Reviews (2)
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0% of ratings are 5 stars
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0% of ratings are 4 stars
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0% of ratings are 3 stars
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0% of ratings are 2 stars
- 100% of ratings are 1 stars
Unfortunately, my experience with RetailerBoost has been very disappointing, particularly when it comes to communication and transparency.
I installed the app because the offer of having RetailerBoost fund the advertising was appealing. However, I have seen no measurable traffic or activity from RetailerBoost in my Shopify reports.
I was told that my campaigns were live, but after seeing no activity, I contacted support to find out what was happening. I was later told that an automated system had failed to set the campaigns back to live. Since then, I have followed up again and have gone several days without receiving a response.
The lack of communication has been extremely frustrating. I understand that advertising does not guarantee sales, and I am not expecting them to guarantee results. What I do expect is accurate information about whether my campaigns are actually running and a response when I have questions.
I also recently saw another merchant's review where RetailerBoost acknowledged that their system had automatically paused a campaign and that their CRM had failed to route the merchant's messages to a person. Unfortunately, this made my own experience feel even more concerning.
At this point, I still have no evidence of any traffic or activity being generated for my store by RetailerBoost, and the lack of communication has left me unsure whether the service is actually operating as expected.
Based on my experience so far, I cannot recommend the app.
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
