Most Shopify brands running paid social already have retargeting switched on inside Meta, Google, and TikTok.
So the real question isn’t whether retargeting works. It’s why customer acquisition costs keep climbing while your campaigns live in five separate dashboards, each one grading its own homework. If you’re paying for new customers today, whether you’re a four-person team or a Shopify Plus brand with a dedicated growth hire, this episode is about getting more reach out of every ad dollar across more channels, without adding more logins.
Lizzie Chapman is VP, Technology Partnerships & Channels at AdRoll, a division of NextRoll. AdRoll has been helping challenger brands get access to big-brand ad inventory since 2006, and Lizzie spent more than a decade in ad tech (including a stint at VaynerMedia) before leading the partnerships behind AdRoll’s Shopify integration. She shares how RIGd Supply, a four-person off-road brand selling a $1,500 tire carrier with a long, considered buying journey, reported a 35x ROAS by running brand awareness, retargeting, and cart abandonment together across social, email, and the open web.
In this conversation, Lizzie breaks down the multichannel acquisition playbook: why brands that cut brand awareness spend often take twice as long to recover, how to find channels with plenty of eyeballs and too few advertisers, and where a cross-channel platform fits next to the retargeting you already run natively. We recorded this one in 2023, and I’ve added context below where the landscape has shifted since.
Let’s dive in. 👇
✅ Why you shouldn’t turn off your Meta and Google retargeting: Lizzie’s surprisingly direct answer to “why AdRoll if I already retarget in the ad platforms,” and the one place she says a cross-channel tool actually earns its keep.
✅ The hidden cost of cutting brand awareness: why pulling top-of-funnel budget to protect this month’s ROAS can take twice as long to recover from, and how awareness spend feeds the retargeting pool you rely on.
✅ How a $1,500 product with a long buying cycle hit a 35x ROAS: the three campaign types RIGd Supply ran together, and why a four-person team handed the ad management over instead of hiring for it.
✅ Where the cheap attention is hiding: the supply-and-demand lens for picking channels, and the example Lizzie gave of an inventory pool with plenty of people and very few advertisers.
✅ The $800 creator test versus the $10,000 celebrity post: why smaller brands should start with micro-influencers, and the second job that creator content can do inside your paid campaigns.
✅ The 10% ad credit most Shopify merchants don’t know about: how the AdRoll Rewards Program works, and who qualifies automatically.
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The big idea in this episode is that acquisition isn’t one channel’s job. Lizzie Chapman breaks down why AdRoll was built the way it was: founder Aaron Bell and his wife were trying to advertise their own home goods company and kept hitting the same wall, with ad platforms demanding huge spend commitments or an agency relationship before a small brand could even get in the door. AdRoll grew out of that frustration into a retargeting leader and, today, a multichannel ad platform where one Shopify connection places a pixel, pulls in contacts and events, and imports your product feed. From there, templated automations (AdRoll calls them “marketing recipes”) run cart abandonment, retargeting, and brand awareness across email, open-web display and native inventory, and Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. Lizzie says setup takes about 15 minutes.
Steve plays devil’s advocate with the question every merchant asks: if you already retarget inside Meta and Google, why add another platform? Lizzie’s answer is refreshingly direct. Keep those campaigns running, they perform. AdRoll’s case is its own bidder, direct publisher relationships across thousands of sites, and the ability to manage your social spend alongside everything else in one login with one cross-channel performance dashboard. You’ll also get the real story on brand awareness: Lizzie argues that brands cutting top-of-funnel investment often take twice as long to recover, and that awareness spend is what keeps the lower funnel full in the first place.
The rubber meets the road with RIGd Supply, an off-road brand whose founder Luke built the UltraSwing so drivers could carry a spare tire and a bike rack at the same time. At $1,500, it’s a considered purchase with a long journey, and their paid campaigns weren’t connecting. With a four-person team, they leaned on AdRoll to run brand awareness, retargeting, and abandoned cart recovery across social, email, and web so each touchpoint told the same story. Lizzie reports a 35x ROAS across their campaigns that year, and 44.5x on cart abandonment alone.
Along the way, Lizzie and Steve cover TikTok’s growth, micro-influencers you can test for around $800 instead of $10,000, zero-party data from quizzes, and the supply-and-demand channel lens Gary Vaynerchuk used to buy wine keywords for pennies. A few things have moved since we recorded in 2023. The Klaviyo integration Lizzie previewed has since launched, so you can now sync Klaviyo lists and segments into AdRoll campaigns. And Google ultimately abandoned its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, confirming in April 2025 it would keep today’s controls instead. The first-party data advice still holds, because Safari and Firefox already block them and consent keeps shrinking what cookies can see. This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a blueprint for spreading acquisition spend across more channels without losing sight of what’s working.
👉 Keep native retargeting running, and consolidate the view instead. Lizzie’s own advice is not to switch off your Meta or Google retargeting, because those campaigns work and the inventory is deep. The gain from a cross-channel platform comes from adding open-web inventory you can’t reach natively and seeing every channel’s performance in one place. If you’re a smaller team, the time saved from one login is real. If you’re running a larger media budget, the question to answer first is whether a single dashboard gives you a truer read on incremental results than each platform’s self-reported numbers.
