A real example of how I test a business idea with ads 🐊

Hey! Some of you asked me to show you a real-world example of how to test your business idea, so here you go.

One of my e-commerce clients wanted to try out a different type of product, but it’s not something we can just slap onto their existing Shopify store because it’s a completely different product category.

Before committing to a new Shopify store build, stocking product and negotiating with her vendors, we’re checking how the market responds to the product, and if they are showing buy-intent.

We setup a 2-page dummy store with all the information a real store would have. You can see it live right here: https://drcroc.com.au/ (I use Carrd to build these).

The second page let’s the user know that we’re sold out but we’re currently restocking - and they can opt-in to get notified when they can buy the product.

There are two significant buttons that we track.

• If people click on ‘Buy Now’ it gets marked as an ‘Add To Cart’ and they are moved to the second page.

• If people fill in the form and click on ‘Notify’ it gets marked as an ‘Initiate Checkout’

For us, the form submissions are ‘nice to haves’ because we know most people won’t bother giving up their email address so easily. The real value is the event data we track. Not just with the META Pixel, but we also run Microsoft Clarity (like Hotjar, but better) on the pages - so we are recording user activity.

We’re simply counting how many people clicked on an ad > saw the product page > added to cart > and initiated checkout.

If the numbers add up after our test campaigns, we’ll know if this is a product worth stocking and if we should build a new Shopify store.

Here are some of the ad creatives we’re running in case you’re curious.

Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in learning more about testing and validating your business idea this way.

Stay Awesome!

—Bob