Shopify Traffic: 8 Tips to Increase Visitors

If you’re running an ecommerce business on Shopify, you might think about various ways to drive your Shopify traffic.

But it’s important to know that you can generate three types of traffic: earned, owned, and paid. 

Increasing web traffic could mean more sales and profits if your store is optimized correctly for conversations. But for traffic to successfully result in sales and profits, there are some essential tips to ensure that your traffic converts.

We’ve gathered a list of tips to drive more Shopify traffic and help you get increased revenue.

You’ll learn the following:

1. Why you can only drive targeted traffic if you understand your customer
2. Why advertising is an excellent initial route for traffic, but it’s a pay-to-play system
3. Why you need to focus on creating premium content to support your premium ecommerce store
4. How you can drive traffic through social media content
5. Getting an initial traffic boost from guest posts
6. Invest in Optimized Google Ads Campaigns

Who is your customer

Without knowing who your customer is, how do you hope to drive the right kind of traffic to your site.

The thing is, traffic means nothing if the people who visit your store aren’t likely to ever make a purchase.

If you sell fishing equipment and you drive 10,000 people who have never fished and instead are into fashion, you’ve wasted your time.

That’s why before focusing on traffic, you should remember that you want to attract the correct type of people.

To do this you should create buyer personas.

Buyer personas help you understand who your ideal buyer is, what they’re into, what problems they have to understand how your product’s help solve their problems.

To put together buyer personas, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who is my ideal buyer?
2. What gender are they?
3. How old are they?
4. What job do they have?
5. For them, are our products nice to haves or essentials?
6. Where do they hang out online?
7. What’s their ideal buying process?
8. What would their life be like if they didn’t make a purchase?
9. What changes in their life make them want to consider buying from us?
10. What are they into?

Which tactic is best for your business?

You need to focus on some important elements of tactics to find out which ones are most suitable.

• Tactic Type: You should decide whether you implement long vs. short-term tactics. Short-term tactics usually see different results quicker but require more maintenance. But, long-term tactics take longer to see results but are more evergreen and require little to no maintenance.
• Effort: You should know that the time, skill and experience you need to put in your tactics should be met by your team.
• Return on Investment: Whether you invest time, money, or effort, it can take days, weeks, or months to see the accurate results you have been waiting for.

You should aim to choose your tactics carefully so that you can do them consistently and get the results. 

Let’s explore eight tips to increase your Shopify traffic!

Pay to play with advertising

Advertising is a great way to grow traffic to your Shopify store. It’s effective because if done right it often leads to direct sales.

Therefore for the money you put in, you’ll get money out. However, what you do need to factor in is that advertising costs money.

There are various ways you can do paid advertising on your e-commerce store. For example, you might try Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Twitter ads, Pinterest ads or even Snapchat ads.

You should know that Pinterest is extremely popular among niche groups such as DIY crafts and home decorating. If you are selling home decoration items it’s ideal for you to get into those markets with paid ads.

The medium you choose will depend on three things:

1. The level of expertise in your business
2. The channel your target customers frequent
3. The cost of acquiring a customer on these channels.

Let’s look into each one in detail.

If you’re running your ads internally, you need to think about which channels your team is proficient with.

If no one has used Snapchat before, not even as a user, it will cost you money to get advertising right on that channel as you’ll need to spend money testing different systems.

Instead, look at your expertise and make decisions that way. Alternatively, you could partner with a creative content agency to help you produce the type of advertisements on the channels you want.

Keep in mind though, you’ll have to factor this cost into your overall costs to see whether it’s cost-effective.

If all your customers use Snapchat, it makes sense to advertise there as that’s where you’re likely to attract the most targeted traffic. Going back to our fishing example, if people who are interested in fishing rarely use Snapchat, there’s little point spending your advertising efforts there.

Finally, before you begin advertising on any channel, you need to think about the cost of acquisition (CAC).

This tells you how much it costs you on average to make a sale.

Looking at the example above, this company have used paid advertising to drive traffic to their hot water bottle store.

Their hot water bottles (with covers) cost £100. If they’re paying £30 per lead to generate a sale, that’s £70 profit.

It definitely seems like a good idea to use this channel.

However, if it costs them £110 to drive traffic and then a sale, they’re actually losing money, even if they do end up selling loads of hot water bottles.

To make this better for your business, try to reduce the cost of the click by making your ads as targeted as possible.

But do keep in mind, if you’re trying to advertise for a really popular product, you will inevitably end up paying more.

Benefit from TikTok Ads

For many online stores and marketers, TikTok is a compelling platform for advertisers across virtually all demographics. Global spending on TikTok will increase rapidly in 2022 and is expected to increase in 2023. And why should you not try it?

The platform allows you to create quality content and requires a fair investment. Therefore, it can be a great platform to add TikTok to your marketing strategies. You can generate high-quality Shopify traffic with TikTok shopping. 