👉 Protect a floor for brand awareness, even when budgets tighten. Lizzie’s pattern: brands that cut awareness spend often take twice as long to recover from the cut. Retargeting only works on people who already visited, so top-of-funnel spend is what keeps that pool full. Before you trim awareness to prop up this month’s ROAS, check how your retargeting audience size trends over the following six to eight weeks.
👉 Hunt for channels with lots of attention and few advertisers. The cheapest reach usually sits where plenty of people are paying attention but advertisers haven’t piled in yet, the same arbitrage Gary Vaynerchuk describes buying wine keywords for five cents in the early days of AdWords. In 2023, Lizzie pointed to Facebook Reels as that kind of pocket. That specific example will have shifted by now, but the lens is timeless: every quarter, test one channel your competitors are ignoring with a small, capped budget.
👉 Match your campaign structure to your buying cycle. RIGd Supply’s $1,500 UltraSwing doesn’t sell on the first ad impression, so they ran awareness, retargeting, and cart abandonment together across social, email, and web to meet shoppers at different stages of a long decision. Lizzie reports a 35x ROAS across campaigns and 44.5x on cart abandonment. If your average order value is high and your consideration window is long, single-channel, last-click campaigns will likely undersell what’s working.
👉 Start creator partnerships small and niche. Lizzie’s rule of thumb: a celebrity-level influencer might cost $10,000 and drive a single sale, while a niche creator at around $800 lets a smaller brand test and learn with an audience that actually fits the product. Steve adds that performance-based deals can let you share upside instead of paying everything upfront. Bonus: ask for usage rights so the creator’s content can double as paid ad creative.
👉 Collect data customers give you on purpose. With cookies less reliable across browsers, Lizzie recommends a real first-party data plan: capture contacts through discount codes and newsletters, store them in a CRM or CDP, and tie them to purchases. Steve pushes further toward zero-party data, where quizzes ask shoppers about their skin type, flavor preferences, or style. Every answer enriches the customer record, whether or not they buy that day, and gives you sharper audiences to find more people like them.
Lizzie Chapman
VP, Technology Partnerships & Channels, AdRoll (a division of NextRoll)
Lizzie Chapman leads technology partnerships and channels at AdRoll, NextRoll’s marketing and advertising platform for direct-to-consumer brands. Her first priority in the role was nailing AdRoll’s Shopify integration, and from there she built out connections with ecosystem partners like Klaviyo and Yotpo, launched an agency partner program, and helped bring the AdRoll Rewards Program to market with Shopify, which gives merchants 10% back in ad credits on web ad spend.
Before AdRoll, Lizzie spent more than a decade in advertising technology in business development and product strategy roles, including time at VaynerMedia, where her team produced hundreds of creative variations to find what performed. That background in programmatic buying, publisher relationships, and privacy-driven targeting shifts shapes how she thinks about acquisition.
Her perspective is valuable because she sits where the Shopify ecosystem meets the open web. She sees which integrations actually help merchants, where ad inventory is underpriced, and why the best creative decisions come from testing rather than a CMO’s gut. She’s based in Vermont, where skiing beats mountain biking every time.
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Steve Hutt:
All right, let’s jump into today’s episode. Now, today’s episode, my guest is Lizzie Chapman. She’s the VP of Tech Partnerships and Channels at a company called AdRoll. And what they are is they’re a kind of a marketing and an advertising platform that helps Shopify merchants to basically reach, engage, and I’d say even convert more shoppers. I know with the acquisition costs are so high right now, I’m sure that this is going to be an excellent and very timely conversation about really how can we improve our acquisition costs, maybe of our existing traffic or traffic that has left and needs to come back and how we’re going to engage with that. So, hi, Lizzy, welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.
Lizzie Chapman:
Hey, Steve, it’s great to be here. I’m curious who else from AdRoll was on this podcast. I’ll have to go back and find out.
Steve Hutt:
I’m going to go because you definitely— AdRoll was definitely on a show. There’s like 300 episodes, but it’s going to be quite a few years ago. And I think I’ve been telling most tech partners that, you know what, I got to have all of like the great tech partners in the Shopify ecosystem on at least once a year because just the market conditions are always changing. The platforms keep iterating, you keep improving them and helping Shopify merchants. But you can’t come on every 2 or 3 years. You got to come on annually, right? And talk about—
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah. Well, thanks for having us back.
Steve Hutt:
Absolutely. So there’s going to be people, believe it or not, in my world, that seems strange because I do recommend AdRoll to a lot of merchants, like literally, like, you know, monthly on my calls and stuff like that. But let’s talk about the uniqueness, like, like what is AdRoll like kind of like holistically and, and its connection to Shopify brands today?
