Shopify Audiences Not Going to Move Needle Enough for Average Shopify Plus Merchant

Overall response: "Meh and Late"

Shopify just released its Audiences feature, designed to help Shopify merchants find new customers more efficiently. Here's what it does.

- Allows you to select a product and build an audience around it, which is submitted to Facebook from aggregated Shopify data from OTHER stores (not your own) that are opted in. Your own customer data is not sent.

- This data is then sent to Facebook's targeting algorithm which then matches to an audience which is used to display the right ad, which then drops a user on a landing page, which then is going to lead to conversion.

Keep in mind, Facebook's targeting has been pretty much crippled due to the tracking data Apple is allowing them to get now. If Facebook is unable to classify a user's behavior properly and match then to the right audience this isn't going to help a whole lot. Perhaps marginally.

A few thoughts:

- 2-3 years ago peak Facebook, this would have been a good idea, now this just feels a little too late.

- The message Shopify is sending here is that we think you should be doing more media buying, rather than trying to get more organic reach.

- There's still a lot a merchant can get wrong in their conversion funnel that's unrelated to which audience it gets matched to. In particular, most landing pages are pretty terrible. Many ad units are pretty terrible. How is Shopify helping merchants diagnose what's happening in the marketing funnel?

- I would rather see Shopify instead focus on a few important areas related to advertising:

-- Cutting out media buying altogether. Ultimately this Audience tool helps with media buying. Shopify should be pushing towards cutting out media buying in certain situations altogether by creating an advertising network out of the huge number of web pages that it controls. To do this, it would need to acquire or build an advertising exchange. That would be unique and interesting!

-- Improving Shopify SEO. Compared to say WooCommerce and BigCommerce, I would say that Shopify has much less flexibility here.

-- How good is Shopify going to be at understanding user intent across its merchant base? That remains to be seen.

- From the instructions, you select a product at a time to do this. This means if you have a few products in your store, perhaps it's useful. But hundreds or thousands? Unclear.

- I would love to see features in Shopify that make it easier for its merchants to do daily storytelling through imagery and video. That is the core of what I'm on Shopify for.

The softer side of me thinks this is the start of a journey and we should wait and see the impact it has in the wild, and what Shopify has in store over time.

But in the short-term, this is not going to be a step-change in anyone's business who is more than likely struggling with profitability than anything at the moment.