Week 3 Recap
This weekly recap is a part of the “Experiencing the Digital Marketplace” experiment involving creating and advertising for a drop shipping website for the duration of December 2020. If something you see piques your interest or if you want to learn more about what I accomplished, feel free to look around!
Week 3 Goals:
Examine my data.
Implement any changes.
Create two more Facebook and Instagram ads.
Determine if a chatbot will improve my website or not.
Write another blog post about the products, company, myself, and my goal.
Write a Week 3 recap blog.
Record a Loom to show what I did and how I did it.
Tuesday and Wednesday: I figured out the problem with launching Facebook Ads from Shopify: I needed to update and verify an email account for my Facebook Business Page. This is a separate page from your Facebook page. The URL for Facebook Business is https://business.facebook.com/.
The following is a quick instruction guide on how to fix this problem.
Step 1: Go to the Facebook Business Suite page.
Step 2: Once you sign in to your Facebook Business Suite account, go down to ‘Settings’ in the navigation guide on the left-hand side.
Step 3: Go to ‘Business Settings’ in the navigation guide on the left-hand side (yes, you need to go to Business Settings twice).
Step 4: Go to ‘Business Info’ in the navigation guide on the left-hand side.
Step 5: Scroll down the page until you reach the ‘My Info’ section. Verify your information is correct. If you leave the ‘Email’ form blank, your ads will NOT publish.
Step 6: Verify Changes on Shopify.
On the Shopify dashboard, go to ‘Marketing’ in the navigation guide on the left-hand side.
If your campaign is working, then you’ll see an ‘Active’ green icon.
If the campaign is NOT working, then you’ll see a ‘Failed’ red icon.
For the rest of the week, I looked over other snags on my website, recorded two Loom videos, wrote a blog post, and created another Facebook Ad.
The snags I saw centered around connecting Google Analytics on my website. My problem was that Google Analytics wouldn’t provide a Universal Analytics code (UA) only a Global Site Tag (gtag.js). Shopify is compatible with Google Analytics but only for UA tracking codes.
After reviewing my website code and Google Analytics, I realized that I skipped a step when I created the property in Google Analytics. To solve this issue, I deleted my initial property and simply created a new one.
Note: This deletes all data from your property. Since I didn’t have data from my (now) deleted property, this didn’t affect me.
In your admin settings, select ‘Create Property’ and name it. Next, go down to ‘Show advanced options’. DO NOT HIT NEXT (this is was my mistake).
Make sure that the toggle is on the right and the bar is green. After doing this and imputing your website, select ‘Next’.
Now Google Analytics will provide you with a UA tracking code to input into your website. For Shopify, you need to go down to ‘Preferences’ on the dashboard, scroll down to ‘Google Analytics’, and copy the UA code into the form.
For my Facebook Ad, I decided to use the Facebook Business Suite. I explain why in a blog post by comparing Ad creation on Shopify versus social media platforms. Read it here. In a nutshell, when I reviewed the analytics from my first ad, I saw that people in Ireland were viewing my website and ads.
However, my store only ships in the U.S., and Shopify doesn’t allow you to limit your ads to a single country.
I also created two Loom videos showing various actions I did and why I did them. First I showed how to automate blog posts with Zapier by connecting Google Docs to Medium. You can view this here.
My second Loom covers connecting Mailchimp with your Shopify store using the app ‘ShopSync’. This allows the two platforms to share data (including contact information) and to use a pop-up subscription form on my Shopify store. You can watch it here!
Conclusion
This week I accomplished most of the goals I set out at the beginning of the project. The goals I did not accomplish are creating a chatbox for my website and creating two Facebook or Instagram ads.
I didn’t create a chatbox because I haven’t received any questions about the store nor the products. I created one new Facebook and Instagram ad but held off on the other one after looking over the analytics of my first ad and how half the traffic came from Ireland despite my business only shipping to the U.S.
Instead, I focused on creating a new ad for Facebook using Facebook’s Business Suite rather than Shopify and documented the difference between the two.
Stay tuned for Week 4!
