch.com//google-ads-conversion-data-

22.01.2022 "Prior to Digital Darts, we had no luck with it (Google Ads) and wasted a lot of money. After Digital Darts took over the management of our Google Ads, we finally started getting positive results from our ad campaigns. And very soon, the results exceeded all of our expectations. Our lifetime return on ad spend is 385% and we could not be happier." Juliette Vassilkioti, My City Plants: https://mycityplants.com Learn more about working with us to grow your Shopify business at: https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/services/google-ads

22.01.2022 Joshua (myself) and SEO manager Emily attending Shopify Pursuit in Melbourne last week. Spot us. Hint: we enjoy everything about Shopify more than others

21.01.2022 6 Google Shopping programs and how to set them up to increase Google Ads revenuean article I wrote for Shopify: https://buff.ly/2ICfQgM

21.01.2022 Does your store use carousels? We have never been a fan of carousels because they are slow and hard to design forboth of which hurts conversion rate. Knowing the critical message you want to say and saying that, instead of cramming everything into a carousel, will boost your page speed and possibly conversion rate.

21.01.2022 Who are your best Shopify customers, and what marketing channels help them find you? Coding is for Losers has a killer template vault to help you out with this: https://codingisforlosers.com/shopify-google-analytics-buy/

20.01.2022 WebP is a modern image format that now makes for a faster Shopify store. Using WebP, you can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG and PNG images. There are no settings or code changes required to take advantage of this feature in #Shopify. Lossless WebP is automatically available when using browsers that support the format (which is most): https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/

19.01.2022 The best visualisation of data Ive seen. Live sales on Shopify for #BFCM: https://buff.ly/2AfGUhB

19.01.2022 23 sneaky, little-known tricks of the trade from Google Ads ecommerce experts to get more out of your campaigns: https://www.datafeedwatch.com/blog/google-ads-ecommerce

18.01.2022 Looking for a great ecommerce podcast? Check out Austin and Andrew on Ecommerce Influence. Good constant insights on email marketing and Facebook Ads.

18.01.2022 A power-packed lecture from Keith Rabois at Stanford University on how to work intelligently on your business with other people. Every minute is filled with gems every company owner needs to know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fQHLK1aIBs

17.01.2022 Theres three ways to grow your business. You can increase profit with more customers, by getting customers to buy more, or by getting customers to buy more frequently. Increasing your average order value is all about the second strategy and we have a bunch of tactics that works well for clients: 1. Optimise your free shipping threshold. 2. Upsell and cross-sell. 3. Create bundles of value.... 4. Offer expensive products. Read about them in a guest article on the WooHoo: http://blog.getwoohoo.com//how-to-boost-your-shopify-stor/

17.01.2022 Shopify are now in the email marketing game: https://www.shopify.com/email-marketing. A long-long way off from Klaviyo, but I suspect the product will be different altogether with a feature-lite and simple focus for those looking to do basic email marketing at low cost.

17.01.2022 The best visualisation of data I've seen. Live sales on Shopify for #BFCM: https://buff.ly/2AfGUhB

17.01.2022 Large Google advertisers with 10,000 transactions per month will now have cross-device data available: https://buff.ly/2UUMYch. This will let you plan your TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU better.

17.01.2022 Looking for a way to fund ongoing product creation, marketing, and fulfillment? Stores are using Indiegogo InDemand to keep momentum going:

16.01.2022 Animated gifs are making headway in store design as a way to present complex information in a user-friendly manner. Dont make the mistake of doing one poorly. Whats even better are mp4s because they are a HTML5-friendly way to present gifs that can otherwise be bloated while achieving the same goals. I love this as an option for some stores to improve sales because: Major browsers support mp4s. You can use a link to an animated version of the gif as fallback.... mp4s and gifs require no input from the user meaning less decision-making. mp4s speed up load times when done right. Gifs can destroy load times when uncompressed, containing high frames, or poorly sized. The movement captures attention. Complex features or a story can be understood instantly through the visual format. Rather than doing an animation for the sake of it, ask yourself how it adds value. The tactic does not suit everyone. Australian furniture company Koala have a great one to quickly show the difference between the firm and soft sides of their pillow. You understand the difference instantly and more comprehensively than what could be described by any photos or text: https://au.koala.com/products/koala-pillow (as a customer, I can say its a great pillow to sleep on!)

16.01.2022 It's awesome to see clients thrive. Especially when they beat hardship like Zeynep from GalenLeather did with cancer. There are many lessons to be learned in this article for fellow Shopify stores. A key takeaway is, as an independent retailer, you can compete and make a name for yourself when you understand your niche and serve them: https://starterstory.com//how-i-overcame-life-s-roadblocks

16.01.2022 A question we commonly get asked is what should my open-rate and click-rate be per email. The wise even ask about revenue per recipient. It depends on the size of your store as it relates to the audience size of your emails. Theres no better source to benchmark than an email provider of ecommerce (Klaviyo) with the data: https://help.klaviyo.com//360033669492-Performance-Benchma

15.01.2022 If you sell on Google Express in the US, by meeting performance standards you can now get a 20% commission discount: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7574576. Google are rewarding fast and free delivery, and free returns.

