Solved: Need a Meta/Google Ads freelancer for Shopify store

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! A Shopify store with shoes and ebikes is an interesting mix, and a daily ad spend of £5-8k is a serious budget. That's the kind of spend where you can see some proper results, but it also means you can burn through cash incredibly quickly if things aren't set up right from the get-go. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of guidance based on my experience running campaigns for eCommerce stores.

Honestly, with that kind of budget, you can't just throw money at the wall and see what sticks. You need a solid, structured plan. I've seen too many accounts with big budgets get terrible results because the foundations were all wrong. So let's talk about how to get those foundations right first.

We'll need to look at your foundations first...

Before a single penny is spent, the absolute first thing we need to be sure about is your tracking and your website. You mentioned knowing the basic pixel, which is a good start, but for a £8k/day spend, 'basic' won't cut it. You need robust conversion tracking set up, including the Meta Pixel with Conversions API (CAPI) and Google Ads conversion tracking with enhanced conversions. This is non-negotiable. Without accurate data feeding back into the ad platforms, their algorithms are flying blind and your money is just evaporating. You'd be amazed how many businesses try to scale with broken tracking, it's like trying to drive a performance car with a foggy windscreen.

Next is the website itself. I've not seen your store, but I've critiqued hundreds. People aren't going to spend hundreds, or thousands, on an ebike from a site that looks untrustworthy or is a nightmare to navigate. The product pages for your shoes and ebikes need to be top-notch.

This means:
-> High-quality, professional photos and videos. For ebikes, videos are almost a must. Show them in action. For shoes, show them from all angles, on a person, in different settings.
-> Persuasive, detailed product descriptions. Don't just list specs. Sell the benefit. How does that ebike change someone's commute? How do those shoes make you feel on a run? A good copywriter can make a huge difference here.
-> Clear pricing, shipping info, and return policies. Any confusion here and people will just leave.
-> Social proof. Customer reviews, testimonials, photos from customers (user-generated content). This builds massive trust. A store with no reviews feels risky.

I remember one client selling subscription boxes who saw a 1000% return on ad spend with Meta ads. A huge part of that success wasn't just the ads, but the fact their landing page was perfectly optimised to convert the traffic we sent them. The ads get people to the door, your website has to convince them to come inside. If your site's conversion rate is poor, you'll just be paying for expensive traffic that never buys, and that £8k a day budget will feel like a curse, not a blessing.

I'd say you need a multi-platform approach...

You mentioned Meta or Google Ads. My answer would be: you need both. They serve different purposes and catch customers at different stages of their buying journey. With your budget, you have the luxury of dominating on both fronts. Trying to pick just one would be leaving a huge amount of money on the table.

Meta (Facebook & Instagram): This is for creating demand. People are scrolling through their feeds, not actively looking to buy an ebike. Your job here is to stop their scroll with amazing creative (more on that later). Shoes are a perfect product for Meta – they're visual, they can be an impulse buy, and you can target people based on interests in fashion, running, specific brands, etc. Ebikes are a bit trickier as they are a considered purchase, but you can still generate a lot of interest and capture leads for your sales funnel. Meta is brilliant for telling a story and building a brand image.

Google Ads: This is for capturing demand. This is where you find people who are already looking for what you sell. They're typing "buy electric mountain bike" or "best waterproof running shoes" into Google. They have intent. For a high-ticket item like an ebike, Google Search is absolutely vital. You want to be the first result they see. Google Shopping is also incredibly powerful for both shoes and ebikes, putting your product image and price right there in the search results. It's much more direct response. I've run campaigns for home services where the cost per lead from search was around £5-£10, because we were targeting people who needed help right now. The same principle applies here.

So, the strategy isn't Meta or Google. It's Meta and Google, working together. You use Meta to make people aware of your cool shoes and amazing ebikes. You get them to your site. Maybe they don't buy straight away. But then, when they later search on Google, your Shopping ad or Search ad is right there to remind them. Or, even better, we use the data from both platforms to retarget them across the web. This integrated approach is how you maximise a large budget.

You probably should structure your Meta Ads like this...

