Performance marketer for Shopify stores

A performance marketer on Shopify is responsible for paid acquisition and for proving that it works. That covers more than launching campaigns:

• Paid channels. Meta ads and Google Ads, including Shopping and Performance Max, with budgets set against a target return.
• Measurement. Pixel, Conversions API, GA4 and Shopify's own reports reconciled, so everyone argues about strategy instead of whose number is right.
• Creative testing. A steady supply of new hooks and formats, tested one variable at a time.
• Landing experience. Product pages, landing pages and quizzes written for cold traffic.
• The handoff to retention. Email and SMS capture, so a click that does not buy today is not lost.

Before changing anything I want to know where the money is going. The first two weeks answer five questions:

1. Do Meta, Google and Shopify agree on how many purchases happened? If not, why?
2. What does a new customer cost, separately from returning customers the ads are taking credit for?
3. Which ads and which products produce first orders that lead to second orders?
4. Where do paid visitors drop off between landing and checkout?
5. How much revenue comes from email and SMS, and is it rising or flat?

You get the answers as a short written plan with priorities in order, not a slide deck.

An in-house performance marketer makes sense once ad spend justifies a salary and there is enough work to fill the week. Before that point, a full-time hire spends much of their time on tasks outside their strength.

A large agency gives you coverage, and often a junior account manager running your spend from a template. You rarely speak to the person making decisions.

Working with me sits between the two. I make the decisions and manage the accounts myself, and my team at Branva handles production work such as email builds, SEO content and creative, so you get senior judgment without paying senior rates for every task. If you want one person across ads, email and conversion, see Shopify growth consultant and fractional marketing manager.

Ad platforms take credit for sales generously. Part of my job is separating the sales the ads created from the ones that were coming anyway:

• Branded search in its own campaign. People searching your name were already looking for you, so brand is reported separately and never counted as growth. See the Google Ads setup I use.
• Remarketing kept small. It claims many sales that email or a returning visit would have closed, so it gets a small budget and close attention.
• New and returning customers apart. Prospecting is judged on new customer acquisition cost, not on revenue from people who already buy from you.
• Blended return at store level. Total Shopify revenue against total ad spend. If platform ROAS rises and blended return doesn't, the ads are taking credit, not creating sales.
• Platform purchases checked against Shopify orders, so double counting is caught before it inflates results.

Where spend is large enough, Meta and Google both offer lift tests that hold back a control group, and I'll tell you when one is worth running.

Platform ROAS is useful for comparing ads against each other. It is a poor measure of whether the business is growing. I report on:

• Blended return: total net sales divided by total ad spend, across the whole store.
• New customer acquisition cost, kept apart from returning customer revenue.
• Channel ROAS on Meta ads and Google Ads, as a diagnostic.
• Email and SMS share of revenue, which shows whether paid traffic is being kept.

For Ruthi Human Hair, that meant 3.8x ROAS on paid ads and 145% growth in ad revenue, plus a 38% drop in customer acquisition cost as targeting improved. The falling CAC is what showed the account was actually getting more efficient, not just spending more.