So you started a new e-commerce website from scratch, now what? The following guide will cover a few of the basics so you can hit the ground running. This isn’t an exhaustive list but it is a good start.

SEO:

Everyone wants free traffic, and that’s what organic traffic from Google is bringing to the table. It may seem daunting to imagine your brand new website competing against well-established websites that are years old, but every website starts somewhere. Having the best practices implemented from the start will be beneficial and save a lot of headaches in the long run.

If you’d like a good starting point to help build a healthy skepticism of Google, I’d recommend starting with this article.

Key Tools: Your first step will be to ensure you’re set up with two important tools: Google Search Console and Google My Business. The set up for these two tools is explained relatively easily through the account creation process. The goal is to fill in as much information in as humanly possible. Submitting a sitemap to Search Console is helpful and should be easy to find if you use Shopify or Squarespace. Google is like a child trying to learn something new – the more information you’re providing in these various tools and on your site itself, the quicker it will learn and reward you.

Technical SEO:  Technical SEO is much less important these days than it was in the past, but having the basics down is useful. It used to be crucial to have perfect meta titles and descriptions stuffed with keyword variants – this is not longer as critical. Be sure to use easy to read and concise copy that clearly explains your website’s pages while remaining within character limits, that is sufficient. More important now is having excellent structured data in the form of Schema Markup and Opengraph Meta Tags. Schema markup ultimately tells Google’s crawling robot about your website – while bots don’t have eyes, well executed mark up can help give them context about things such as your website’s images, founders, and much more. Open graph meta tags do the same thing for Facebook, ensuring for example that it knows the right image to attach to a given URL when it’s being shared.

Site Structure and User Experience: These are now the most important elements of a well executed SEO strategy. A website’s structure should be clear and legible. You should be able to find exactly what you’re looking for in as few clicks as possible, and related items should be linked together. When you’re browsing your site be sure to think like a user and don’t be afraid to compare your site with your competitors’ to find areas of improvement. A slick and/or beautiful website won’t necessarily provide the best user experience. Having a site that is fast and functional across all devices and browsers is as important as having one that looks good. Tons of pop ups, carousels, sliders, and other elements will more often than not slow down the user experience to a degree that is not worth the style. Luckily Google has an excellent tool to test your website’s technical functionality – it’s a must-use through the development process.

Website Analytics

The absolutely necessary list of tools begins and ends with Google Analytics. It’s free and a necessity for new websites. You can use it to see where your traffic is coming from, learn about your audience, measure revenue growth, and too many other things to list. Even better, Squarespace and Shopify (as well as many other CMS) both have native Google Analytics integrations so you don’t need knowledge of coding to get up and running.

Be sure to set up conversion tracking by enabling ecommerce settings in the set up process. While I could spend time explaining all the benefits and different set up options I’ll leave it at this – get Google Analytics set up and keep it simple to start.

One other source of analytics worth mentioning is Facebook. If you set up a business account and have pixels on your site, you’ll see fascinating audience insights (and much more) that even Google will have a tough time competing with. It’s also free and worth the effort.

Starting with Google & Facebook Ads

The question I’m asked most frequently when chatting with new founders is “Which ad platforms should I start with?” and “How much money do I need to spend to start?”. The answers to both questions are business dependent but I can provide a bit of insight to each.

Facebook Advertising: (inclusive of Instagram) is an excellent place to gain awareness. It’s the best starting point for push marketing – where you’re pushing your message to users who don’t know about you. Facebook/Instagram give you access to an enormous audience of users and give you the best targeting data in the industry. Facebook is drastically more efficient than traditional display advertising due to the lack of middlemen in the process and the free, high quality audience targeting. Some starting point recommendations:

• Set up a Facebook Business / Ads manager account instead of promoting posts direct from Instagram/Facebook. It’s well worth the hassle.
• Get your pixels set up properly, and track as many events as you can (add-to-bag, product page view, cart view, initiate checkout, checkout confirmation, etc).
• Don’t over-segment your audiences to start, keep things broad. Facebook’s algorithm needs data to learn from. Hyper segmented audiences won’t give a strategy enough data to optimize with. One first party data (remarketing) campaign/ad set is probably enough to start with a low volume of users.
• Give your pixels some time to accrue user data and start prospecting through lookalike audiences – where Facebook targets users with similar attributes to a set of your current users. Lookalike audience sets will likely outperform your manually creative audiences, despite our best efforts to beat the machine.
• Start with a strategy aimed at maximizing traffic for your budget, then when you have a minimum of 15 conversions per week for a given strategy adjust the goal to conversion optimization.
• Use creative with motion. Don’t have video creative? Short 6 second videos are perfect. Use Facebook’s creative tools to turn static images into short videos.

Google Advertising: Is pull-based marketing – your user needs to already be searching for something related to your business to find you. If you have a product that answers a clear question, or has a very unique proposition, Paid Search marketing may be a strong choice. It’s extremely intent driven so it won’t provide the same new user exposure for the price as Facebook/IG, but SEM will drive direct conversions. Be sure you’re confident in your website/product offering before navigating these waters. Some starting point recommendations:

• Start with a simple campaign that protects your Brand terms from competitors. You’ll be able to see if tracking works properly while seeing a few conversions come through before putting the pedal down.
• Leverage automation/machine learning as much as you can – for small businesses this is the easiest way to compete with the big guys. Use Dynamic Search Ad campaigns to save time with keyword research, and leverage smart bidding strategies to avoid dealing with bidding. You just set your goal (clicks, conversions, etc), set a budget, and you’re off to the races.
• If you have a product catalog try Google Shopping ads. The user is prequalified after having seen the product and price before clicking – it’s a great way to bring in high quality traffic.
• Get a free ad credit. If you’re using Squarespace or Shopify you may have a free ad credit sitting in your account. Use it!
• Connect your Google Ads account with Google Analytics for easy conversion tracking.

How much should I spend?

I never ever set minimum ad spend recommendations when chatting with clients. Any agency (or ad tech company) that sets a recommended minimum for Facebook/Google ads spend should be immediately regarded with caution and skepticism. If you’re comfortable spending $5 per day to start, feel free. Day by day as you gain comfort with the quality and performance of traffic coming through, budgets are easy to raise. Start at $5, move to $10, and continue on until you don’t see the performance you’re looking for.

The more you spend to start, the more learnings you’ll receive. It’s easier to spend a ton of money right away and simply turn off the campaigns/strategies that are performing poorly. Scaling slowly and carefully though is always an option, not everyone has venture capital money to burn. There are partners out there willing to test and grow a business carefully and if you can’t find one feel free to send me an email.