14.01.2022 If you cant afford to have your best sellers disapproved in Google Shopping, this is for you. There a number of reasons why products may get disapproved, a mismatch in information between your listing and the product page, a change in your product description that triggered a violation, or countless other reasons. Many advertisers will only find out their products have been disapproved when its too lateafter a few days of poor shopping performance leading to a significant ...loss in sales. The common way to keep on top is cumbersome. You routinely logging into the Merchant Center then review the shopping diagnostics to see if your products are still running. Not anymore. This nifty script checks MC regularly, up to an hourly basis, and alerts you via email if any products are disapproved. You can customise the alert to trigger when the overall approval rate falls below your preferred threshold. You can include specific items in the alert i.e. best sellers. This script can be the difference between a few hundred in daily revenue vs thousands: https://github.com///Monitoring/gmc-disapproval-checker.js

14.01.2022 What are some key SEO metrics to look at in tracking your store? SEO is multi-faceted and there are numerous metrics to consider when reviewing the performance of your SEO campaigns. 1. Organic search traffic - rather than getting caught up on daily figures, are week to week and month to month numbers trending upward? ... 2. Total organic ranking keywords - while this isn't a number to get caught up on (because what really matters are ranking for high converting keywords), if the trajectory of this metric is trending upwards, rather than downwards, then you know your website is improving. 3. #1-3 ranking keywords - a majority of traffic is distributed between the highest search results and this is where you will attract a majority of your traffic from. 4. High quality, authoritative backlinks - search engines place a lot of weight on the number of websites linking to your store which in turns, improves your overall domain authority. 5. Organic conversions - after all, you want to be attracting highly qualified customers to your store who are ready to buy. Remember, SEO is a long-game. It requires ongoing effort and time or money. If organic search is important to your Shopify store and you are not actively working on the SEO of your store, you are falling behind to active competitors.

13.01.2022 You cannot rely on Google and Facebook ads support to advise you on their ad policies, unfortunately. It helps for you to know it. This Google Merchant Center account was rightfully suspended as the store was password protected, but the review has support making up policy that a buy button must be on collections

13.01.2022 Want to participate in Black Friday for the first time, but not sure what you should do? If nothing else, do this ONE thing. Make sure you are re-engaging people who purchased from you or interacted with your brand at least once in the last year. Two really good resources for doing this are through an email list, (we recommend Klaviyo) and through Facebook Ads, which just takes a business manager account and a pixel installed on your website. Some warm audience ideas for you in Facebook Ads include 180 day ViewContent events, Facebook engagers, Instagram engagers, video viewers, and customer lists. Get ready now since this is expected to be the biggest Q4 yet.

13.01.2022 The biggest update to The Finest Google Analytics Setup in Shopify has been published since I wrote it in 2015. It has been updated with questions I get asked every week, new best practices, ongoing best practices, third-party integrations, Google Signals, and more. Theres a 25-point spreadsheet to have by your side as work through the guide so you get your setup right. It is a must-follow guide for any Shopify store https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/google-analytics-shopify

12.01.2022 Facebook Ads finally have available a status page to inform advertisers that they're not going crazy every other day when Power Editor breaks. It's good to see BFCM go a lot smoother this year than the tragedy of last. Worthy of a bookmark: https://status.fb.com/ads/

12.01.2022 "Delivery" searches hit an all-time high in Google: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=delivery

11.01.2022 For many years, sellers in China have been able to ship for less from China to America than local American sellers can domestically, thanks to ePacket. If and when rates do go up significantly, those selling small and light items are likely to have a small bonanza thanks to the elimination of many of their Chinese counterparts. This is impacting especially for dropshippers to the US. Read more at: https://www.ecomcrew.com/why-china-post-and-usps-are-killi/

10.01.2022 No my entrepreneury friend.

10.01.2022 Shopify in July will allow for custom shipping profiles based on product details like size and weight. Woop! Some incoming conversion-boosting features include easier management of video/3D assets, better subscription integration, and predictive search:

10.01.2022 The biggest Shopify updates for 2020-21. As usual, a few announcements like Shopify Email have already rolled out to select stores for testing. You may have heard of the Shop Channel where Shopify essentially become a third-party marketplace like eBay or Amazon, but without taking customer data from you. What got us most excited is a native solution for buy now, pay later with Shopify Pay. We expect a lot of stores to turn more visitors into customers because of the offer and... seamless experience. Just like that, Sezzle and Afterpay have taken an upper-cut to the jaw. Watch the Reunite recap here: https://www.shopify.com/reunite

10.01.2022 A summary of 26 key rules to typography: https://buff.ly/2TBp6Jw. Be careful if you decide to read it because youll get frustrated when seeing other websites ruin readership over a 5-minute fix.

