Hey everyone, Senior Client Manager Mel here with SolutionsAge. today we're going to talk about, smaller clients who don't have the budget or the resources to have things like Northbeam and Triple Whale and how I manage their, MER week over week. I've created a spreadsheet that I'm going to share with y'all, that just makes it really easy week over week to keep track of, MER. I'm going to look at new customer M. E. R. As well. So we have lots of clients within solutions age who have great L. T. B. so we actually focus on new customer acquisition that lifetime value of customers could be thousands of dollars. we really focus on pushing those new customers. for a lot of clients, we do have a new customer acquisition. our goals. so we're going to look at that for a client that I have, we're going to go over the spreadsheet and any kind of tips and tricks that I can think of along the way, that helped me when, when having goals like this on a smaller scale. so North beam, triple wheel, they laid out really easily. You can easily see your, new customer MER. You can easily see your overall MER, but when you're doing it yourself manually, It's not, presented very pretty. You have to do the math and you have to store it somewhere. So this is a spreadsheet. we've got here the date. So I usually look in seven day periods. You can look at 14 days. You can look at month over month. That's totally fine. You choose how you want to, look at it. What time period do you want to look at? I put the date I add our Google ad spend. if the client's running Facebook ads, we'll add the Facebook spend. And then if they have any other spend, like Pinterest or Bing or any other paid advertising, we'll put it here and then it will automatically calculate in the spend total column. And then we have the online store revenue. So this is going to change depending on if your goal is new customer MER or if it's just MER. this is the basics of the spreadsheet. If there's other spends, you can obviously add different columns, but I find not a lot of our lower budget clients run too much other paid advertising, so I just didn't have a need to add it, but you can absolutely do that. And starting from the basics, John and Kossum and the team have a lot on what M. E. R. is, why we track it. so I'm going to assume we all have the knowledge on what M. E. R. is, why we track it, all that good stuff. I. Add in all this stuff from the client side information into this spreadsheet and then we'll look at it together. so who had spent, obviously we're going to look the last seven days. They don't run Facebook right now and they're not running anything else. So if they did, Let's just put like 500, for instance. And then if there were anything, anything else, like 900 there, it would automatically calculate in the spend total, but they don't run anything else. online store revenue. for overall, are, you're just going to grab this from your analytics section. From Google ad spend 893. 29 to online store revenue. We have 11, 730 for the last seven days. We have a 13 X that's overall MER. Now, if we wanted to track new customer MER, revenue. And you're probably wondering, how do I get that number? something you probably heard John talk about quite a bit is the app by the numbers. So I use that every day. I love by the numbers. this past seven days, we had nine first time customers, which is up 50%, which is awesome. So that's what we want to look at. If we're looking for a new customer acquisition goal, by the numbers tells us all of this information. And then what also I really like about it is this first time. versus returning customer sales. for instance, we have, 1400 new customer sales, 10, 000 from returning customer sales. So as this number grows month over month, this number is going to grow month over month because if you think about it, so this clients, they do have a subscription model. which is a lot more convenient for a lot of people think, groceries that you need to buy month over month, that you could just, for instance, automate. once you find the brand that you like for this particular set of groceries, you're not very likely to change, just because how this particular, industry is set up. it's not exactly that example, but just to give you an idea, it's not convenient to change. so once you find something that you like, you're likely to stick with it. So that's the case for this customer here. once this number starts growing, we're going to see this number start growing month over month as well. So if we take this number because we're looking at our first time versus returning customer sales, so this is our 1400 from first time customers from these nine customers and our AOV on the first time customers is lower than our returning customers just because you can, get a sample pack of, food service, and just, A try. And then if you do like it, then that's where the AOB increases. and then month over month people do. our new customer MER is 1. 56. So John has lots of videos on this. I'm not going to talk too much about why it's okay to have a low MER. So essentially what we want is to at least break even and anything over that is awesome. So we at least want to one we love it because we have such a high returning customer rate and the LTV is so high, we can afford to take a hit a little bit of a hit at the beginning because we know we're going to make that up over time, but we still want to get a little bit of profit for the client just so that they're not, you Going further into the whole, to we want to make sure we're getting at least 1. 