Industries / Ecommerce
Online marketing for ecommerce brands.
Shopping, Performance Max, creative volume, and owned email, judged on contribution rather than platform screenshots.
Online marketing for an ecommerce brand is the work of getting your products in front of people with buying intent, converting that traffic profitably, and then earning the second and third order without paying for them again. In practice it is a clean product feed feeding Shopping and Performance Max, prospecting and retargeting on the social platforms where your creative can carry the message, enough new creative each month for testing to mean anything, lifecycle email and SMS flows that run without a campaign calendar, conversion rate work on product and cart pages, and measurement that separates new customer revenue from returning customer revenue. CurrentAds runs all of that, including the feed, the creative, the flows, and the tracking, on accounts you own.
The discovery path
How customers actually find you in this industry
01
Product search with a picture attached
A large share of commercial searches surface Shopping results first, and those results are drawn from your feed. Title, image, price, availability, and attribute completeness decide whether you are in the set at all.
02
Performance Max spends wherever it wants
Performance Max distributes across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, and Gmail from a single campaign. That makes feed quality, asset quality, and exclusions the real control surface, because the placement dials are gone.
03
Discovery in the feed, driven by creative
On Meta and TikTok nobody was looking for you. The creative does the targeting. Brands that ship a steady stream of new concepts find winners, and brands that boost the same three assets watch frequency climb and returns fall.
04
They compare, then they leave
Price, shipping, returns, and reviews get checked across two or three tabs. Most first sessions do not convert. Retargeting and a working browse abandonment flow are what make the first visit worth buying.
05
The inbox decides your margin
Repeat purchases come from email and SMS, not from paid. A brand with good flows can afford a higher acquisition cost than a competitor without them, and that is usually the whole competitive difference.
Priority order
The pillars that matter most here
We run the same ten services for every client. What changes by industry is the order they are built in and where the budget goes. For ecommerce, this is the sequence we argue for.
01
Paid Media
Shopping and Performance Max built on a clean feed, prospecting and retargeting on Meta and TikTok, and budget pacing that treats acquisition and retention as separate jobs with separate targets.
02
Creative Studio
Enough new concepts every month for creative testing to produce signal. In feed environments the creative is the targeting, so creative volume is the growth lever, not the audience settings.
03
Email and SMS
Welcome, browse abandonment, cart and checkout recovery, post purchase, replenishment, and winback flows, plus a campaign calendar and deliverability maintenance. This is the margin channel.
04
CRO and Landing Pages
Product page, cart, and checkout work, offer and shipping threshold testing, and mobile speed. Buying more traffic to a page that converts poorly is the most expensive way to grow.
05
Analytics and Tracking
Server side tagging, consent handling, and reporting that separates new from returning revenue so you can see contribution rather than a blended platform number that double counts.
06
SEO
Category and collection pages, product schema, faceted navigation control, and content that captures the research stage before the transaction stage.
07
Web Design and Speed
Site speed and Core Web Vitals on mobile, where most of the traffic and almost all of the abandonment lives.
See all ten services and how they compound, or what it costs.
Why that order, in full
Ecommerce is the one industry where creative volume, not bidding, is usually the binding constraint, and how large a batch has to be before a winner means anything is worked through in why a creative test needs twenty ads. That production runs through the creative studio and gets distributed by the paid media program.
The margin, though, is in the second order, which is why deliverability is a revenue question rather than an IT one and why SPF, DKIM and DMARC done properly sits alongside the case for running more than one channel in why one channel caps growth. What we report across both is on how we report and how you verify it, and the terms are in the trial and money-back terms.
What we report
The metrics that actually matter
Live in your portal, not a monthly PDF. These are the numbers we commit to reporting for ecommerce, whether they moved in the right direction or not.
- Contribution after ad spend and cost of goods, not platform reported revenue alone
- Blended return on ad spend against new customer return on ad spend
- New customer acquisition cost, tracked against first order value
- Repeat purchase rate and time between first and second order
- Email and SMS attributed revenue as a share of total revenue
- Product page and checkout conversion rate by device
- Feed health: disapproval rate, missing attributes, and out of stock coverage
- Creative level results: hook rate, cost per purchase by concept, and how fast concepts fatigue
Where it goes wrong
Three ways this gets broken
01
A neglected product feed
Truncated titles, missing GTINs, wrong availability, and no product type structure. Every Shopping and Performance Max decision downstream is made on that data, so the campaign is capped before anyone touches a bid.
02
Judging everything on platform reported ROAS
Every platform claims the same sale, and none of them subtract cost of goods, shipping, or returns. Brands scale a campaign that looks like a four and find out at the end of the quarter that it was not profitable.
03
Running one creative until it dies
Frequency rises, cost per purchase drifts up, and the account gets blamed. Without a production pipeline there is nothing to swap in, so the only lever left is cutting budget.
Compliance and practical notes
What we work around in ecommerce
Shopping and merchant policy
Shopping requires accurate pricing, availability, and returns information, and it restricts certain product categories outright. Feed and site data must match, which is why merchant policy problems are usually site problems.
Claims and disclosures
Advertised claims must be truthful and substantiated, and subscription or auto renewal offers carry disclosure and cancellation requirements. We flag copy that makes a claim your product data cannot support before it runs.
Consent and tracking
Privacy regulations in several states and regions govern how tracking and audience data are collected. We implement consent handling and server side tagging so measurement stays as accurate as the rules allow rather than quietly breaking.
General information, not legal advice. Rules change and vary by state. Your business stays responsible for the legality of its own offers, claims, and disclosures, and nothing goes live without your approval.
FAQ
Ecommerce questions
What return on ad spend can you get us?
We will not name a number, and a number named before anyone has seen your margins, feed, and repeat rate is a sales tactic. We commit to delivery: the plan, the tracking, the campaigns live, and reporting that shows contribution. Targets get set from your actual unit economics in the first month.
Do you manage the product feed?
Yes. Feed quality is part of the work, not a prerequisite we ask you to fix first. Titles, attributes, product types, custom labels for margin tiers, and disapproval clean up all sit with us.
How much creative do you produce?
Enough for testing to be meaningful, with the exact volume set by your spend level and platform mix. The principle is a steady cadence of new concepts rather than endless variations of one, because concept level differences are what move performance.
Do you work with our existing email platform?
Yes. We build flows and campaigns in the platform you already use rather than pushing a migration for its own sake. You keep ownership of the account, the list, and the templates.
How do you measure what is actually working?
Server side tagging for durable event collection, new versus returning customer reporting, and a view that nets out cost of goods where you can share it. Where platforms disagree we say so rather than picking the friendliest number.
Close to this
Other playbooks worth reading
Med spa
Injectables, laser, body, and skin. Map pack and reviews first, then offer led paid social and search measured to booked consults.
B2B SaaS
Category and comparison search, LinkedIn by title and account, content that earns AI citations, and reporting that ends at pipeline.
Real estate
Agents, teams, and brokerages. Neighborhood and seller content, Fair Housing compliant campaigns, and nurture that survives a long cycle.
Or see every industry we work with.
Get the plan for your market
Thirty minutes, a senior operator, and a written plan you keep either way. Month to month, and you own every account we touch.