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, so you mentioned a little bit, I mean, at a high level, we’re a marketing and ads platform focused on e-commerce brands. Shopify is one of our biggest partners, and we help Shopify merchants grow their business by finding the best customers, building profitable relationships with those customers, and tracking and improving results. I think the thing that’s unique about AdRoll is we’re not just a point solution. Instead, AdRoll has multiple channels. That we really want to work together. So we have email, we have display and native ads, we have Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, and we’ll chat more about that later in the podcast. And across all those channels, we want to personalize product recommendations alongside the merchant’s online store experience. So our integration with Shopify really lets us do that across multiple channels.
Lizzie Chapman:
We also have a really big focus on helping merchants future-proof against third-party cookie deprecation. Which is something that’s been lingering for years. But that’s one of our core focuses on, on our product engineering team to make sure we’re doing everything we can to help merchants there.
Steve Hutt:
Very cool. Thanks for sharing that. You know, what’s, what’s interesting is in this kind of like, you know, martech, adtech kind of world and stuff like that, and just all these partners that connect to Shopify, there’s always an interesting kind of founder story. Like, how did this, how did all of these pieces come together? I don’t know if you, if you have the kind of the backstory, because it’s nice to kind of set the stage a bit about, hey, you know, AdRoll, I know as a company just from what I know, and we probably can add a lot into There is, there’s quite a bit more to it. There’s like, there’s NextRole, there’s AdRoll, there’s RoleWorks. There’s quite a, there’s a lot, there’s a lot there. And so I just would like to understand kind of like the founding story a bit and then just kind of how you got involved kind of in this industry.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah. So just to break down first, like what is AdRoll, NextRole, and RoleWorks? So NextRole is our parent company. Underneath that you have AdRoll, which is focused on D2C brands. And then on the RoleWorks side, They’re focused on B2B brands and have an account-based marketing platform. The core technology is the same. It’s kind of how we package it that’s different. So I actually learned AdRoll’s origin story while prepping for this podcast, which was fun.
Steve Hutt:
It was a good question, Steve.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, it’s a 15-year-old company. I’ve only been here for 3 years, so I did not know the whole background. But it’s cool because it’s very customer-centric. So our founder, Aaron Bell, and his wife were creating a home goods company and they were trying to advertise online and they ran into a ton of blockers in trying to do this 15 years ago. One of the biggest problems was that the, the standard platforms were asking for insanely large spend commitments or to be able to have to go through an agency in order to advertise. So Aaron was like, there has to be a better way for new and challenger brands to, to access some of the same tools, tech, and inventory that the big brands were. And so he started AdRoll to solve that problem for his wife’s company, and they became the leader in retargeting ad space over the past decade and a half. Aaron is no longer the CEO, but he is on the board, and the platform has, you know, grown and evolved significantly to being a go-to-market automations platform for growing and scaling e-commerce brands still today.
Lizzie Chapman:
So we’ve stayed very true to where we started.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, this is lovely. You know what’s interesting? I always, I always love how founders like to scratch their own itch, so to speak. And it just, they never, it never really comes across as like, hey, well, at some point maybe, you know, we’re gonna have a SaaS company and we’re gonna have like recurring revenue, and that’s just kind of what our revenue model’s gonna be. But it, it, there’s always like, solve your own problem, then, oh wow, there’s a wider audience than just our own challenges, right? We can get this tool out into the wild.
Lizzie Chapman:
Totally. Like, SaaS companies were not a thing 15 years ago. programmatic advertising was barely a thing. So it’s evolved a lot. And it’s been— I’ve been here for 3 years, and my journey has changed quite a bit from being on the API side of the business to going into this partnerships role. And it’s been a fun journey itself. So technology platforms are always growing and changing pretty quickly.
Steve Hutt:
Oh, yeah. So right now we’re in Q2 right now of 2023, depending on when you’re listening to this episode. And I’d say that, you know, I think it’s just standard, but just like digital marketing trends, um, are ever evolving, like these platforms are to go along with these trends and stuff. Is there anything that you’re seeing on your end, any kind of emerging trends, or are there anything that you believe is going to continue to evolve over the next few quarters?
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah. So I have a couple of things here. The first one, uh, is TikTok. Not that that is necessarily emerging, but I think it’s going to continue to be a very important platform for brands to be on. This is partially due to Facebook performance decreasing with some of the third-party cookie deprecation and privacy changes that are happening. And TikTok is just growing at an insanely high rate. It’s a disease. Exactly.
Lizzie Chapman:
It was the most downloaded app worldwide in 2021. So it’s the place to be. So when we talk to marketers about how do they utilize TikTok, we think about Obviously paid advertising. It’s super similar to what brands are already doing on Facebook. Basically have ads that link to your products, your websites, your social media pages. AdRoll does have a connection to TikTok as one of the first platforms we built to because we think it’s such an important channel. The second way is to utilize influencers. And here I would say really think about potentially using micro-influencers.