08.01.2022 Facebook Ads finally have available a status page to inform advertisers that theyre not going crazy every other day when Power Editor breaks. Its good to see BFCM go a lot smoother this year than the tragedy of last. Worthy of a bookmark: https://status.fb.com/ads/

08.01.2022 Decisions for Google Ads optimisations have always been about hitting your ROAS goal, but now you can make more informed decisions to acquire the top 25% of your customers. How would you like to know the age, gender, parental status, and location of your highest value customers? Or the strongest affinities of your highest value customers to fuel Google Ads bid modifiers and Facebook interests, so you get additional customers who spend x2-5 times more than a one-off customer?... Google Ads is now giving simple insights not previously available to any other channel through their new customer value report. You can see if this feature is available to you from the top-right of your ads account. Go to "Tools & Settings" then under the "Measurement" column will be "Customer value". I do not see this feature for all our clients. Running ads for at least a year with several thousand in ad spend a month seems to be one criteria yet some clients doing this still do not have the report available. The report is split into three groups : 1. High value customers: Top 25% of returning customers based on the total value of their purchase conversions. 2. Medium value customers: Bottom 75% of returning customers based on the total value of their purchase conversions. 3. One-time customers: Customers who have made only one purchase. In the image of this Facebook post, we see mobile users are twice as likely to spend in the top 75% of all customers! That is great insight where if your cash flow is good, you could place an aggressive bid modifier on mobile devices for all campaigns. In the affinity tab, you can do the same strategy plus get ideas for valuable interests in your Facebook Ads campaigns. Data is anonymised information about your customers over the previous 12 months. This is yet another reason to ensure you're not making tracking mistakes like doubling up on conversions or reporting an incorrect value, because it will distort your value segments.

07.01.2022 Congratulations to our SEO manager Emily and Jake Amor on their wedding day. It was lovely to see you both commit to each other. We pray the best for your marriage.

06.01.2022 Shopify have released an in-built speed report in the Shopify admin to review a variety of metrics aimed at helping you make informed decisions for store speed. It uses Google Lighthouse to provide a speed score. The report gives people unfamiliar with speed tools, a way to judge how the store benchmarks against others. You get a summary of the three most important pages for store speed in Shopify: the home page, collection page, and product page. Even if youre comfortable w...ith tools like gtmetrix.com, Lighthouse through the Shopify integration tool is another reliable tool to test against. You can view yours by going to the "Online Store" then "Themes". Beneath your live theme, you will see your speed score and can get a more in-depth report. You can also go to "Analytics" > "Reports". In the Behavior section, click "Online store" speed. I have noticed not all clients have access to the report. There is also the option to view the speed score overtime so you can monitor what store changes impact speed. (Make a simple change log of your website theme with the date and details of each change so you can dig into correlations.) A higher speed score is not always better. A good question to ask yourself when analysing an asset that is slowing the store, "Can this facet be sped up? If not, does the benefit of it outweigh the speed cost?" There are ecommerce features that contribute to the customer experience that help conversion rate or order value, which can offer more value for your business than not having the feature to get a faster store speed. Here are speed boosts you can use to improve your speed score: the mp4 versus gif hack I mentioned last month on Facebook, minimise custom fonts, use lazy loading, remove apps that load on the front-end, optimise your images before uploading, improve the time to first render by loading JavaScript in the footer, and cut down the size of code through a variety of methods like minification.

06.01.2022 Are you attracting the right kind of organic customers to your store? It sounds wonderful in theory to attract customers from all walks of life and at all stages in the buyers journey, but when it comes to crunch time, you need sales. If customers are rocking up to your virtual doorstep and turning away as soon as you open the door, then it looks bad for business according to search engines. High bounces rates arent desirable for SEO or your bottom line. Behind every searc...h query is an intent. Search queries can broadly be classified as indicating one of three intentions: 1. Informational Keywords 2. Navigational Keywords 3. Transactional Keywords. Is the user looking for more information, deciding on a solution from a number of options, or ready to buy? As an ecommerce store, navigational and transactional keywords are the most desirable. This isnt to say you only need to dominate transactional based keywords. High quality content can, and often does, attract informational keywords and in turn, can take readers on a buyers journey and convert them to paying customers (it just requires a lot more leg work). But what if you could capture those customers who are already in buying mode, and searching accordingly? Consider these your low hanging fruits. This is why you need to know your keywords! A targeted SEO keyword strategy is vital in making sure you are spending your time and energy focusing on the kind of searches that will convert.