You can use paid ads and engage with your target customers on TikTok. It can be a great way to communicate with your customers and strengthen your relationship with your customers.  

Use SEO to Optimize Store Discoverability & Drive Shopify Traffic

Imagine that your target customers are looking for your products on Google. Your store must be one of the top results that appear in their search. Having a high position in search results is to generate high and qualified store traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO) is your answer to do it properly.

SEO helps your store rank higher in search results if you include relevant keywords. If you are in the beginning stages, you can use popular SEO tools such as SemRush or Ahrefs to help you understand your positioning in the search compared to your competitors. 

You can write titles aligned with your customers’ search intent. Think like a customer and ask yourself what you would type when looking for your products. Answering these questions can help you find the best keywords for your product titles. 

Use Premium Content and Guest Posting

Shopify allows you to create blog posts alongside your site. Blog posts are effective because it helps people find your store through SEO. What this means is that someone might type in a problem they have (they don’t yet know there is a solution) and if they land on your content, they’re much closer to making a purchase.

You can use your blog posts to think about the keywords you want to attract and then direct them to your store.

The same goes for guest posting. When you find a relevant site to yours that accepts guest blogs, think about writing one, especially if your store is in its infancy. You’ll benefit from a link back to your site and open yourself to more eyes on your business.

Let’s see how content drives traffic in real terms.

Say you were interested in learning more about filtered water.

One search you might make on Google is “benefits of filtered water”

If you click the top link, if takes you to a blog post that details 21 benefits of filtered water.

Moreover, this isn’t just a blog; it’s an ecommerce site too. From there, if you’ve been convinced of the benefits, you can go to their product page to learn more about what they sell.

Do you see why creating premium content about your niche is essential? A customer might only have found this site if Phox water showed up for this search term.

Offer Time Sensitive Discounts

This tip type is short-term and requires high effort. It’s an extremely effective way to get people to take action, generating Shopify traffic and higher sales. Putting an expiration date on your discount leverages scarcity and triggers customers psychologically to purchase.

You can offer a discount right after the purchase. Sending an email about their discount to continue shopping is an effective way to drive more traffic without losing time.

But remember that product discounts aren’t the only offer to provide your customers. For example, occasionally doing so can be a compelling incentive to drive traffic to your Shopify store if you don’t offer free shipping.

Engage in Social Media

When running your Shopify store, you might think that to drive traffic, you need to work only on the content on your site. While that is true, you also need to think about the content you put elsewhere, namely social media.

Most people spend some of their time each day on social media and what’s more, people have said they’re happy to follow brands on social media too.

It gives you a great opportunity to connect with your customers and potential customers in a new way.

And if they see your content on your social channel and like what they see, there’s a good chance they’ll move on to your website too.

Reach New Customers with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is building relationships with your customers via social media influencers. You can find most of these influencers on Instagram, one of the most effective marketing channels for ecommerce stores. You can reach new customers by letting influencers share their experiences about your products and brand.

The best way to approach this tip is to reach relevant influencers in your niche. They can leverage the trust they’ve created with their followers, generating traffic to your Shopify store.

You can send free samples of some of your best-selling items to influencers and let them take a video to share with their audience. Using this tip to introduce your new products to your target market, and it can be an effective way to spread your new products to social media, which spreads quickly to many of your customers.

Invest in Optimized Google Ads Campaigns

Regarding driving highly-targeted traffic to your Shopify store, Google Ads are a top choice. Google Ads campaigns offer many benefits, including access to highly actionable data, unprecedented reach for affordable prices, access to potential shoppers actively looking for what you’re selling, much flexibility, and, most importantly, instant results—driving traffic from day one with solid budget control.

To build a successful ecommerce business with a steady stream of quality traffic, ecommerce entrepreneurs should be investing in these three Google Ad campaign types at the very least: Google Shopping campaigns, Google Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs), Google Re-marketing campaigns

However, to ensure you are getting the right traffic (bucketloads of shoppers with buying intent), campaign monitoring, tweaking, and optimizing are vital. This means ensuring you are utilizing negative keywords, integrating short- and long-tail keywords, and testing and tweaking your campaigns until they perform at their peak. You can, truthfully, be a full-time job, but with the help of Shopify apps like Traffic Booster, you can reap all the rewards Google has to offer without lifting a finger.

Traffic Booster will automate Google ads using our unique AI technology while our PPC experts take the burden off your shoulders, to ensure you get the right customers at the right time for the right cost.

Final thoughts

If you want sales for your ecommerce store, you first need to get people to visit your store. 

You’re now equipped with five different strategies to increase the number of people visiting your store. 

Not only will you have more eyes on your website and products, hence you’ll have more potential customers. 

Moreover, the more people visiting your store, the wider your network effect is. Your network effect is how you grow your traffic through word-of-mouth.

If person A visits your website from Google or a social media campaign, loves your products, buys one, and then, in turn, reaches out to their network to tell them to visit your store too.