Right, let's get into the nitty-gritty of Meta. A big mistake a lot of people make is just lumping all their audiences into one campaign and hoping for the best. With your budget, we need a proper funnel structure. I always break it down into Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

ToFu - Prospecting New Customers:
This is your cold audience. People who've never heard of you. The goal here is to introduce them to your brand and products. We'd test a load of different audiences to see what works. I wouldn't start with broad targeting straight away, not until the pixel has thousands of conversion events. I'd start with detailed targeting.

For your store, I would test ad sets themed around:
-> Competitor Interests: Target people who like competing shoe brands (e.g., Nike, Adidas, On Running, Hoka) or ebike brands (e.g., Rad Power Bikes, Specialized, VanMoof).
-> Activity Interests: For shoes, this could be "Running", "Trail Running", "Fashion accessories". For ebikes, "Cycling", "Mountain Biking", "Electric bicycle", "Sustainable transport".
-> Publisher Interests: People who follow cycling magazines, running blogs, fashion influencers etc.
-> Lookalike Audiences: Once you have enough data (you need at least 100 purchases, but ideally 1,000+ for it to be powerful), we can create Lookalikes. We'd start with a Lookalike of your past purchasers, as this is the highest quality seed audience. Then we'd work our way down the funnel: Lookalikes of people who Initiated Checkout, then Added to Cart, and so on. This is usually where you find the best performance at scale.

MoFu - Engaging Warm Audiences:
These are people who have shown some interest but haven't gone deep into your site yet. They've engaged with your brand but aren't ready to buy. We want to draw them back in.
-> This would be retargeting people who have visited your website in the last 30-60 days (but excluding those who bought or added to cart).
-> We'd also retarget people who have watched a good chunk of your video ads (e.g., 50% or more) or engaged with your Facebook/Instagram page. The idea is to stay top of mind and show them more of what you offer.

BoFu - Closing the Deal:
This is your hottest audience and where you should see the best return. These are people who were on the verge of buying. We need to give them a final push.
-> Retargeting people who Added to Cart but didn't purchase in the last 7-14 days. These ads could even include a small discount code to nudge them over the line.
-> Retargeting people who Initiated Checkout but didn't complete.
-> Using Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) to show people the exact shoes or ebike they were looking at. This is incredibly effective.

I remember running a campaign for a women's apparel brand and achieving a 691% return with Meta ads. A huge part of that was a hyper-focused retargeting strategy for cart abandoners. It's often the most profitable part of any eCommerce ad account. You've already paid to get them that far, you can't afford to let them just walk away. This structured approach means you have specific ads and messages for people at every stage, which is far more effective than a one-size-fits-all approach.

You'll need powerful creative to make this work...

With a £8k/day spend, you will exhaust your creative very quickly. People will get sick of seeing the same ad over and over (we call this 'ad fatigue'), and your performance will tank. You need a constant stream of new, high-quality creative to test. This is probably one of the biggest challenges at this level of spend. You can't just have one good video and expect it to last for months.

For shoes and ebikes, creative is everything. We need to test different formats and angles constantly.

-> Video Ads: This is king on Meta. For ebikes, you absolutely need videos showing the bike in action. Riding through a city, up a hill, on a trail. Show its features, how it folds (if it does), the battery. For shoes, show people running in them, walking in them, unboxing them. Short, snappy videos for feeds and stories work best.

-> User-Generated Content (UGC): This is gold. It's far more authentic and trustworthy than slick, corporate-style ads. We've seen brilliant results with UGC for SaaS clients, and it's even more powerful for eCommerce. Encourage your customers to send in photos and videos of them using your products. You can even hire UGC creators to make content that looks native to the platform. It just feels more real.

-> Carousel Ads: Perfect for showing off a range of shoe styles or colours in a single ad. For an ebike, you could use a carousel to highlight different features one by one: the motor, the battery life, the frame, the display.

-> Static Images: Don't discount these! High-quality lifestyle photos (people actually using the products) and clean studio shots (product on a white background for shopping ads) are both needed. Test both to see what your audience responds to.

You also need to think about the copy. The text in your ad has to grab attention and persuade someone to click. Here’s a quick example of how you could approach the copy for each product:

This is just a starting point. We'd test dozens of variations of headlines, copy, and calls-to-action to find the winning combinations.

We'll need to look at Google Ads for high-intent buyers...

