Are Facebook ads worth it for your Shopify store? Do the math first
Facebook ads are worth it when they bring in more than they cost after you pay for what you sold. Most stores never run that math. Here is how, and what one store found.
The math most stores skip
Add up what the ads cost in a month, including anyone you pay to run them. Set it next to the sales the ads actually brought in, taken from your own order records rather than Ads Manager. Then subtract what those products cost you. What is left is what the ads earned. If you have never done this, you do not yet know whether your ads are working.
One store's numbers
A direct to consumer beef brand was spending $1,200 a month on Facebook ads and paying an ad vendor $500 to run them. From the store's own orders, the ads brought in about $2,177 a month in sales. That is before paying for the beef. Facebook was a third of the store's web sales, which meant the orders rose and fell with the ad budget.
When Facebook ads are not working
Owners describe the same pattern again and again: the ads drive clicks, the sessions climb, and nobody buys. That usually means the ads are reaching people who were never going to buy, or the store is losing them after the click. Ads Manager can still report purchases, because it counts orders its own way. Your order records are the tiebreaker.
Signs the ads are carrying the store
Sales drop when you turn the budget down. Free Google listings, search and email bring in a small share of sales. Nobody can tell you which channel actually paid last month. On the beef brand, organic channels were 30 percent of web sales before anything changed.
What changed, and what did not
The ads were not switched off. They were rebuilt to spend on warm audiences, people who already know the store, and the cost of a visit to the website went from 45 cents on cold audiences to 13 cents on warm ones, 71 percent less. They still run. What changed was everything around them: the best products were published to Google's free listings, email flows were fixed so they actually sent, and every order was read by channel. Sales from organic channels went from $1,939 a month to $5,422 in August, and their share of web sales from 30 percent to 48 percent.
So, are they worth it
They are worth it when the math says so, and only you can run it on your store. The better question is whether they are carrying more of the store than they should. When the free channels are working, the ads become a choice instead of the whole plan.
If this sounds like your store
This is what Shopify store audit fixes. See it on one store, with the before and after, in the case study.