Hello Tuesday tea break talks. It's time to listen to some of
the ramblings of me, Nick Truman, your host.
I'm going to talk about some exciting things today.
If you haven't already, I'm going to stop shouting this out.
Actually, I'm going to say it now just so I don't sound
really, really vague, but go and check out Growth Summit.
It's happening in 1st of September 2026.
It's going to be going live. It's basically a conference, a
show, an Expo, whatever you want to call it, but everything's
going live in one single moment. We're going to try and we don't
know what the record is. We couldn't really work it out,
put a number on it, but we're going to try and break or even
set the record for the most Shopify related content in one
place at one time ever. And then we will have that as a
benchmark. And then come 1st of September
2027, we're going to launch a bigger 1.
And there'll be some stuff going on throughout the year as well.
So if you want to get access to all of that content, I'm not
going to be on most of it, which should be a Hallelujah moment
for a lot of you guys. You can just hear from the
experts and some of it's going to be apps talking about how
they develop things, brand sharing their stories.
It's going to be super exciting and we are currently signing up
speakers, sponsors and brands and lots of other stuff and
we're starting to get first few bits of content coming in the
next few weeks to put on the platform.
We're building a platform for it.
It's super exciting. It's quite scary these things
because it was all my idea and now thousands of you are sitting
here listening to me say hey, go and do this.
It's going to be fun and we're possibly going to launch a bit
of a community off the back of it as well.
We launched something a while ago and just didn't really take
off, but this felt like a better opportunity to launch a little
community. So let's have a look then.
So this week we are talking about and one of my lovely
friends, you know, your friends are always your biggest critics.
One of them said to not use the word so in the entire episode
because he listened to two of them and I kept saying so.
So we're going to talk about data today.
I'm going to have a little ramble about data.
I've got 9 points of things you should be looking at and then I
got 123. I didn't number these 123456 and
88 recent examples of things we learned about clients of ours
were actually quite a big statistical change needs to
happen or behavioral change to change the data based on the bit
of data that we saw. This is the third thing I'm
recording today and I've had two coffees so this will not take
long whatsoever. If I'm talking too quick, just
slow the thing down. I'm absolutely buzzing.
It's only a Monday, so I yeah, kicking the day off and the week
off in a good style. Let's look at some of the bits
of data you guys I think you should be looking at and some of
the things that our clients either look at regularly and I
agree with it or don't look at enough and I don't agree with
it. They should look at these things
more. First one is how often do you
find yourself in meetings or reviewing your business data on
Shopify and you talk about revenue, how exciting revenue,
how much money's come in? There's a problem with revenue
and that is that it doesn't include the costs.
So you need to look at gross profit and net profit and those
are two very, very important things to look at.
Taking that step further though, and I mentioned this a bit on
the show before, we're working with some clients now where
they've got their cost of product data in Shopify, which
means something very, very exciting.
We can see that one product might have an 80% margin.
So if we sell it for $100, we make 80 as profit, 20 covers the
price of the product. And out of the 80, that's where
our margin either for agency fees or for marketing costs or
there'll be a set part of that for running a business at your
end as well. But that's an 80% margin.
And in the same business, you'll have products that have like a
20 or 30% margin, which is completely different ball game.
So why then, why are you running campaigns with a return on ad
spend? Just one flat, 1 flat cost.
You could make more profit if you spent more acquiring
customers or acquiring sales from the products that have
bigger margins. And you're probably spending too
much then on some of your products that don't have a good
margin. In terms of running a business
in a smarter way, you start to build your campaigns out based
on margins. There's one small problem there
is if you have the same product to say it's a pair of trainers,
you've one pair of trainers with a 20% margin and one pair of
trainers with an 80% margin. The problem then is you don't
really want 2 campaigns on Google, both targeting, I'm
going to be really, really kind of firm ignorant here and say
the the keyword trainers. You want to have a bit more of a
breakdown in the campaigns than just that.
