Advertising for an online store in Astana: where to start
If you are launching advertising for an online store, the order of actions matters more than the choice of channel. You can buy perfect advertising and pour the money into a hole if you do not prepare three things first.
Step 1. Check that the site is ready to take orders
Open the store on a phone. Find a product, put it in the cart, get to checkout. How many steps? How many fields? Is the delivery price visible before the last screen? Anything that annoys you will annoy a buyer too, except they will simply leave.
Step 2. Connect tracking
Advertising without analytics is shooting in a dark room. The minimum: events for product view, add to cart, checkout start and purchase. Without them the ad systems do not know whom to look for, and you do not know what works.
Step 3. Prepare a product feed
This is a file with your products that Google Merchant Center reads. Names, prices, photos, availability, GTIN. Errors in the feed mean products quietly disappear from the ads, and you find out a month later. In our case, reworking the feed and the Performance Max structure gave 41 percent more revenue on an unchanged budget.
Step 4. Choose the first channel
Start with what catches ready demand. For an online store, this is usually search and shopping ads in Google (Shopping and Performance Max). People are already searching for “buy a sofa Astana”, and you need to be on that page.
When that works steadily, add paid social on Instagram and TikTok: it brings back those who have already been on the site and brings in new people.
Step 5. Define what “pays off” means
Advertising for an online store is judged not by the order but by the margin. If the markup on a product is 20 percent and advertising costs 25 percent of the order value, you are working at a loss, however nicely sales grow. Work out the acceptable cost of an order before launch, not after.
Typical mistakes
Advertising the whole catalogue at once. Not tracking returns and cancellations. Not showing the real price and delivery terms in the ad. Optimising for add to cart instead of purchase.
Our take
An online store that does everything right but does not count its margin dies beautifully: with revenue rising and money in the account falling. Start with the economics, then the advertising.
We will show what needs fixing in your store before launch, so you do not waste the budget.
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