So now that you understand what I consider to be the right way to approach paid advertising, let's
now have a look and see how Shopify can help us out with this whole process.
And that process is centered around what we call sales channels.
So what is a sales channel?
Well, a sales channel is simply a point of contact with your customer, an opportunity if you like,
to show what you are selling.
So at this point, and I draw your attention to this part here where it says sales channels, you can
see that we already have one sales channel listed, which of course is the online store.
The online store is a point of contact with our customers.
It is the opportunity for us to display what we are selling.
But now we have the opportunity to massively increase the number of places where we could show our products.
And to do that, we simply need to increase the number of sales channels that we have.
So we could show our products on Google, we could show them on Instagram, we could show them on Snapchat
or TikTok.
All of those examples are sales channels.
And to display our products on each of those sales channels, we need to implement paid advertising
and to implement paid advertising.
At this point, you basically have two options.
Your first option could be to head over to the home page of your sales channel of choice and sign up
directly.
So just for example, I'm over here on facebook.com slash business ads, and you can see here that I
could start creating ads on Facebook.
And if you go to Google or Snapchat or TikTok or indeed any other sales channel, you are very quickly
going to find where you can run ads, because of course, at the end of the day, that's how they make
money.
So that's option one.
But in fact, that's not the best way to do it.
And the reason for that is because if you sign up directly on each of these sites, not only will you
find it more difficult to integrate everything with your Shopify store, but you're also going to find
it more difficult to get a good understanding of how each of your sales channels are performing, particularly
in relation to one another, because of course, you want to be investing in the sales channel that
is giving you the highest return on your investment.
So how could we achieve that?
Well, luckily, that's where option two comes in, because Shopify gives us the opportunity to easily
integrate each of these sales channels and allow us to make comparisons so we can see which of those
are performing the best.
And it all happens using apps, marketing apps to be more precise.
And so if I go back to admin and click on marketing and then scroll down towards the bottom, you see
this marketing apps where you can see that we can promote our products on a multitude of different marketing
apps, including for example, Pinterest and also Snapchat.
And of course there are many others.
And I'm going to come back to this in a moment to show you the best marketing apps that you need.
But just before I do that, what I'd like to do is to scroll up towards the top here and then draw your
attention to this top marketing channels, because this is really going to bring it to life as to why
we're using marketing apps now, even though we haven't yet installed any marketing apps, you can already
see that there are two active sales channels, the first one being direct and the second one being Tideo.
Now, the direct sales channel, as the name implies, is traffic that came directly to your store.
And that might have happened because the person that literally typed the domain name for your store
directly into their browser.
Or it could have come, for example, because of your efforts with SEO.
Either way, they came directly to your store.
Or to put it another way, they didn't come from any other marketing source such as Facebook or Snapchat.
And then the second sales channel, as you can see, is Tideo.
And of course, you're already familiar with Tideo.
And you might be thinking, well, that's a bit strange.
I thought we were using Tideo primarily for customer service.
Why is it listed as a sales channel?
Well, in a few lectures time, I'm actually going to teach you how to recover abandoned carts by issuing
discounts.
And when Tideo issues the discount and the person makes the purchase.
That purchase has effectively happened as a result of tideo, meaning the sale has happened because
of Tideo.
Tideo is in this case a sales channel.
Now, I appreciate that sounds a little bit confusing because we haven't yet covered that in the course.
It is coming up in a few lectures time, but just know at this stage Tideo can be used as a sales channel
and that's why it's listed here.
So we're currently showing two sales channels, Direct and Tideo.
But over time, as you start adding more and more marketing apps also listed under channel, you're
going to see Facebook, Pinterest, Google, Instagram or Snapchat, or indeed any other marketing app
that you might choose to use.
And so, as the list of marketing apps starts to build and time goes by, you're going to be able to
use this report to make very informed decisions.
Because for each channel, you can see immediately the amount of sales that each one is generating.
And then because you can see the number of visitors or if you like, the number of.
The sessions and the number of orders that those sessions have generated.
You can also see the conversion rate.
And then for the last two columns you have the Roas, which is the return on ad spend, and then also
the CPA, which is the cost per acquisition.
Now those acronyms and terminology might be a little bit overwhelming or indeed a bit confusing.
And so just to simplify things, you can think of these metrics as showing you the amount of money that
you had to spend on advertising in order to get a sale.
And so keeping that in mind for a moment, let me give you a simple example, which I hope will illustrate
the power of this report.
So let's imagine that you have TikTok as a sales channel, and TikTok has brought in $10,000 worth of
sales.
Now, at the same time, you're also running Facebook as a sales channel, and Facebook has also brought
in $10,000 worth of sales and so on.
The face of it, it would appear that both channels are equally effective.
After all, they've both bought in the same amount of sales.
But of course, that's not the whole story.
Because if I now look at my Roas and my CPA, in other words, the amount of money that I had to spend
on each of those sales channels to get those sales, it's at that point in this example that I noticed
that I'm spending way more money on TikTok to generate $10,000 than I am spending on Facebook.
And so I hope you can clearly see that immediately.
I might want to increase my spend on Facebook, because it's way more effective and perhaps reduce my
spend on TikTok, or maybe stop it altogether.
And then, if you can imagine all of the other sales channels that you might be using listed here,
I hope it's at that point that you really can see the power of this report, because you're going to
be able to immediately assess the performance of each of your sales channels to make sure that you are
investing your money as wisely as possible to generate the maximum amount of sales.
Now, in addition to all of that, don't forget you're not going to be running the advertising campaigns
yourself.
You're going to be outsourcing them.
And that means that this report also becomes an incredibly important management tool because in the
example of my TikTok campaign not performing so well, I can simply take this report and present it
to the person running my TikTok campaign and ask them, what's going on?
Why isn't it performing so well, particularly in relation to Facebook?
Maybe there's a problem, maybe they're targeting the wrong people.
Or maybe TikTok simply isn't an effective sales channel for my business.
Whatever the reason might be, the data presented in this report is clearly going to help you make highly
informed decisions.
And so now the only thing left to do is to install the marketing apps themselves.
And to do that, if I scroll down towards the bottom here to where we were before, to the marketing
apps, I can simply click on View Marketing Apps to go directly to the Shopify App Store, where of
course all of the marketing apps are listed.
And so in the next lecture, what I'd like to do is to show you the marketing apps that you need, and
then take one in particular so that you can see how to install it and start driving paid traffic to
your store.