But the point being is you should be optimizing campaign
performance to profit. And actually, if you've got an
80% profit margin on something, go and get 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 ROI
on that. And then when you've got a 20%
margin where you need a 5 to 1 to break even or just add cost,
agency cost and then the cost of product that's break even, it's
not very exciting. But when I talk about the second
metric in a second, that might still be profitable for you
longer term, but we've got to, we've got to work these things
out. We need to do a bit of maths and
work out what we're going to do with this stuff.
So try and focus on profits or what we call PO as profit on ad
spend, not return on ad spend. Again, there's a smarter way to
run it. And just having one blanket ROI
target for the whole account, unless that is actually like,
you know, if you, if you bought material and, and everything's
made of silver, then fine. Like you just got, you do have a
blanket, that's fine. The second one though, which
might affect that is you might make a loss on that first order
and that might be OK. But I did a bit of a, again, I,
I called it a rant on my Friday episode the other day.
It's a bit, a bit of a rant the other day to say that a lot of
businesses, they don't have a metric or a target for lifetime
value. There's no sort of people are
buying 1.2 times, you know, from us in total.
And we need to make that 1.5, which means there's 1.5 as an
average. Half our customers buy a second
time from us. Fantastic.
Which means you just boosted your entire ROI or POI profit on
profit on investment. You've just managed to scale
that up quite significantly across all channels.
So lifetime value, like you want to increase the average order,
average orders per user. So I say that again because I
totally mumbled that increase the average orders per user, the
average number of orders. You want people ordering from
you again and again and again. If your delivery costs are quite
high and you offer free delivery, then maybe you want
them to actually order slightly less but increase the AOV.
So instead of making 10 orders of 1 product, you want 2 orders
of five products each. It's more profitable for you,
which means you could sell it as a bundle or a set or something
to try and get those guys to do that more often.
Third bit of data, the every time I mention this to clients,
the moment they say like what customer cohort analysis, it's
called the customer cohort analysis Shopify, everyone
should be familiar with it. I work so often in my agency
mostly focused on acquisition. Here I'm going to give you an
example of where a client thought they were working an
acquisition of weren't, which is going to be number.
It's going to be in my recent examples without mentioning any
client or, or brand names #4 when we get to #4 So I'm really,
really important on this. But you you want to look at that
customer cohort analysis. We don't look at it off things.
We work in acquisition on PPC and SEO.
So you want to look at it from the business wide.
You also want to then try and make some filters and sidekick.
Shopify's AI is very, very good in the back end of Shopify.
Help them with this. You want to make some filters to
then see it just by PPC, just by SEO.
The thing is, the thing with Shopify analytics is the
attribution's pretty rubbish. It thinks everybody's come in
direct. GA 4 gives you a much truer
value if you set it up correctly and you've got your cookies
working correctly. And yes, we're going to do an
episode very, very soon on cookies.
How exciting. So face to face recording, which
I am doing next week. So that be very, very exciting.
Cool. So I just got a message from my
team. Just checking if it's important
or not. It's not.
I can get back to a minute and check performance in #4 check
performance in GA 4 product view, then add to cart.
So how many product views do you get per add to cart?
How many add to carts do you get per begin checkout?
How many begin checkouts do you get to each checkout complete?
You got to set GA 4 up correctly.
It's going to be far in the right tags out to GA four more
often than not, depending on what cookie banner and things
you're using. More often than not, it will.
It should work just from the integration with the Google and
YouTube app, straight to Shopify and straight to GA 4.
But if not, you might need to do some manual tagging, use tag
Manager or manually tag it through your theme, which you
you can do, you can do. I'm not going to get into that
today. We can talk about how to set up
GO-4 another time. There's so many good guides on
it online. So go and check out those guys
who have done that. But the thing you're trying to
work out is where do you lose people here?
And you want to set, almost set a benchmark for the web team and
say, look, we want to improve every single one of these
metrics. We want more people looking at
products, more people adding to cart, more people beginning the
check out and more people completing the check out.
So say lots of people begin check out but they don't
complete go on the website yourself on an Incognito browser
or a new device, ideally mobile. If most of your customers are on
mobile, do it as a customer word and get to that begin check out
and go. What did I not know that I now
know. If it's not obvious to you, ask
one of your mates down the pub to do it.
Say hey, if I buy a glass of wine, can you use the website
and just verbal verb. I was about to use a horrible
phrase my dad used to say that I did because I talk too much.
