Unlocking Success with Shop Campaigns: 8 Tips for Optimizing Your Campaigns

Scale your customer growth across platforms and countries at a controlled cost with Shop Campaigns. Target and convert new and existing customers; only pay when customers convert on Shop.

Full-funnel marketing has always been daunting. It takes time, resources, and testing to ensure your dollars are making an impact. But what if you could acquire customers at a controlled cost and set return, and retain them with a few simple steps? 

Shop Campaigns makes that a reality. It's easy to set up your campaign, and once it's live, maximize its impact with simple optimizations. This article outlines eight tips to optimize your campaigns, drive customer growth, and strengthen your marketing strategy. 

What is Shop Campaigns? 

Shop Campaigns is a pay-per-conversion program designed for risk-free customer acquisition. Target Shop’s millions of shoppers, and reach new and existing customers on top platforms with exclusive offers. Set up a campaign in minutes—no new assets or audience building required. With full control over your customer acquisition cost, targeted return on ad spend, and daily budget, you can reach and retain customers, boost revenue, and unlock a channel to fuel long-term, sustained growth. 

8 tips to optimize your campaign 

1. Remove the guesswork 

Create your campaign in the advertising section of the Shop channel within just a few minutes. Skip the experimentation, and use the suggested parameters for your optimal campaign setup. These suggestions take into account your average order volume, brand’s industry, and relevancy algorithms in Shop. They eliminate the need to test different setups, and quickly help you establish the optimal campaign setup. 

“Managing and optimizing the Shop channel? Maybe two hours a month. It's very minimal for us.”

Brendan Gardner-Young, Head of Technology, Thrive Causemetics

The suggested parameters are set by default for your customer acquisition cost (CAC), return on ad spend (ROAS), and daily budget. 

As you change budget settings, the estimated results update to give a sense of your campaign's expected performance. Metrics include converted customers, sales, ROAS, and average order value (AOV). Top brands running Shop Campaigns use a customer acquisition cost that's at least half of their average order value. A higher CAC means your campaign will rank better, show shoppers a more attractive offer on Shop, and convert better overall.

2. Acquire new customers and win back lapsed ones

Acquire new and lapsed customers at the same time with precise audience targeting. We'll automatically build the audience based on your targeting. Our relevancy models target potential customers with a high-intent to purchase. Run multiple campaigns at once. Test different customer acquisition cost (CAC) and target return on ad spend (ROAS) for different audiences and countries.

3. Select your return on ad spend wisely

Set your ROAS in line with your wider advertising and business objectives. Your desired target informs how we optimize your campaign placements across platforms, while ensuring a return that's aligned with your goals. Many factors will influence what's an acceptable ROAS for your business, but we recommend starting with the suggested amount that's based on your store data and any previous campaign performance. You can experiment using your target ROAS for other advertising platforms. We'll show shoppers dynamic minimum order values for offers on Shop, in order to realize your desired return on ad spend target and customer acquisition cost.

4. Expand your campaign's reach

Extend your campaign to top ad platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Google (with more coming soon) to acquire even more customers at the same max (customer acquisition cost) CAC. You set your campaign parameters, and let us do the rest. We optimize the creative, choose the perfect placement, and build the audience based on your targeting. Advertise alongside Shop and only pay when customers convert to reduce the risk and drive incremental results.

“We’re going to continue to allocate budget, and expand as more eyeballs get on Shop Campaigns."

Matthew Hernstadt, co-founder of HydroMATE

5. Own your customer data and analytics 

Your customers are truly yours. Once you acquire a customer, you get access to their order data. Since all the customers acquired through your campaign are tagged with ‘Shop Cash offers acquired’ and the specific campaign name, you can easily view customer data to use in the customer segments section of the admin. Create segments to analyze your lists with additional filters like location, number of orders, and predictive spend tier. Monitor and analyze your campaign results regularly to make data-driven decisions and continuously improve your customer acquisition efforts. You can also see exactly which customers subscribed to marketing at checkout, so you can seamlessly retarget them and grow lifetime value.

You can also see exactly which customers subscribed to marketing at checkout, so you can seamlessly retarget them and grow lifetime value. 

6. Customize your Shop Store 

How a brand presents itself in Shop is vital for building trust and driving engagement with shoppers. Your Shop Store is your owned storefront in the Shop app that helps buyers get to know your brand, and shop your catalog. With rich branding and customization features in the Shop channel, it's easy to add a logo, include your brand's tagline, and change the background of your store's header to be a color, image, or video. By fully customizing your Shop Store, you can increase shoppers adding items to their carts by 15%.

Showcase collections on your store to help buyers easily discover your products. Since Shop Campaigns specifically target new customers, we recommend highlighting popular items and best sellers to increase the chances of converting first-time shoppers. Make your catalog easy to navigate for new and returning customers by eliminating clutter, and replacing and refilling SKUs. 

Sync reviews to your store to increase trust and drive conversion. Read specific reviews, and write replies to them in the reviews section of the Shop channel. Display reviews from supported apps, and collect them directly on Shop. The total review count and average rating will be visible in your Shop Store header, as well as other keys surfaces across the app. 

7. Enhance your store with Shop Minis 

Drive engagement with customers on your Shop Store using Shop Minis. These immersive shopping experiences, built by Shopify partners, let you add custom content like shoppable videos and interactive quizzes to your store. Consider embedding creator videos in your store with Supergreat, making your Instagram shoppable with Foursixty, or selling products during live streams on Shop with Stage Ten. These experiences can help you capture the attention of potential customers and drive conversion. Top children's clothing brand Little Sleepies increased their average order value by 13% when they added shoppable galleries to their store. 

8. Create a post-purchase offer 

Ensure newly acquired customers re-engage by sending promotions after they've converted on your campaign. To reduce the time to second purchase, consider offering customers a discount on their next order.

Use the marketing tools section in the Shop channel to create post-purchase offers. Send a discount for free shipping, a fixed amount off, or a percentage off. Returning customers can use this in-app discount on your store. By providing an incentive for customers to return, you can maximize the value of the customers you've acquired from campaigns.

How to get access to Shop Campaigns 

For brands on the Shopify Plus plan, creating a campaign is as simple as navigating to the marketing section of the Shop channel. From there, you can set up a campaign in just minutes. Once the campaign is published, it goes live within 24 hours.

Don't leave customers behind

Optimizing your campaign with Shop is easy and will help you drive customer acquisition, boost revenue, and unlock long-term growth. By removing the guesswork from setup, maximizing your Shop channel presence, curating your store, and leveraging various strategies like product bundling and post-purchase offers, you can enhance the performance of your campaign to achieve greater success. Diversify your customer acquisition strategy, and convert customers on Shop at a controlled cost with Shop Campaigns.