Lizzie Chapman:
Because like you see this where there’s really popular influencers, you might pay them $10,000 and get one sale. If you’re a smaller or mid-sized brand, it’s smart to go and look for someone that maybe you can pay $800 and test and learn and figure out what works for you. And you can find someone that’s speaking to a more niche audience that your product is aligned with. They can also create creative content for you that you can go and use in your paid ads as well. So it has a couple of functions there. And then the last thing is just the organic brand content on TikTok. You have to pay attention to the trends. They change very quickly.
Lizzie Chapman:
Gen Zs are ever-moving, quick group of people. So just make sure that the content is engaging and making sure that you’re interacting with the followers who are commenting with that content. But it’s a really great channel and one that brands should be exploring more and more.
Steve Hutt:
You know, one thing else I was thinking of too was, you know, when you’re talking about different trends, because like, and I’m totally on point with kind of the TikTok growth side of it. And I totally agree with you on the influencer side about like not just going to the celebrity endorser, but literally niching down into your— actually, the engagement is much higher in the conversion rate. And then you can actually share in the upside. Don’t necessarily have to pay upfront. A lot of times it’s pay for performance side of influencer marketing, I think, is, you know, building a true partnership between you and the creator. And I think that’s a massively growing industry is finding the right creators that you can build relationships with. And actually you can even build Shopify stores that allow creators to have their own little custom mini sites now where they can get out there and, you know, on their own property. And, you know, so Shopify is working on and building a lot of these kind of things to help creators scale up instead of just being on rented land on social.
Steve Hutt:
So that’s another area that’s quite interesting. And the other thing I noticed too is, you know, we kind of talked about this kind of offline, but AI right now, I know you probably have a comment on this, but AI is so interesting to me right now as a marketing or as a marketing emerging trend right now, uh, ChatGPT and all these large language models and stuff for content production or for creating content briefs paired with a human. What’s your take on the AI that’s going on right now as it relates to SEO or organic traffic building or just anything? I’m just curious in your feedback.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, this statement is inspiring to me because I was like 6 or 7 years ago, I had a I was working at a different ad tech company and the CTO at this company was showing me how AI could write a song. And I was like, this is the coolest thing in the world.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah.
Lizzie Chapman:
And we work in AI. All of our bidding algorithms are machine learning based, right? So that’s been something I’ve worked in for years. But the fact that AI can actually create legitimate creative that you can use on your website and in your ads is definitely a new thing. And I think you’re seeing this obviously with what is happening in ChatGPT and what OpenAI is doing. I just saw Jasper AI had a recent evaluation of $1.5 billion.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah.
Lizzie Chapman:
In this economic climate, which is crazy. And I just had a conversation with a smaller company today that’s starting to get into this space. It’s just popping up everywhere. So we use a tool for creating our blogs right now, CopyAI. And that’s our main content generator, which is incredible. But I really think this is something brands should be exploring when they’re looking to test a variety of creatives and changing one variant. I worked at an agency called VaynerMedia 5 or 6 years back, and we were essentially doing this with creative designers. Like, so we were coming up with hundreds of creative types But it costs a lot of money.
Lizzie Chapman:
Jasper has monthly packages for $25 a month, so it seems like a no-brainer to go in and really try a bunch of different things. I think a lot of CMOs or heads of marketing think that they know what the best creative is, and the truth is you should really let analytics and data show you that. So if you can put out 100 creatives and see what’s, what’s working best and then hone in on that. I think it’s something that all brands should see if— go and test a platform like this and try to make the most of it.
Steve Hutt:
Very cool. Thanks for your— yeah, that CopyAI, I’ve seen them before. I’ve used a couple other tools too. Surfer SEO is a phenomenal tool for creating content briefs and scanning the top 20 results based on a keyword that you want to rank for and really helping craft H1s, H2s, and paragraphs and stuff like that. It doesn’t actually write the content. I think it can pair nicely with Jasper. If you’re looking for a tool, just before we kind of moved on my next question. But if you’re looking for a tool that actually writes the content, like, so doesn’t just leverage OpenAI, but it uses other large language models and a few other things, it’s called copyatscale.ai.
Steve Hutt:
And it is a phenomenal piece of software that you literally put in the keyword you want to rank for, it writes the 3,000-word article, and it’s absolutely incredible. You still have to go in and, and maybe, you know, add some images and add your own tone of voice and kind of clean it up and reference checking things like that, because it is AI generated, but it passes all of the, uh, copyright kind of infringement, kind of plagiarism checks. And it’s, it’s like incredible. I’ve launched, let me, well, maybe 10 blog posts lately, and a couple of them have just exploded now. And so it’s clear that Google’s still into long-form content right now. So it’s pretty exciting.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah.
Steve Hutt:
So I wanna talk about acquisition now, because I think, you know, when you talk about acquisition, we, we, we think about, well, how do we, how do we acquire some net new customers? I mean, the retention strategies are like, how do I maximize the value of my existing customers. That’s not where Adderall fits in the equation right now. It’s like, hey, how do we drive net new customers or convert net new customers? And so I just would love to understand from your side, it’s just like, what are these keys to success that you’re seeing right now from an acquisition perspective? Are there any important strategies maybe that marketers need to consider?