But just ask them to verbalize is the is the PC word.
Verbalize all of the things you're thinking out loud whilst
using from the site. Go what they and it's probably
something like the taxes, delivery costs, something like
that is putting people off when they reach the checkout or they
get there and go, Oh my gosh, I live in Canada and you're an
American brand in the US and you don't deliver to Canada so they
leave. And so again, there's things you
can then do to either cater for the Canadian audience or try and
stop targeting the Canadian audience in the 1st place.
Again, look at that data in GA 4 by channel, you'll see a very
different well, you might not, but chances are you'll probably
find some nuances between PPCSEO, meta, e-mail, etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera. So you want to look at that and
see what where are people actually dropping off and then
go and make some changes like and you don't even need to AB
test this because you've got a benchmark of what was it over
the last three, 6 or 12 months. Make some changes and then go
right. We've got more people adding to
cart now and we're getting more checkouts as a result.
But now we're now we're getting now we need to work on how do we
go from add to cart to begin check out.
So let's look at the usability and functionality of the site.
Try and make a change to that number 5.
I love this one. I love this phrase I use and
this is pop up rage count. How many pop ups and overlays do
you actually have on your site? More than one is too many, and
that will probably be your cookie banner.
I saw a site recently where it was cookie banner.
Live chat then popped up and a mobile that took up the whole
screens had to close that. Then it said would I like 10% if
I join the newsletter? It's like I don't know I haven't
even seen the website yet and you're asking me if I want 10%
off the newsletter and say take it or leave it right now No I'm
not ready to get 10% off. But if I can't find that banner
later, then I'm going to want the 10% off and probably not buy
because you did offer me something.
Now I can't find it or I'm going to change device.
You lose the attribution, but you still get the sale, which we
don't get the marketing data you need.
So the third one then was like the e-mail banner.
Then a big thing popped up saying spin this magic wheel and
we'll give you a discount. It's like, hang on, I just got
the discount from the e-mail banner.
Why are you now offering me this thing?
And then it pops up with something else saying like 4
people just bought this and it's like, I don't care.
Like I'm just that's 55 pop ups. Genuine, genuine website that
asked us to come and pitch them last week and we said we will
come and pitch, but clean that up in the in the in the process.
So have a look at pop up rage. How many pop ups are there?
Again, if you look in GA 4 and look in Shopify analytics, you
can see what percentage of people are on mobile versus
desktop based on the percentage of people that are mobile versus
desktop. You then want to you then want
to try and see if there is a way that you can optimize that
experience. So the pop ups either happen in
more of a sequential order. So it's only one at one time and
things only happen like maybe offer the 10% off when somebody
adds the car. So you can have 10% off if you
give us your e-mail address and the spin the wheel thing, offer
that maybe post purchase. So say get a discount off your
next order, click here to spin the wheel because that's cheaper
than paying Google or Meta to get another order in.
So you see sequentially, here's what I'm saying.
So make sure there's a the right sequence of user does this.
Now here's a pop up rather than just you've just landed on the
site for the first time and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang
people just leave and see what happens to your bounce rate.
That's been really important metric, which we've got a #8
anyway, but have a look what happens to your bounce rate when
you clean that up? I love this one.
Returning customer frequency. So session sessions from
returning customers. How many users are new versus
returning this data is a bit hard to track because if
somebody changes devices and come on the on the store for a
long time and their cookie expires or they again change
device or, you know, I've, I've seen something and I tell my
wife, hey, we should go and buy this product.
She then goes on and buys it. You're not always going to have
accurate data on this, but have a look at what Shopify Analytics
is telling you and also have a look at what GA 4 is telling you
for returning new versus returning visitors and see what
that starts to do. And also by channel, which I'm
going to, although this was number six, I'm going to add
this in with #8 on my list, which is also then the bounce
rate from ad channels is your targeting wrong?
And so six and eight, returning customer frequency and the
bounce rate from each channel, you want to have a really,
really hard think about what you want each channel to do and let
the data do the talking. So actually, if everyone is a
repeat purchaser, that's really good on one level.
