The Pros and Cons of Using Shopify to Create Online Ads

Below I go over several pros and cons of creating ads on Shopify.

Creating digital ads can be intimidating. There are many platforms you can advertise on including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Shopify allows you to create digital ads for each of these social media markets on their (Shopify) platform but there are a few drawbacks.

Pros

Convenience

Since Shopify allows you to create ads for different digital mediums on their platform it makes it easier than having to go to each application and manually making them. This is especially true when you intend to use the same ad campaign across different platforms (i.e. Facebook and Snapchat). All they require is an account for each website and to connect those apps to Shopify in the Shopify app store.

Consolidation

By using Shopify as your digital ad creator, you can view each campaign in one place. You can compare the effectiveness of campaigns on different platforms or create the same campaign across multiple platforms. Either way, you can consolidate data in one place and ensure uniformity in your advertisements without going through each campaign on each platform.

Time

One area the previous two pros overlap is time. By creating ads on Shopify you save yourself or your marketing team time from creating individual ads for each platform. Also, it allows you to create a higher quantity of ads to further examine what works and what doesn’t. The time you save from creating ads is then used to analyze the data from the ads and implementing the necessary changes.

Now for some downsides of using Shopify as your digital advertisement creator.

Cons

Limited Creativity

Where there is convenience, there are limitations. By using Shopify to create ads you have a hub to make and visualize your advertisements but you lose some of the creation tools and benefits the social media platforms provide such as advertisement layouts, text formatting, and color variations. So if you’re creating an ad that’s extremely unique, Shopify might not be your best option.

Audience

Another con of using Shopify as your digital ad creator is their limited audience specification. For example, Facebook Ads allows you to specify your target audience by age, gender, demographic, social class, interests, or life events (like marriage or recently moved). If you create an ad for Facebook on Shopify, you can only select the age range and gender of the target audience. For targeting specific people (like a country or recently married) don’t use Shopify.

Shopify is a great website that allows its users to access and market on different platforms without leaving the Shopify dashboard. The wide variety of mediums comes at a cost of creativity and specification. If you want to use it as your ad creating platform you need to understand the desired outcome of your campaigns.

Do you want more personalization or a larger quantity created in a shorter time?

The choice is yours.