Paid Ads & Performance Marketing

The same team builds the store and runs the ads

Most stores buy paid media from one company and the store from another. The ads agency sends traffic, the conversion rate disappoints, and what follows is two suppliers each pointing at the other’s work. The media buyer says the product page is slow and the checkout leaks. The developer says the traffic is poor. Both may be right, and neither is paid to fix the other’s half.

We build Shopify stores, and the people who run your campaigns work alongside the people who wrote the theme. That changes three things. Tracking is set up by someone who can read the theme code and the checkout configuration, rather than pasted in from a guide. When a landing page is the problem, it gets fixed rather than blamed. And when the honest answer is that the store should not be buying traffic yet, the same team says so, because we would rather do that work first.

Tracking before spend

Every decision in an ad account rests on what the platform believes happened. If a purchase is not reported back, the bidding system cannot learn from it. If it is reported twice, the system learns the wrong thing with confidence. Since Apple’s tracking changes and the spread of browser-level blocking, a browser pixel on its own misses a share of conversions, and how large that share is varies by store and audience.

So the first month starts with measurement, not campaigns. The Meta pixel and the Conversions API send the same events, one from the browser and one from the server, deduplicated by event ID so each order counts once. The Google tag runs with enhanced conversions, and Consent Mode is configured to match the consent banner you actually show. Purchase values are checked against what Shopify recorded, including how discounts, shipping and refunds are treated. Then a test order is followed end to end through each platform’s event tools before any budget is set.

This is included in the first month of every tier. It is also the part most often done badly, and the part a store developer is best placed to do well.

How the account is built

Fewer campaigns, each with enough budget to learn. A small store split across twenty ad sets gives each one too little data to optimise against, and the platform spends the month guessing. We structure the account around what the business actually sells: prospecting and retargeting on Meta; on Google, a split between brand search, non-brand search, and Shopping or Performance Max where the catalogue supports it.

The structure is written down, so you can see why each campaign exists. Budgets, bid strategies and exclusions are documented in the same place, and when something changes, the change log says what, when and why. If you ever move the account to someone else, they inherit a document rather than a puzzle.

Creative is most of the work

On Meta in particular, many of the targeting levers that used to separate good accounts from bad ones are now handled by the platform itself. What is left to the advertiser is mostly the creative: the opening second of a video, the first line of copy, the offer, the image that makes someone stop scrolling.

So creative testing runs as a programme rather than an occasional refresh. Each test changes one thing, whether the hook, the format, the angle or the offer, so that the result means something. Winners get more budget, losers are retired, and the log records which is which so the next round starts from evidence rather than taste. We write the copy and build variants from the photography and video you already have. Where the account needs new material, that is scoped separately, often alongside a branding project.

What the report says

The monthly report leads with revenue and return on ad spend, not clicks, reach or impressions. It shows two sets of numbers side by side: what the platforms claim, and what Shopify recorded. They will not match. Each platform credits itself under its own attribution window, and when Meta and Google both claim the same order, adding their figures together counts it twice. Seeing both is the only way to know whether the account is paying for itself.

The report also lists what was tested and what was learned, what changed in the account, and the landing-page problems found along the way, each with an owner. What it does not contain is a promised return. Return on ad spend depends on margins, price point, the offer and the market, most of which sit outside the ad account, and an agency quoting a figure before it has seen those is guessing.

Why there is a three-month minimum

New campaigns go through a learning phase while the platform works out who is likely to buy. Results during it are volatile and usually worse than what follows, and every significant edit can restart it. Month one is mostly tracking and launch. Month two is the first clean data. Month three is the first point at which a decision about the account rests on something more than noise.

A client who leaves at day thirty leaves at the most expensive point, having paid for setup and learning before any of it has been used. The minimum is there so that does not happen by accident, and it applies to every tier, including Launch. After the first three months, the engagement continues month to month.

When we say no

If the store does not convert the visitors it already has, paid traffic multiplies the loss rather than fixing it. A product page that loads slowly on a phone, a checkout that asks for too much, shipping costs revealed at the final step: ads pay to send more people into each of those. In that case we will recommend the audit first and the campaigns after, and the audit’s findings become the first month’s landing-page list.

The same applies when the margins cannot carry the cost of acquiring a customer, or when there is no evidence yet that people want the product at its price. Spend can test an idea. It cannot rescue one, and we would rather tell you that than take a management fee against it.