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, I think a big one is really emphasis on brand awareness. So oftentimes we get new merchants that come and are utilizing AdRoll, and they’re all about retargeting cart abandonment, to your point. And we really push them to, to focus on setting up brand awareness campaigns. You know, I think companies don’t realize when they cut their investment in brand awareness that it often takes double the time to recover from that. So we really want having that budget up top to fill the lower part of the funnel. I think a big thing that’s important with this is finding an authentic way and voice to do that. So brands really thinking about like, what, what is the message? What is the voice? What is the tone? Who am I speaking to? We talked about TikTok a little bit before, like that is a place that really craves authenticity. And so making sure that that’s coming through in anything you’re doing for, for brand awareness.
Lizzie Chapman:
I think another thing here is like lean on your partners. So, you know, work with them to understand how you can be successful on new channels and in new technology. Like I mentioned up top, Avril is really focused on third-party cookie deprecation and what we can do for brands there. Targeting gets more limited when there aren’t as many cookies out there. So we’re coming up with new strategies around prospecting targeting. To plug Shopify for a minute, I think that Shopify audiences is a really cool product that came out that can help brands with prospecting and brand awareness. And we’re looking to take advantage of that as it goes into general availability. But trying to find alternative solutions to target those audiences is important.
Lizzie Chapman:
Part of that is, you know, really thinking about how do you build your first-party data strategy. So having a plan to store known contact profiles with a CRM or CDP, through having discount codes, newsletters, and making sure you’re obviously tracking them with any purchases and having a good way to organize those and then figuring out what those contacts represent and how do you go and find more of those audiences, whether it’s by channel or by some of the native audience targeting that some of the social platforms have.
Steve Hutt:
What’s interesting too is even zero-party data has been on a lot of radars lately, thinking about like quizzes and having customers kind of opt in to self- Identifying, hey, I’m a cat person, or I have this flavor profile, or, you know, whatever the questions are, skin type and style and things like that. And having that and then enriching the customer record, that’s so interesting to me. Purchase or not, if you can get in someone into a quiz and then enrich that customer profile, it just gives you so much opportunity for how you can market to them.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah. And thinking about like, how do you make your site engaging? Like, how do you not just show all the products that you have available? Like, how do you get people to want to interact? Interact with your brand beyond just purchasing a product? And is that a Claire’s? Is that letting them customize what the product would look like on them and cool things like that to get some of that more zero-party data? The one other thing I would say here, especially as we’re talking about acquisition, is thinking about what channels have a lot of supply and not a lot of demand. So we talked a lot about TikTok, but everyone wants to be on TikTok as a, as a brand. Yeah. And I was listening to— I forget who— someone talked the other day about Facebook Reels. That is a place where there are a ton of people still on Facebook, especially if that’s your, your age demographic range, but not a lot of advertisers on it. So you can get more cost effective eyeballs there than you are on TikTok. So really, and that’s like when I talk about innovative partners, like making sure you’re working with partners that tell you things like that and tell you where the most cost-effective, highest-performing inventory is, as well as audience data.
Lizzie Chapman:
So that’s a good thing to, to be thinking about.
Steve Hutt:
You know, it’s interesting, you mentioned, uh, back a bit about, uh, VaynerMedia and, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee as everybody calls him. And he, he always talks of exactly what you’re talking about right now, is that, you know, the whole supply and demand thing. And he always makes a comment in the early days about Wine Library, um, and Wine Library TV, like his wine company and you know, his early days on his YouTube channel. And he said there was a day when I, you know, through AdWords, I was able to get the word, you know, wine and the word Cabernet wine and Zinfandel wine for $0.05, you know, which is just unheard of now. It’s like it’s going to be $10 to $15 to click on an ad that says, you know, Cabernet, right?
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah.
Steve Hutt:
So it’s exactly the same situation you’re talking about. If Facebook Reels is kind of where it’s at right now to test it out, you know, then that’s, that’s, that’s an opportunity. So that’s what you’re talking about is more wider channel testing. Testing to kind of see where your customers are, but then there’s still that arbitrage of pricing to, you know, to, you know, so improving your ROAS essentially is, is, hey, I’m willing to spend money. I don’t know which, you know, I don’t know which channel is the best, but I got to get out there and at least test it and try it. And so that’s what AdRoll fits into. That is all the retargeting ads, I guess, by whatever channel that you want to test on. But then you said brand awareness ads.
Steve Hutt:
That’s interesting to kind of keep that awareness up. Is there anything else that we might want to think about? Like, I’m trying to think more directly from the AdRoll platform. So we got retargeting and go very wide, and then we have brand awareness campaigns, same wide again through multi, multi-channel. How does like social ads fit into this or email and SMS? And I don’t know, I’m just curious on what other things you can do.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah. So we last year came out with what we call marketing recipes, which is essentially templated automation. And so when a Facebook store downloads our Shopify app, we automatically place a pixel on their website. We pull in all their contacts and events to our templated automations and our contact profiles and list builder tools. And then we also pull in their product feed. And what this allows us to do is With a few clicks of a button, a customer can set up an automation for cart abandonment, retargeting, and brand awareness. And those automations can serve across email, our display and native inventory that is with our SSP connection. So it’s kind of open web, think like, you know, New York Times and all the websites out there.