As I said, Google is about capturing existing demand. People are literally telling you what they want to buy. Your job is to be there with the right answer. With your budget, we'd want a comprehensive Google Ads strategy.

Search Campaigns:
We'd build out campaigns based on keyword themes. The structure is really important for control and reporting. For example:
-> Brand Campaign: Bidding on your own brand name. This is cheap and essential to protect against competitors bidding on your name.
-> Ebike Campaigns: We'd have different ad groups for different types of searches. E.g., 'electric commuter bikes', 'folding ebikes', 'electric mountain bikes'. Each ad group would have tightly-themed keywords and highly specific ads. Some example keywords would be "buy ebike online UK", "best electric bike under £2000", "lightweight folding ebike".
-> Shoe Campaigns: Similar structure. Ad groups for 'mens trail running shoes', 'womens white leather trainers', 'vegan sneakers'. We would do extensive keyword research to find what people are actually searching for.

All search ads should use extensions to take up more space and provide more information – phone call extensions, sitelinks to specific categories, image extensions, etc.

Performance Max (PMax) / Shopping Campaigns:
This is probably where you'll see the biggest volume for eCommerce. PMax campaigns use your product feed from Shopify to show your products across all of Google's inventory – Shopping, YouTube, Display, Search, Gmail, etc. It's heavily automated, but the key to making it work is a perfectly optimised product feed. This means your product titles, descriptions, images, and attributes in Shopify need to be spot on. A title like "Ebike" is useless. A title like "Urban Glide X Folding Electric Bike - 50 Mile Range - Black" is what Google needs to show your ad to the right people. Getting this feed right is a technical job but it's the difference between success and failure with PMax. I remember one campaign we ran for an eCommerce store selling maps & navigation equipment, where we generated an 8x return with Meta ads, and a massive part of that was a meticulously managed product feed for their Google Shopping campaigns.

I'd say you need a plan for your budget and expectations...

Okay, let's talk about the £5k-£8k per day. It's a fantastic budget, but we would not start spending that on day one. That would be incredibly reckless. We'd start with a smaller testing budget, maybe £500-£1k per day, split across the platforms and campaigns we've discussed. We'd run these initial tests for a couple of weeks to gather data, find out which audiences and creatives are working, and what your initial Cost Per Purchase (CPA) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) look like.

What should you expect? For eCommerce in developed countries like the UK or US, a click (CPC) might cost you between £0.50 and £1.50. A typical eCommerce conversion rate is 2-5%.

Let's do the maths:
-> Worst case: £1.50 CPC / 2% Conversion Rate = £75 Cost Per Purchase.
-> Best case: £0.50 CPC / 5% Conversion Rate = £10 Cost Per Purchase.

Your actual CPA will likely land somewhere in between. For a pair of £120 shoes, a £25 CPA is great (a 4.8x ROAS). For a £2,000 ebike, a £75 CPA is phenomenal (a 26.6x ROAS). ROAS is the metric you should be obsessed with. I'd much rather have a high CPA on an expensive ebike than a low CPA on a cheap pair of socks.

Once we have this baseline data and have found some winning combinations, that's when we start to scale. We'd gradually increase the budget on the campaigns that are performing well, while continuing to test new things to beat the current winners. Scaling from £1k to £8k a day is a careful process of monitoring performance and making data-driven decisions, not just flipping a switch. I've worked on campaigns where we've reduced the cost per user acquisition for SaaS clients from £100 CPA down to £7, but that comes from relentless testing and optimisation over time, not overnight.

Here's a summary of the main recommendations I'd propose as a starting point.

Managing this level of spend and complexity isn't something you can just hand off to any freelancer. It requires a strategic, data-led approach, a deep understanding of how the platforms work together, and the capacity to produce a constant flow of new creative. It's a full-time job for a team, not just one person.

I hope this detailed breakdown gives you a much clearer picture of what's involved. It's not just about 'running ads'; it's about building a robust, scalable customer acquisition machine. We have a lot of experience with this, especially for eCommerce clients.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and have us take a proper look at your store and your goals, we offer a free initial consultation. It's a good way for you to pick our brains and for us to see if we'd be a good fit to help you properly invest that budget for the best possible return.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh