Retailerboost ‑ Google Ads

Hello,

You are right about the communication and I am sorry. You should not have had to chase us, and going days without an answer is not something I can explain away. We are a small team, we were thinner than usual over the summer, and our support routing did not hold up under it. That is our problem we are working on fixing in several ways including:

1. Dedicated Shopify support channel view in our CRM (added today)
2. Automated emails when we pause ads for lack of conversions / deep unprofitability (added late last week)
3. Transparency around impressions and click data in the app (added today)
4. Simple live / paused / stuck status indicator on the app home page (added today)
5. Looking into hiring a dedicated support staff member (WIP)

On whether anything has been running: it has. Since 17 July your campaigns have delivered 15,657 impressions and 598 clicks, and sent 615 visits to your store out of the ~5,264 it received in that period. We have spent $267.89 of our own money on that and you have not been billed anything. There was also a stretch in late July where an automated guardrail stopped your campaigns (between 22nd July and 26th July) and nothing in our system told you, which is exactly the gap you are describing.

I spent a few hours looking into why no stats were showing in your Shopify reports. Your product feed comes from Shopify's Google channel, which tags every link with utm_source=google before it ever reaches us. We add our own tag after that, and when a URL carries two, the first one wins. So your analytics filed our paid visits as ordinary Google Shopping traffic. You were looking in the right place. The label was wrong.

We do add our own unique parameters alongside the standard ones for precisely this reason, so we can still attribute orders when the tags collide. That is how we know those 615 visits are ours.

Here is the full list below that we append to all ad link clicks:
vrb = our own reference, carrying the unique click ID Google generates for that click. This is the one that still works when the other tags clash.
utm_source=retailerboost, utm_medium=cpc, utm_campaign=retailerboost = the standard tags, so our traffic shows as ours in any analytics tool that reads them, unless there is a tag collision - such as Shopify setting it's own in this case.
ref=RetailerBoost and ref2=RetailerBoost = a second fallback.

If you're using Google analytics or similar you may be able to create reports with these url params instead.

With that said, as of today to help with transparency, impressions, clicks and user visitor analytics data is now available in the app itself under the analytics tab, so you no longer have to rely on Shopify's reporting to tell whether our campaigns are running. That shipped because of this. You can also select different date ranges to look at different date periods.

The honest part: those 598 clicks have not produced an order yet. Your store took 14 orders (including the one test order we asked you to place to confirm tracking is working), in the same period through your checkout and none were generated from the traffic we have sent so far.

That is a performance conversation rather than a technical one, and we are still funding your campaigns while we work on it.

If you'd like to book some time on my calendar, I'd be happy to run through the campaign numbers so far in more detail - https://calendly.com/sturrock/intro

Best,
Adam

Hello,

Thank you for the honest feedback. You're right, and we're sorry for the poor communication.

Your campaign went live on 5 August. We funded £54.52 of Google Shopping spend from our own budget, which delivered 15,251 impressions and 235 clicks to your store, and it did produce one conversion worth £10.65, on which we charged our 12% commission of £1.27. That is the only money you have been charged for.

On 8 August our system paused the campaign automatically, because the commission coming back was far below what we were spending, and that spend is our money at risk. You got our automated notice on the 10th. What you didn't get was a person answering the entirely reasonable question you asked in response.

On that: our CRM failed to route your messages to a person on both occasions. It's affected several merchants and we're fixing it now. The team working on RetailerBoost is small and we rely on those systems to answer merchants the way we would ourselves, so when they fail silently nobody knows you're waiting. It should not have taken a review to find that.

I'd like to try again properly if you're open to it. Your store and the products we advertised weren't the problem. We're still developing our system and bidding rules. The campaign ran for three days with only one conversion flowing back to Google, so it never had a chance to learn. Longer run, working feedback loop, same terms: nothing upfront, and nothing charged unless we generate a sale. If you'd rather not, I completely understand. Your review found real faults for us to work through in our CRM and bidding system. I'm grateful for your feedback.

It is worth highlighting that we can not guarantee results. There are many variables outside of our control happen after we setup and fund ad campaigns including, search volume and intent, competitor pricing (appearing alongside other results in the carousels), your website conversion rate and more. We can guarantee that we will only ever charge if our ads directly lead to an order being placed on your store.

Kind Regards,
Adam