But if you're paying Google Ads, which is one of the things we
did find in one of our clients, it's in my list of 12345678 to
go through in a minute, eight things that eight real examples
from some of our clients and some of the people we've pitched
to or met recently. You, you don't want to be paying
Google ads and Meta ads just to bring in people who are
searching your name already and they are existing customers.
I'm going to ignite the brand versus non brand Google ads fire
in a minute. So I'll come on to that.
But argument says that if you're emailing people regularly,
they'll come in through e-mail. If they remember who you are and
have you in the browser, they'll just come back direct.
So you want, if, if direct is lots and lots of new users,
you've probably got a tracking problem.
So there's things like that that I would, I would certainly
suggest having a look at. And I really by mentioning those
two things, I really have open Pandora's box.
So good luck. Lots and lots to learn.
Excuse me, I still got my cold cart abandonments number 7.
And then we just got #9 to go on this list and we've got the
other list, cart abandonments, abandoned basket revenue
attributed to the original source.
So one of the issues we find certainly when we're running
Google Ads, it's we find that lots of people are saying, look,
I'm spending 50 or £100,000 a month with you or dollars and
we're not making enough money back.
And we say, well, look, we when we did a dramatic increase of
budget or something, we also saw a dramatic increase in total and
e-mail and direct. So we think that we're bringing
people in, but they're actually making the final last click
purchase through another channel.
So abandoned car abandonments and then sending what we call
abandoned basket emails, which is you got as far as putting
your e-mail address in the in the checkout, but you didn't
check out, sending them an e-mail to try and convince them
to check out. It's really important that you
attribute this back to how people found you in the first
place. So if you can see that, OK, 50%
of our car abandonments was Google ads bought them in or SEO
bought them in or TikTok ads or something bought them in and
then they came through e-mail to actually make the purchase
afterwards, then you know you're on to.
So I'm getting so many notifications today.
My next meeting just said they're on their way.
How exciting. So we better wrap this up soon.
But yeah, if you see that though, you're bringing those
people in through paid channels basically, but then they're
using e-mail as their last click, actual conversion point,
that's fine. That's an OK journey.
But from a tracking point of view, you want to be really,
really clear that actually that revenue you got that says it's
through e-mail because of the abandoned basket, it's not
actually e-mail. Another channel triggered that
in the 1st place. So again, it's really important
to to be aware of that. And then the final one on the
list of the metrics that you should be looking at.
And again, this isn't the full list.
This is just these are things that have been coming up a lot
in the last sort of three or four months, product performance
based on sales and revenue. So lots of people look at
product performance and say, oh, we've only sold six of those.
I would say to get a, an enormous CSV file of all product
performance and you want to see things in that like how many of
these products did we buy in and how many did we sell?
When we start to look at product performance rather than what we
normally look at is acquisition channel performance and just go
Google ads, we spent 100 grand, we made a million back.
Great. We got a 10/10 to one ROI
target. That's fantastic.
When we start to break it down, we say to the client, do you
know 50 like, and here's a genuine learning, which wasn't
actually on the list, but I've just remembered this.
It was about 15% of the product sales on PPC we had then sold
out. So we'd sold one item, so 15% of
all sales. Well, we'd sold one item of
something and it had then sold out.
And when we looked then deeper into those products themselves
and this big CSV file of products, number crunching on
it, we realised a lot of them are most profitable products,
our highest conversion rate products and the products we
therefore made the highest profit per, you know, power as
profit on AD spend. When we made the best profit on
these products, we would have, the client would have bought in
like 8 of them and then we sold 8 and the same.
And then we, then you can dig a bit deeper into some of those
and go, well, when was that OK? It was March 2025 and we haven't
had any since. We're like, client, why are you
not buying more of these back? And they're like, well, we
didn't think it was a best seller because we only sold
eight of them. It's like, well, you only
stocked 8. Can we get like 30 this time and
see if we sell those? And if we sell those, can you
get 100 and then we'll sell those.
