How to choose your first ads plan without burning budget
A practical guide for eCommerce owners taking their first steps in digital advertising: where to start, what to measure and when to scale.
When you first start investing in advertising for your online store, the question is not "how much do I spend?", but "how do I learn fast with what I spend?". In this note we lay out a simple framework to start with focus.
Start with a single platform
It is tempting to be everywhere at once, but at the beginning it pays to concentrate the budget where your customer is. For most eCommerce businesses in Chile, that means choosing between Meta (Instagram and Facebook) or Google depending on how people discover you:
- Meta works well for discovery: visual products, impulse buying, new brands.
- Google captures existing demand: when people are already searching for what you sell.
Define a north-star metric
Before looking at twenty indicators, settle on one that guides decisions. In early stages, ROAS (return on ad spend) is a good beacon:
Do not optimise what you cannot measure. If your pixel and conversions are not properly configured, any number is an illusion.
Give the learning phase time
Platforms need data to optimise. Changing strategy every three days resets the learning and wastes budget. A good rule:
- Launch with a simple structure.
- Wait until you have gathered enough conversions.
- Only then iterate on what the data shows.
Want us to look at your specific case? At Clicomy we help stores make every peso invested pay off. This note is an example of Clicomy Notes.
