Better Digital

Better Digital We grow NZ businesses using Shopify and Shopify Plus

13/10/2026

Someone is typing your best product into Google right now with their card out. Now open your ad account and check how much of last month's budget was waiting there to meet her. For a lot of stores, the honest answer is none of it.

And I get why it all ends up on social, right? That's where the attention is, the platforms make it easy, and the creative is more fun to make. But there's a difference the budget split ignores. Someone scrolling is in browsing mode; you're interrupting them and hoping. Someone typing your product category plus "NZ" into a search bar is in buying mode. They've raised their hand, today. And plenty of stores spend almost everything interrupting browsers while nobody's there to catch the hand-raisers.

And on a small budget that split matters more, not less, because interrupting people is a volume game, and volume is the one thing a smaller budget doesn't have. Catching intent isn't.

Now, to be fair, it's not either-or. Social builds the wanting, search catches the wanting. Both have a job. It's just that the split is rarely a decision anyone actually made. It's a default.

So run the boring check. Take your best product, find the exact phrase someone ready to buy it would type, and price what five hundred dollars would do there. Then set your split like it's a decision, because right now it's probably just a default you inherited.

Follow for budget decisions made on purpose. Save this for your next ad review.

Applications for the Black Friday Build close today at 5pm.One Shopify store gets its whole Black Friday planned, built ...
24/09/2026

Applications for the Black Friday Build close today at 5pm.

One Shopify store gets its whole Black Friday planned, built and run by us, and pays nothing for the work. If you've been meaning to put your store forward, this is the morning to do it. It's a few minutes and one honest answer about why your store.

Winner announced Monday. Apply here: https://betterdigital.co.nz/pages/apply-to-win-a-black-friday-build?utm_source=social&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=bf_build_competition&utm_content=fb

24/09/2026

Pull up last November's customers in Shopify and you'll probably find a whole heap of new names from that weekend, and almost none of them have ordered since.

That's not a bad weekend, it's a badly designed one. So this year we're building one store's entire Black Friday for them, and they don't pay for any of the work.

Free to apply, we pick, closes tomorrow at 5pm. Apply here: https://betterdigital.co.nz/pages/apply-to-win-a-black-friday-build?utm_source=social&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=bf_build_competition&utm_content=fb

21/09/2026

If your agency is pitching you headless, ask them one question. Who pays for the next feature? Follow for the questions that save you from expensive advice.

Run 2 of our masterclass cost $978 in ads and brought 23 registrations. Run 1 cost $852 and brought 62. That's the wrong...
21/09/2026

Run 2 of our masterclass cost $978 in ads and brought 23 registrations. Run 1 cost $852 and brought 62. That's the wrong direction, so here's the whole thing.

Run 1 was five campaigns and came in around $14 a signup. Run 2 was two campaigns, and cold came in at $40.72, warm at $46.61.

And I have to be careful about what that proves, because this morning I nearly told you it proved something it doesn't. Two things changed between the runs. The ads went live five days late, and we raised the bar on who we were asking for, to stores doing 200 or more orders a month. Both at once, so the cost moved and I can't tell you which change did it.

What it does show is inside the run. One audience of five brought 14 of the 16 signups at $25.79 each. The other four spent $290 between them and brought two. The average describes none of that.

There's a verdict I said I'd have by now and I don't. The lead form came in cheaper than the landing page on cost per signup, but the number that matters is cost per person who turns up, and I can't split attendance by source yet.

So run 3 changes one thing, not two. Short window, money in the last three days, audience bar left alone.

The last one runs Tuesday the 22nd at 12:30, it's free, and there's no replay. The link's in the bio.

We paid 54 cents a click to send 812 people to our own Instagram profile, and that's roughly where it stopped.And the tr...
14/09/2026

We paid 54 cents a click to send 812 people to our own Instagram profile, and that's roughly where it stopped.

And the traffic half of that genuinely worked. Fifty four cents is cheap, the click-through rate ran over three and a half percent, and by every number a media buyer would show you in a report, the campaign was doing its job. Which is exactly why this is worth saying out loud, because a report full of green numbers is the most expensive thing you can be handed.

The profile those 812 people landed on is the part nobody was grading. It had to explain who this is for, why it's worth following, and what happens next, and it had to do all three in about two seconds on a phone. Ours was mostly neat educational squares that looked like everybody else's, so people arrived, had a reasonable time, and left.

I get why it happens. The ad account is measurable and the profile isn't, so the ad account is where the attention goes, and you can spend months optimising the cheap half of a problem while the expensive half sits there untouched.

This is the same shape as a store getting more sessions and the same number of orders. The traffic isn't the thing that's broken. It's the page it lands on, and the page is harder to fix, which is why it keeps getting skipped.

If you want the wider version of this, there's a quiz in the bio that tells you which layer your growth is actually stuck on. It takes about five minutes.

14/09/2026

You give brilliant service to the customers who contact you, and everybody else gets your website. Follow for how to serve the ones who never email you.

Five flows, and the thing that should actually set each one off.Welcome fires on the signup itself, not on the next sche...
11/09/2026

Five flows, and the thing that should actually set each one off.

Welcome fires on the signup itself, not on the next scheduled Monday, because the moment they're most interested in you is the moment they just typed their email in.

Abandoned checkout fires on the checkout and stops the second they buy, which sounds obvious and is still the one I most often find sending after the order already went through.

Browse fires on the same product twice, not on any visit at all, because one look is a browse and two looks in a week is somebody deciding.

Post-delivery fires on the delivery, which your store already gets told about and almost certainly does nothing with.

And win-back fires on their own order gap, worked out from what your customers actually do, rather than on a round number somebody picked once because it sounded about right.

Save this one and hold it against your own account tonight.

11/09/2026

Follow for the checks that tell you what a campaign was actually worth.

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