Obviously it depends on lead time, but the point being is you
don't want to end up, if you've got quite a wide and and deep
product range, you don't want to end up having like one or two
orders here and then one or two orders here and one or two
orders here only to find that actually if we'd stocked 100 of
those products, we could have made a huge amount of profit
selling those products. So combine some of the what do
we actually spend driving people on ads into that product versus
how much, how much stock do we have and how many did we did we
sell? The other way to look at this is
download all of your out of stock products and go how many
did we buy? How many did we sell?
What was the time frame between us stocking it or selling our
first one and selling our last one?
And if it was quite a short time frame, we need more of that
stuff. Guys.
If you're in a bigger, more corporate business and what
enterprise, enterprise grade e-commerce set up, then your
merchant buying a merchandising team, this is gold dust for
them. And as marketers, if you're only
stocking stuff on the site that you know is super popular and
sells well, your reports are going to look incredible.
You're going to look like an absolute genius.
So we need to close that loop between what have we got on the
shelf, what we actually selling, therefore, what do we need on
the shelf, Therefore, what are we selling?
Therefore, what should we now get on the shelf to what are we
selling to quantities on the shelf to what are we selling?
It's that constant loop that needs to go round and round and
round. My brain works at 1,000,000
miles an hour. So sorry if I haven't explained
any of those points very well. I'm going to give you a few,
just I'm just going to read these out and I'm not going to
comment on them too much because they should be quite
self-sufficient. But these are some examples I've
been keeping from client meetings.
I'm not going to mention any of the clients, but if you spot
yourself then great. We fixed something or we found
something, we fixed it. First one, the about us page
never gets visited on one of our clients sites.
It's nested between two different collections on Shopify
in the main NAV of the site. So we decided to remove from the
NAV and introduce more brand story later in the buying
journey. The customer is focused on
product at this initial stage, so we need to talk to them about
brand in another forum. They're not clicking through to
the about us page, which is quite common.
It's the same with wish lists and loads of other functionality
on sites. Number 2, when pre-order shows
on a page, bounce rate was almost 100% from advertising and
exit rate was nearly 100% from anyone that visited that page.
So as soon as somebody saw the phrase pre-order left the site,
I've used the example a few times before.
So we relabeled pre-order with in stock and we just increased
the delivery estimate time on it because we're going to have to
pre-order it in then send it on. By doing that conversion rate
lifted, the revenue actually went up nearly 80% as a result
of doing that was incredible. And some of these we've only
done we've only talked about recently as well.
So I don't have the outputs on all of them and less than nought
.5% of users are leaving reviews on an awesome product, amazing
brand. So we then recommended they get
a new e-mail template designed up for that.
Please leave us a review e-mail that gets sent out by their
review partner. 83 percent is #483% of PPC spend was on brand.
I mentioned this earlier, 83% of PPC spend was on brand, not
targeting new customers. If you are spending that kind of
money on PPC or that percentage of your budget on PPC, just
getting people into your site who are already looking for you,
that's what you mean by spent on brand.
That's if you're if it was Nick's T-shirt shop.
That's people typing in Nick's T-shirt shop to Google, then
clicking on an ad and it's costing you money.
Now I'm going to open Pandora's box and just sort of leave it
here if you want me to talk more about this later, because it's
very it's been a very controversial topic over the
last 20 years of my career in the PBC space.
But you my vote is you should spend something on brand, but
you've got to keep it as lean as possible and on brand.
It should just be bottom of funnel.
When somebody's like, I'm coming back to buy that T-shirt that I
was looking at on Nick's T-shirt shop.
It's like, fine, just show an ad, get them through the car as
quickly and cheaply cheaply as on ads.
So the ads need to be as cheap as possible, get them through,
check out as fast as possible. But spending eighty was it 83%
on this client far too much, which meant only 17% of their
entire ad budget was actually acquiring new customers.
We think some of those people would be searching for a T-shirt
and going, oh, I've shot there before and coming in anyway.
So even that 17% isn't completely on new customers
number. Well, 2345 I should have
numbered these idiot #5 over reliant on Google channels.
So one of our clients is 75% of their revenue and users come
from PPC and SEO, which is just Google and the rest was direct.
So people coming back. The problem with that is you're
so over aligned on search. I mean, obviously we've done a
good job growing those two channels for this client, but
diversify your risk, spend some money on Meta.