06.01.2022 Google Ads have a new type of tracking. Its called Google Conversion Tracking with Cart Data... or Basket Data. Google doesnt even seem to know what it is. Its still in beta. Were able to see the true profit of products in Shopping campaigns. Cost data is taken directly from Shopifys cost per item field on products, which youre able to include in your shopping feed using DataFeedWatch. After a rough month of testing with no data coming through to Google Ads, its finally working for a few clients. Plenty of hot new metrics like the number of items per purchase. See how to create it and what insights to look for: https://www.datafeedwatch.com//google-ads-conversion-data-

04.01.2022 Google Shopping for Shopify: The Definitive Guide. My latest book available for free https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/google-shopping. Its the most comprehensive guide ever written on Google Shopping for Shopify stores. Google Shopping offers the ultimate way to level up revenue for many stores. We have managed approximately one hundred Google Ads accounts for various stores, and its common for my team and I to produce a return on investment for our clients of 300-2000%. W...hile these results are not possible for all businesses, the Google Shopping channel is a golden source of customers wanting products. By searching, they are wanting. Maybe you work with an ad agency who actually do little behind-the-scenes to improve your campaigns. Perhaps you implemented Shopifys own Google Shopping channel then had its automated bidding burn through ad spend. Im sick of seeing people lose money in their businesses all because of bad freelancers, agencies, or information . While it makes great business for me, it is heartbreaking to see people lose on business ventures they pour their hearts, souls, and finances into establishing. So after 10 years of Google Ads management and 4 years working only with Shopify stores, I rolled up my writing sleeves to distill everything I have learned. The end result is the Google Shopping For Shopify: The Definitive Guide. The book sheds light on the tried and tested strategies of what works, and what hasnt, for our clients on the channel . Dont be fooled into thinking you can fudge your way through this. Paid advertising is most successful when you know all the levers you can pull that make up the whole ad platform then benchmarking these against quantifiable metrics to determine performance. Otherwise its all too easy to pour money down the drain that could have been spent elsewhere in your business. I created this guide, not only as an easy reference for clients and team, but as a way to squelch a lot of the misinformation out there about Google Shopping basics. This is a step-by-step guide to show you how to get started and grow any shopping campaign. Read it free online or download the PDF now at: https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/google-shopping

04.01.2022 Now this is cool. Create a custom mobile app from Google Spreadsheet data. Get inspiration from Glide Apps library:

04.01.2022 A neat feature for catalog-heavy Facebook advertisers. Facebook will auto-detect feed updates next month so that the latest inventory is reflected in your ads regardless of the upload schedule: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/479667179249237 The result will be better performing campaigns for stores who regularly update product information and are dependent on the Catalog Sales objective.

04.01.2022 An Amazon-inspired Shopify theme by Pixel Union: https://buff.ly/2LBI1gs. Yummy!

03.01.2022 Top piece by former Shopify Plus Editor Aaron Orendorff on the impact of the Cornavirus on ecommerce across verticals, ideas to cope, and what brands are doing during these challenging times: https://commonthreadco.com//coachs-c/coronavirus-ecommerce

01.01.2022 If you can't afford to have your best sellers disapproved in Google Shopping, this is for you. There a number of reasons why products may get disapproved, a mismatch in information between your listing and the product page, a change in your product description that triggered a violation, or countless other reasons. Many advertisers will only find out their products have been disapproved when it's too lateafter a few days of poor shopping performance leading to a significant ...loss in sales. The common way to keep on top is cumbersome. You routinely logging into the Merchant Center then review the shopping diagnostics to see if your products are still running. Not anymore. This nifty script checks MC regularly, up to an hourly basis, and alerts you via email if any products are disapproved. You can customise the alert to trigger when the overall approval rate falls below your preferred threshold. You can include specific items in the alert i.e. best sellers. This script can be the difference between a few hundred in daily revenue vs thousands: https://github.com///Monitoring/gmc-disapproval-checker.js

01.01.2022 Its awesome to see clients thrive. Especially when they beat hardship like Zeynep from GalenLeather did with cancer. There are many lessons to be learned in this article for fellow Shopify stores. A key takeaway is, as an independent retailer, you can compete and make a name for yourself when you understand your niche and serve them: https://starterstory.com//how-i-overcame-life-s-roadblocks

01.01.2022 There's three ways to grow your business. You can increase profit with more customers, by getting customers to buy more, or by getting customers to buy more frequently. Increasing your average order value is all about the second strategy and we have a bunch of tactics that works well for clients: 1. Optimise your free shipping threshold. 2. Upsell and cross-sell. 3. Create bundles of value.... 4. Offer expensive products. Read about them in a guest article on the WooHoo: http://blog.getwoohoo.com//how-to-boost-your-shopify-stor/