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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
Google and Facebook were great 12 years ago. I got an ROAS of 600% back then. Pour money in, get money out. Now, between the thousands of negative key words from irrelevant ads that cost you money for Google to “learn” about your business (tl;dr it doesn’t), some costing 200% of your ad limit, you’re lucky to get 20% ROAS (that’s 20 cents return on every ad dollar spent).
On top of that, I sold hand-blown glass domes in 3 similar sizes. Google doesn’t do sizes, measurements, or units. I got $5 clicks for “14 foot dome” and often would get double clicks the same day for the same keywords, so $10 for nothing. (No, Google doesn’t credit you for bad traffic) My domes were 2 inches and made of glass.
You’ll spend every day putting irrelevant searches into your negative keywords list — which has a maximum number of irrelevant results you can filter for — on Google’s ad manager. Don’t dare use Shopify’s limited portal and think you’re going to be able to make money with a simplified interface.
Unless you sell something popular where people agree on what it’s called, you’re going to go broke at these two casinos before you train them. The House always wins.
Also, sharing your customers’ data with them might expose you to a GDPR fine from the EU, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah or Virginia so there’s that.