5 to 1. 8 is usually what we aim for. you can figure this math out, for sure, looking at your, LTVs, your repeat customer rates, all of that. Again, John has many videos on that. I'm not going to go into those calculations, but, you'll just see how this spreadsheet works. your Google ad spend, because our Google ads are. new customer acquisition. we have a branded campaign. We don't spend much on it, and we don't push our branded campaign. This is more so for placement. so we don't spend a lot on those bottom of the funnel, how warm. Terms we really push our top of funnel terms as much as possible so that we know, that we're going as cold as we possibly can. the last 7 days, 8. conversions here. And then we're tracking nine first time customers in, in by the numbers. we can look at those individual, purchases and I do look at them and I make sure that in Shopify it's first time order so that we can rectify those numbers. but overall, those are some of the numbers that I'd look at. and then another report that I really like in Shopify if we look at month two, So 51. 3 percent of customers that made their first purchase in October made at least one purchase. in the second month, or November, for a total of 27 orders and 6, 468 in total sales. that makes sense. 33. 3 percent of customers that made their first purchase in November. in October made at least one purchase in the third month for a total of 16 orders. And then moving on to the third month here. So 7. 7 percent of customers that made their first purchase in October. Made at least one purchase in the third month for a total of three orders. These air really great numbers, and this is what we want to see here. is these retention rates sustained pretty high? And overall, this client's team great job here. it's not, going to be exactly accurate, but it gives you the Google ads data here as well. December, it's reporting 7, 813 and then you can look at your spend there that's your, new customer MER calculation with your spend and how much you made. so December is one of their slower months. As you can see, we have some really months here. December is one of their slower months. As you can imagine, people are, their spend is elsewhere right now, which is totally fine, but, still did really great for the month and happy with those results. so this is another report that I really like. and then we can also look at first time versus returning sales. Again, this one just gives it in another way. you'll see by day, you'll see your first time customers versus your returning. and then you'll see your AOV here, purchase frequency, value, if there's any discounts, total sales. so it just lays, this is a really great report to lay it out really clearly for you, to see where you're returning versus first time. Customers are, day by day. And you can look at a 7 day period. You can look at 30 days. lots of data that can really help you here. So that's another report that I really like. you can also look at one in Shopify itself. If you go to reports, first time versus returning customer sales. if I go last 30 days, just because it groups it more like. You're all of your first time you'll see here and then all of your returning you'll see here, whereas the by the numbers report, you can see it break down day by day new customer versus returning versus this. you see them separated. in the last 30 days. many first time orders that we have. If you wanted to add those up, you really don't need to. There's, the reports inside of by the numbers do that for you. And then also the returning. So just a different way to look at it. but this is a really good report that I look at as well with my customers. so if you wanted to track first time MER and. M E R. All you would do is just add another column I put the new customer M. E. R. next to the new customer revenue. And then we're going to look at total store revenue and total store M. E. R. So we're going I, which is total store revenue, divided by spend total, equals your overall store MER. So we're making a 13. X M E R for the total store revenue here, and then for new customers, we're making 1. 5. I hope this has helped. I'm going to get the team to link the spreadsheet, in the comments or in the description for you so that you can also have access to the sheet, and customize it the way you want. It's just really simple. To use. if you're a freelancer and your client can use this, I always get the clients to put in their Facebook spend and their miscellaneous spend every month if they have other spend. So clients are responsible for that. And then I just add in Google spend and their store revenue, or you can get the client to put in the store revenue, whatever works best for you, but it just is a really great visual that way you can track it, week over week, or you can do a month over month, whatever works best for you. and keep an eye on those, that new customer MER and also the total store MER, I hope this has been helpful. sorry. I probably rambled a bit more than I needed to, but, we'll see you next time. like comment, subscribe, do all the things. Thanks everyone. Bye.