The future of ecom is data

The future of ecom is data. We track over $100 million of spend on Meta ads every month, and these are the three things. I did a whole write up on this. I'm looking at them over here on my computer that the biggest brands we work with, the ones doing over 5, 10, 20, 50 mill a month on Shopify, are all doing with their data that the smaller brands we work with are not. So if you're under 5 mill a month, this is some advice for you. Number one, all of them know how much revenue their ads actually drive. Now what do I mean when I say that? I mean they know how to track conversions. And what do I mean when I say that? I mean none of them use the Facebook and Instagram channel app in Shopify to connect their pixel and track conversions. I must have made 100 videos on that app at this point. But long story short, it misses a ton of purchases that your ads are driving because it uses third party cookies. How it works. Which means two things. One, you don't know how your ads actually perform and which ones drive the most revenue, which means it's harder for you to scale up. And two, Facebook doesn't know which ads actually drive the most sales, so it's harder for them to find you more customers at a cheap price because you're only sending them like half your customer data. Two quick examples. This brand thought they were making around 400k a month for Meta ads when it was actually 600k, which is 50% more. And this brand thought they were getting around 2,000 customers a month for Meta when it was 3,000 customers. Neither of them were scaling their spend before they had their data because why would they? They thought their ads were doing 50% worse than they were. And that was entirely due to the fact that they were using the channel app, which was informing their entire perspective on what was actually making their business money. Literally the month after they got off that app and started using our tracking, any server side tracking, they spent an extra 75k on ads because now they knew Meta worked and they obviously made way more money. So that was number one. Sorry it was so long. That's just the most impactful and it's also what my business does. But I've got two more. Number two being, all these businesses, all these big ass brands know their real cost to acquire a new customer. So the biggest ecom brands we work with are obsessed with one metric and it's NCAC, it's new customer acquisition cost. How do we get new customers and how much does it cost to acquire them? So we can do the math on how much money we can make on them over the course of their lifetime. You don't wanna keep wasting your ad budget on existing customers you already paid to acquire. So how do you only spend your ad budget on getting new customers? Well, in the past within Meta ads, you would do this by excluding an audience of past purchasers from your ad campaigns so that you only went after new people and none of the people on that audience list. This is cuz by default Meta Ads doesn't care if your customers are first time or returning. They just wanna get you customers so you keep paying them. Right? Well, we've started to notice that the big brands we work with on Shopify are doing something different, which is filtering for new customers at the Shopify data layer level. What do I mean when I say this? Well, Shopify has some functionality where whenever a purchase is fired and the purchase event goes to the data layer. I know this is technical. You can add a trigger condition that basically only fires a purchase event if that customer has never been detected in your Shopify customer base. What that really means is you can send custom events back to Meta ads that only report the amount of new first time purchasers that a certain campaign is driving. So if I were to say that like a human, which I should have the first time, basically you can figure out which ad campaigns actually drive new customers and that is determined by Shopify. So it's using a reliable customer database to determine if it's a first time or returning customer. And then you can make the choice as a brand if you wanna use that to optimize only for new purchasers. Or if you just wanna have it as a metric next to your existing purchase event to see which campaigns are creating new business for you. Last one. Almost done. No. 3. These big brands, the ones making over $5 million a month, just know way more about their users than you know about yours. So all the big nine figure brands we work with don't just track the seven standard ecom events in Meta like page view, view content, add to cart, blah blah blah. They set up a bunch of custom events. Kind of like the first time purchase event. So they can see whatever they want on any page of the website about any kind of behavior that their users are doing, like the ones I'm showing in the screenshots here. So they know exactly where customers are falling off and how to retarget them with better ads. This brand tracks whenever somebody adds a second product to their cart because now they have a high average order value if they can get them to convert. This brand tracks anybody who has a cart worth over $250 but still hasn't purchased yet, so they can run a separate type of retargeting ad to them. And then there's other brands who just track things like how many email signups are we getting from ads so that we can track the cost per email signup so we stop wasting money on ads and just try to convert these people through email later. So if I had to sum this video up, basically, the fastest growing brands that we're working with on Shopify are not just making better creative, they're collecting way more data than everybody else, and they're using it to make more money.