We need to nail Meta and get Meta work and we need TikTok to
be doing something. e-mail was non existent for that client.
Yeah, they've got so many products that anything somebody
had bought, there is another product on the site they could
have bought with it or they could have bought afterwards.
So again, massive amount of work to be doing there on e-mail.
They should be investing in e-mail from there number 123456
orders per customer. Only 5% of these customers for
one of our clients had ordered twice.
I'm sorry, this was a pitch. We did only 5% of the customers
for this, this brand had ordered twice. 95% of people had only
bought once. It's just, it's just revenue
left on the table. It's like saying no, when
someone says here's your change, Sir, and you say, no, I don't
want my change. And there's much bigger and
better than change. And then when we got to that's
only 5% have ordered twice or more, Only 5 or more orders for
this brand didn't even register as a percentage.
Didn't even register as a percentage.
Investing all this money and Google ads with us and stuff,
which is great, but we can be so much more aggressive and spend
so much more money and make less profit but higher volume.
If we're getting those repeat, there's customers doing repeat
orders, buy more stuff from us. e-mail is just the key here.
We had Brian on the show from Schooner a week or two ago
talking about AI with an e-mail. Like it's never been so easy to
make some incredible emails and get some incredible e-mail
content out there. You need to set a target and
say, right, we're going to do X percent of our revenue is going
to come from repeat orders from e-mail and just go for it.
What do we say? 123-4567, number seven out of
eight. If we remember 8, I can just say
8 on the next point #7 Bing only had 5% of total budget and it
was currently limited. We could spend more on Bing. 95%
spent on Google Ads, 5% spent on Bing Ads.
They're both search engines. They're both front shopping.
They both have Performance Max. And also, I found this out a few
months ago, the guy who invented Performance Max on Google Now
works at Bing and is doing all the things he wanted to do with
Performance Max on Bing that Google said no to.
Bing are going for it. You should be trying trying
stuff on Bing. We've got to make we can get
vouchers for Bing as well. So if you want to spend some
money and you basically like if you spend, I think it's up to
it's either, it's either 5000 or $10,000, you get the same back
in free credit. So we're literally getting
whatever you spend, you get that back.
And I think there's also a multiple going on at the moment
as well. So if you want to try Bing, give
us a shout. We'd be very interested to try
and get you set up on Bing. We also work with an
intermediary agency that are direct and a direct agency with
Bing. They don't manage accounts.
They just support agencies like us who do manage the accounts.
So come to talk about Bing. The thing with Bing here though
is it was only had 5% of total budget and it was currently
limited, but it delivered five times the ROI that Google did.
So it was like we just need to allocate more money over to
Bing. Nice and simple.
Final point number, let's say 8, we're going to go with eight
number eight business customer retention.
So this, this particular client's on a subscription,
business customers, they stay on average for six years.
On a subscription, consumers average six months.
By 12 months, 95% of consumers had left and stopped their
subscriptions. So at 12 months, only 5% of
consumers still going, but business customers on average
six years. So we're getting, I did the
maths earlier. So consumers, consumers cost a
little bit less, but business customers are worth on average
12 times as much. The cost to acquire a business
customer was higher, but not 12 times higher, not even double.
And as soon as we looked at that, we agreed with the client,
your ROI now is going to drop. So you say it was 8 to 1, it's
now going to be 6 to 1, but we're only going to be targeting
those business customers because we get 6 years of monthly
subscription revenue from them. Again, let the numbers do the
talking. The business starts to scale
itself. I hope you've enjoyed today.
Back on Friday with another interview with guests.
Go and check out Growth Summit, probably us.
We're going to mention it for a little while unless something
exciting happens. Thanks for tuning in, Hope it's
been useful. If you've got any questions,
send us an e-mail. Hello at Winning with
shopify.com. You're going to sponsor the show
speak at growth Summit, Growth summit.
That's not the name you speak at growth vault and or sponsor
growth vault or get involved in any other way with all the fun
stuff we're doing again, send us an e-mail.
Hello at winning with shop5.com. I've been Nick, you've been
great. Thanks for tuning in.
See you all next time.