Lizzie Chapman:
So we aggregate thousands upon thousands of websites that you can access. And then we have Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok inventory. Soon we’ll also have some Google search inventory in there as well. And so the customer has to set that automation up once, select the channels that they want it to serve against, and then we continuously update those audiences. Obviously, as more people come to the site, you have more people for your retargeting. If you have more people abandon products, you have more people And that automation. And then we— our machine learning really focuses on the brand awareness automation to test new audiences and to optimize towards the ones that are performing well, that are driving more website visitors and ultimately converters. So that all happens on the backend.
Lizzie Chapman:
It takes like maybe 15 minutes to set up and you’re good to go, which is the really exciting thing about our platform. The one piece that we talked about a lot was on the creative side, and we’re actually starting to think more about that. But right now we have a dynamic creative product that we pull in that product feed and on your retargeting and cart abandonment campaigns or automations, we show the customer either multiple products that they looked at or left in the cart or the one that they looked at. We actually have an integration with Yotpo too that will show reviews associated with that product, which is pretty cool. On the brand awareness side, we have a creative services team that will build creative for you at least one time. If you’re a managed customer, we’ll, we’ll do it more often and do more creative refreshes. But we’re starting to think about how do we integrate with an AI tool that can do that at a much larger scale, which is exciting.
Steve Hutt:
Mm-hmm. You know what, I’m going to be devil’s advocate. Thanks for sharing that. And I think All of that is awesome, I think. But, you know, one thing that I think may come on some people’s radar right now is saying, hey, okay, I understand that AdRoll is really good, very wide and multichannel. You can pick your channels and you can— and these dynamic ads, these product recommendations, you do a lot of stuff, very cross-channel stuff. I think that’s great. But I’d also argue that maybe a lot of marketers are probably right now are retargeting directly with campaigns that they’ll have in TikTok or, you know, through Facebook and Meta, Google, these sorts of things.
Steve Hutt:
And I think main reason why is because they already have paid social campaigns already running in these platforms, because that’s kind of where their net new customers are coming from. So why not have retargeting ads running in the same platforms where they’re already paying for acquisition marketing? So I would just, I guess I want to completely put this to bed about like what the best and most amazing use case is for AdRoll for those that maybe are already doing retargeting in the ad platforms individually. What does that mean if they say no to those and yes to AdRoll, or do you use them in parallel? I just want to kind of understand the lay of the land a bit.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, my simple answer to that is you should be using those retargeting campaigns. They’re great. So say here is that AdRoll differentiates itself by having its own bidder and direct relationships with, with publishers that cuts out the middleman. So I mentioned before, like the New York Times, but With that, you’re going to have— that’s one of the bigger ones, but weather.com, like all the websites that you go to or apps that you go to, we aggregate all of that inventory into one buying platform. And we’ve really fine-tuned our predictive modeling across all of those inventory relationships to get the lowest possible cost for our brands across those. On top of that, we can help you automate your Facebook and like I mentioned, soon Google search spend alongside Pinterest and TikTok in one platform. So all you have to do is connect your Facebook account that you already have running and we’re going to pull in all of those campaigns. And we’re also going to have the capability for you to set up new campaign.
Lizzie Chapman:
And now you only have to log into AdRoll and manage that in one place. So really it becomes a time saver and you can, you can look at your performance across each of those channels. in our cross-channel performance dashboard. So that’s, that’s our real goal. And what we’re trying to build is don’t stop running those Facebook and Google retargeting campaigns. They perform great. There’s tons of inventory. It makes a ton of sense.
Lizzie Chapman:
But how do we make this easier for merchants to run across all of those platforms, especially as more and more pop up?
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I mean, you’re preaching to the choir about trying to improve efficiencies. I think there’s nothing better than being able to log in, having a master login to AdRoll for all of these properties that you’re willing to test and try and, you know, just cast a wider net but have one login to see the performance of them and then make adjustments as needed.
Lizzie Chapman:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Steve Hutt:
So I want to pivot to a story now because I think this is where I kind of— the rubber meets the road, so to speak, where it’s like, hey, you know what, here’s a brand X, let’s call them. I’m sure we have one you can bring up. But, you know, here’s a brand that maybe didn’t have AdRoll You know, and maybe decided or learned about the platform, decided to give it a whirl. Um, and then I’d love to understand a bit of like, hey, they turned it on, what did they do with ad roll? And then is there any kind of public case around this company? Hopefully I don’t put you on the spot here, but it’s just nice to be able to hear a story because I think people listening, there’s gonna be, I don’t know, 40-some thousand people listening to this episode and they’re like, hey, you know, that resonates with me. Or, hey, I see I’m in the same position that they’re in. I don’t have ad roll right now. maybe I should go and try it because look what they did by using the tool. So hopefully, hopefully I don’t put you on the spot, but is there anybody that catches your eye in— because I had a list here, I saw it’s a whole bunch of different case studies.
