Facebook ads for a women’s apparel and swimwear boutique
Two Shopify boutiques, a lot of money spent on ads, and practically no sales. The newer boutique went from nothing to a spike she did not expect for months.
Saida, Apparel & swimwear. Recorded December 2020.
Saida runs two online businesses on Shopify — a women’s boutique selling specialty fashion, and a separate swimwear and accessories boutique. Apparel is one of the hardest ecommerce categories to advertise in, because the competition is enormous and the product is easy to substitute.
She had run ads herself with no real knowledge, spent a lot of money, and made almost nothing. She had also worked with a couple of other people before, with the same result. By the time we spoke she was questioning whether the problem was the business itself.
That is the most damaging part of a failed ad account, and it is worth naming. Repeated failure looks like evidence that nobody wants your product, when usually it means the ads never reached the right people in a form that made them stop.
Sales started moving quickly once the campaigns were structured properly, and kept increasing from there. The newer boutique — only a couple of months old — went from no sales to a sharp spike, which she had assumed would take far longer to build.
She had been selling off her own social media following before this, which has a hard ceiling: your audience is finite and eventually everyone in it has either bought or decided not to. Paid reach is what removes that limit.
If ads have failed for you more than once, that is not proof the business does not work. It usually means the account has never been built properly, and there is no way to tell the difference until it has.
In Saida’s words
“I basically had no idea what I was doing at all. I ran a few on my own without any knowledge and I spent a lot of money and I practically made zero sales.”
“I also worked with a couple of other people in the past and again didn’t generate any sales from it. So I was feeling pretty defeated — didn’t really know if it was the business or if it was just that I didn’t know what I was doing with the ads.”
“With my boutique, I’ve seen like an insane spike. I worked a lot off my own social media influence and I would still never be able to make these kind of sales without the ads.”
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