Case Study: Time = Money for Biophilia Designs
Following on from my case study series:
https://www.meliorum.com.au/blog/case-study-ecommerce-store-the-waiting
https://www.meliorum.com.au/blog/case-study-ecommerce-store-the-set-up
It has been a hot minute since I last did an update for my retail site. The mix of life things and Google’s “Big Announcement” left me with little time to do much to the site. I finally had time to breathe one Saturday afternoon and thought I should review it some more. I found out that in my rush to get the site up I didn’t set up my email properly so spent most of the afternoon doing IT fixes to get that connected to Gmail.
Once email was working correctly I could get started on paid media. Though shopify I set up Pinterest, Snapchat and Facebook ads. I am having trouble with my Google Ads being rejected for misinformation (I’m not sure if it claiming that they are eco friendly - which they are, or because I said I would donate the profit to charity - which I will). Fixing this is on the next steps.
As soon as the Facebook ads were published on the 15th of May I saw a jump in sessions.
The sales started rolling in (well trickling) and I went back to being caught up with other things. Then I got a chance to actually look at the numbers and had a bit of a shock.
Basically, I had spent almost $2k on advertising with about $600 of revenue. when it comes to the cost of printing and everything else I would have made about $100.
Though there is a ray of hope in the money that was spent. I can see that the CTR on Facebook is pretty good and the conversion rate is not too bad either. Especially for social channels. Snapchat and Pinterest could be good for awareness but not get people to click through or convert. If the awareness helped then I would hope to get more organic or direct but that is fairly low too. They could be boosting Facebook’s conversion, but Facebook went well event with interest turned off.
It came down to this thought, I am not investing much time in this so why should I magically expect to see money coming in.
I would say the same to my clients, you can’t just set up the analytics, walk away and then expect a miracle. So if I want the profits to come rolling in (and subsequentially be given to a charity) I need to put in the effort.
The project manager in me needs a list:
Get Google Shopping ads working
Find a way to increase AOV by over $100 per sale
Optimize spending on Facebook/meta ads
Increase product range
Set up dashboard reporting with ROI to be checked weekly to make sure I’m not wasting money
I said at the start of this journey that I would share the results good or bad, and I know these are bad. Though I am glad about the learnings it has given me. There are no get rich quick schemes, time and energy are needed to get money out of a website. Data helps shine a torch on what needs to be fixed but doesn’t actually fix the issue.
See you next time when hopefully I have better results.