Steve Hutt:
So.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, Steve. So there’s a lot of different case studies out there. The one that really catches my eye because I live in Vermont is Rig Supply. So they’re a Shopify merchant and an off-road brand that was formed through their founder Luke, who really liked mountain biking. Not one of my loves. I’ve gotten into it this year and I think it’s terrifying. Skiing’s more my jam.
Steve Hutt:
All right.
Lizzie Chapman:
But Luke identified a problem that really happened to a lot of off-road vehicles. He could either carry a spare tire or a bike rack, but not both. So he created this product called Rigged Ultra Swing. That could solve that for 95% of off-road vehicles. The issue that Rig was having was that their Ultra Swing was $1,500, and at that product price point, it’s really an investment. So their customer journey tends to be a lot longer than a lot of other potential Shopify stores out there with more consumable items. So their paid campaigns just weren’t really doing that well with connecting with their audience. So he came to AdRoll, you know, kind of told us all about the problems they were having.
Lizzie Chapman:
They were a small team, 4-person tiny startup with limited resources, and they really relied on AdRoll for managing their ads and being accountable for performance across those. So they started running campaigns across social, email, and web for brand awareness, retargeting, and abandoned cart recovery, just what we were talking about a minute ago. To really tie that story across all those channels for those customers and hit them at different parts of their journey. And so this year across their campaign, they had they’ve seen a 35x ROAS, and when they’re looking at just cart abandonment alone, they’ve seen a 44.5x ROAS, which is just incredible to to see customers grow like this, and something we we. want to produce for all of our customers, but we’re super excited with the reach aim.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah. Oh, that’s amazing. I love hearing that. I’ll make sure I put this link to this case study in the show notes and a link to a few others, cuz you have quite a few. And, and you know, if maybe this is not your jam, but there’s other, you’re in CPG or you’re in fashion, you know, there’s a case study for you in there about others that have, you know, are currently using the AdRoll tool right now to really to help expand their, their acquisition through, through, you know, multichannel. So I think that’s really cool. I wanna talk a little bit about, about partnerships, cuz that’s kind of like your area of expertise. It’s like, has it been intentional for AdRoll to partner up with other pieces of existing technology that’s already in a Shopify store? Because that’s always the number one objection I get.
Steve Hutt:
Hey Steve, great episode on this, but you know, I, I’m, I’m concerned about maybe adding it on, because either you have to do a Shopify app. I just want to understand about the intentionality around, hey, you can add the app. It’s the onboarding. I’ve done it myself already, so I can see the flow. It’s very easy. How does AdRoll want to communicate with the other pieces of technology if it’s Klaviyo’s? And you mentioned Yotpo, but there’s lots of other notable partners in the ecosystem. And I think brands want to feel warm and fuzzy that Whatever existing things you have going on connecting to Shopify, adding AdRoll is just, it’s very complementary.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been in this role for about 2 and a half years, and our first priority was nailing our Shopify integration. That was literally an investment case that we had. So we’re always looking at making it the best we possibly can and improving upon that. I mentioned, you know, Shopify adding before. That’s always a priority for us. But the, the thing that we’re really getting into now that I’m thrilled about and I’ve wanted for a very long time is more integrations with ecosystem partners of Shopify. So we will be launching an integration with Klaviyo, which will allow Shopify Klaviyo customers to import the lists and audiences that they already have built in Klaviyo.
Lizzie Chapman:
So if you’re running email and SMS with them, you can take those same audiences, port them over to AdRoll, and now tie your ads campaigns across the open web and the social channels we’ve been talking about alongside your email and SMS campaigns. So that’s really exciting. We’re going to keep going down that path. We know we’re obviously doing it on the social side, and a lot of those are our other partners, but thinking about, you know, building more with Yotpo. We’ve had lots of conversations with Gorgeous, with Aftership, with ShipBob, you know, the list goes on and on. So what we’ll be thinking really intentionally about, like, what are the other platforms that we need to pull in to make the ads most successful for Shopify merchants?
Steve Hutt:
And I think overall too, it’s like, you know, I think it just— here’s my takeaway on that is that that it really doesn’t interrupt it because the reality is that, you know, pulling in the product data— so someone shows up on a website, it’s irregardless if, you know, you’re running Yotpo for your loyalty or Loyalty Lion or Smile.io or whatever you’re using. It’s okay to use Okendo for maybe your product reviews and your UGC content on your product pages. I mean, these pieces are necessary pieces of technology that need to be in your store to be successful. It’s not native in Shopify. These are add-ons from partners that do it well. I think AdRoll also does the same sort of thing where, hey, we’re going to help you acquire net new customers by expanding your reach wider. And then as you start building more and more of these connections and stuff like that, then, you know, you can natively start using these other tools. And so I think it’s really neat that at least there’s some intentionality for the future, the next few quarters to kind of want to go down that journey.
Steve Hutt:
So that’s really cool.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, I’m really excited about it. I think, you know, I always think about like, how do we have this crew of tech platforms that we’re integrated with that really speak to that Shopify audience? The other thing that we’ll be rolling out in Q2 is an agency partner program for AdRoll. And so we’ll be going, definitely talking more and more to some of the Shopify agencies, but having ways for them to help our current Shopify merchants grow and expand on the AdRoll platform and beyond, and also, you know, give them additional benefits to work with us and partner with us.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah, I love that. I think, you know, it’s a necessary thing to be like a default install. Like, I know that if a brand came to me and said, okay, Steve, let’s say a venture-backed company or they’re on Shopify Core and they’re coming to Plus and say, okay, Steve, like, What’s like from your lens, Steve? What pieces of technology does a brand need right out of the box? You have Shopify. Okay, what are the other pieces I need? I literally can go from top to bottom, and it sounds like one of those pieces is going to need to be AdRoll because I just feel that yes, there’s some native solutions that you’re going to have directly with these ad platforms, but overall a one-stop shop to take care of all of that marketing in one piece. Same as like Rewind. You got to have Rewind. It’s a very small amount of money to make sure your store is completely backed up, uh, because there is no rewind button on Shopify, right? So it’s like you have to have that protection. And I think the same way would come with reviews or loyalty or an email marketing platform, you know, or CRM.
Steve Hutt:
There’s certain kind of pieces we have to as a default install. And it sounds like, um, AdRoll is kind of that piece of software. So that’s pretty cool.
Lizzie Chapman:
That’s what we want to bake. So that’s great to hear.
Steve Hutt:
So I guess the next steps is to find out where do you want to send people? So if people agree that, hey, you know what, I want to, want to kick the tires a bit on kind of what AdRoll is, I want to learn more, I maybe want to download the app and I want to kind of get things figured out. Can we talk a little bit about kind of what some of the next steps could be?
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah. So the simplest thing is either to go to our website at adroll.com or our Shopify app and just search For AdRoll, there’s some really good resources on the app itself, and then we have a bunch of dedicated pages on our website that talk all about our Shopify integration. And as you mentioned, case studies to learn a little bit more with what customers are already doing with AdRoll.
Steve Hutt:
Yeah. And then I know we had a quick chit-chat before recording. I understand that you’d like to have a little offer for those, you know, brand founders and marketers that are listening today, a little kickback kind of in some ad credits. Are you able to chat about that?
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, so we launched this back in November. It is called the AdRoll Rewards Program. And so we partnered with Shopify to do this, which was a very exciting day for our partnerships person. So essentially any Shopify merchant that signs up for AdRoll and is using the AdRoll app in the Shopify App Marketplace is automatically enrolled into this program and will begin earning back 10% in the form of ads credits immediately on any of their ad spend. So really it helps to reduce the, the bottom line return or increase the bottom line return on ad spend. We have a blog post out about it. So if you go on adroll.com and type in AdRoll Rewards Program, you can learn more about it. But we’re thrilled to be able to give a little more back to Shopify merchants.
Steve Hutt:
Oh, this is lovely. And I know I know your pricing is very, very affordable. I know you have a couple different options though, kind of like a pay-as-you-go kind of option, and then you also have a marketing and ads plus kind of option. And it really just depends on, you know, quite a few variables about how large you are. And then, you know, there are some packages that can kind of scale up from there. But I think depending on your maturity and your size of your business, the GMV, you know, your current spend kind of like currently, I think there’s ways of kind of coming out with a very affordable solution where the ROAS is going to be there for a brand to want to at least try AdRoll. And then, you know, the success team will kind of be there to kind of walk you through it, especially if you’re on Shopify Plus, you’re in that kind of sweet spot of like, you know, you have enough kind of traffic coming to the website. There’s a significant amount of data available.
Steve Hutt:
So all of a sudden you can make proper decisions. And yeah, so this is Yeah, me too.
Lizzie Chapman:
It was great to be able to chat more about this, talk about some trends with you, and, uh, and learn about some of the, the companies you like, especially in the, the generative AI space.
Steve Hutt:
I know it’s a wild time. All right, Lizzy, well, thank you so much, uh, for recording today. And I wanted to, you know, welcome you to the, to the, I guess, find— this is your first time, but I’m gonna find who the other guest was I had. I’ll put that in the show notes. But, uh, this is really cool. Really Thank you so much.
Lizzie Chapman:
exciting.
Steve Hutt:
Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for sharing. And I wish you tremendous success moving into the future.
Lizzie Chapman:
Yeah, thank you so much for having us, Steve. This is great.
Steve Hutt:
All right. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. It’s my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips. on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my personal goal to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify. Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey.
Steve Hutt:
Enjoy the rest of the week and keep building. Thank you. Thriving with Shopify.
