Using Ephermal
Everything you need to run your store's advertising without a marketing background: a plain-English walkthrough of the setup, and a glossary for every term you'll see on your dashboard.
1. Connect your Shopify store
The first step of account setup.
Enter your store URL
During setup, enter your .myshopify.com address (or just the subdomain) and click Connect with Shopify. You'll be redirected to Shopify to approve the connection. Ephermal never sees your Shopify password.
What gets synced
Connected dashboard tools request Shopify products, orders, and revenue when needed. Use the product and revenue sync controls before generating or analysing if your catalog or recent orders have changed; existing ads are not rewritten automatically.
2. Connect Meta Ads & Google Ads
The second and third steps of account setup.
Meta Ads (all plans)
Click Connect Meta Ads and log in with Facebook to link your Meta Business ad account. No API keys or developer setup required.
Google Ads (Growth & Scale plans)
Connect your Google Ads account the same way, from Settings → Integrations if you skipped it during setup. You can run Meta-only, Google-only, or both at once.
3. Launch your first campaign
From the Launch Ads page in the sidebar.
Click + New Campaign
Choose the connected platform, product, budget, and objective. Ephermal can draft platform-specific copy, Meta ad variants, Google Search keywords, negatives, and extensions from your imported store context.
Review before the platform call
Save the draft, then review its copy, audience, keywords, budget, and destination. Launching creates the campaign in Meta or Google as paused; it does not start spend.
Turn it on explicitly
Use the campaign toggle when you are ready. Ephermal shows a second confirmation that enabling can start spend before sending the live status change.
4. Reading your dashboard
The Dashboard page is your home screen: four numbers matter most.
The four stat cards
Average ROAS, Total Ad Spend, UGC Ads Created and Total Conversions summarize connected ad-platform reporting. They do not by themselves establish profitability; compare them with COGS, fees, shipping, refunds, and the Profit Tracker.
Campaigns table
Every live and paused campaign with its ROAS, spend, CTR and status at a glance. Click any row to see full detail.
Deeper views
For trends over time, open Analytics. For total revenue vs. spend combined, open Revenue Tracker. For AI-recommended budget changes, open Budget AI.
5. What to do if a metric looks bad
Common situations and where to go.
ROAS is dropping
Open Launch Ads → Live Performance and click Optimize ROAS to generate recommendations. Review the proposed pause or scale actions before explicitly applying them. You can also run Creatives → Creative Fatigue Radar for another diagnostic signal.
CTR is low
Low CTR usually means the creative or audience isn't resonating. Generate a fresh creative from the Dashboard, or build a new audience on Audience Intel.
Not sure why? Ask Auren
Auren can request current data from your connected integrations while answering. Open it from the sidebar and ask directly, e.g. "why is my CTR low?" Check the displayed tool trail to see which sources were actually consulted.
Performance terms
ROAS Return on Ad Spend
Revenue the ad platform attributed to a campaign divided by its spend. A reported ROAS of 3.0 means the platform attributed $3 of revenue for each $1 spent. Attribution settings and tracking affect the figure, and a higher ROAS does not necessarily mean the sale was profitable.
MER Marketing Efficiency Ratio
Total Shopify revenue divided by total Meta and Google ad spend. MER includes organic, direct, referral, and returning-customer revenue, so it is useful as a whole-business efficiency trend but is not attributed ROAS and does not prove that ads generated every sale. Profitability also depends on product cost, fees, refunds, shipping, and other operating costs.
CTR Click-Through Rate
The percentage of people who saw your ad and actually clicked it. A higher CTR means your ad creative and targeting are catching attention.
Impressions
The number of times your ad was shown on screen, whether or not anyone clicked it. This measures reach, not engagement.
Clicks
The number of times someone tapped or clicked your ad to visit your store.
Conversions
The number of times a click actually turned into a result you care about, usually a completed purchase on your store.
Creative fatigue
A pattern where repeated exposure coincides with declining performance signals such as CTR or ROAS. Run Creative Fatigue Radar on the Creatives page to inspect available frequency, age, CTR, and ROAS signals; the result is a diagnostic, not proof of the cause.
Money & revenue terms
Ad spend
The total amount of money paid to Meta and/or Google to run your ads, before accounting for any revenue those ads generated.
Rolling 30-day revenue
Your Shopify revenue from the latest 30 days, shown alongside ad spend and estimated margin for the same period. This is store revenue, not monthly recurring revenue. Margin only shows once you've entered Cost of Goods for at least one product.
Orders
The number of paid orders placed on your Shopify store in the selected time window.
COGS Cost of Goods Sold
What it actually costs you to have one unit of a product ready to sell: manufacturing or wholesale price, plus freight and packaging per unit. It does not include ad spend, Shopify fees, or overhead like rent, those come out of margin separately.
COGS auto-fills from Shopify's own "Cost per item" field when you've set it there, or you can enter it directly on the Profit Tracker page. It's the input that makes margin tracking work at all: without it, Profit Tracker and Revenue Tracker have no way to know what any of your revenue actually cost you.
Margin shown across Ephermal is a catalog-average estimate (your entered costs, averaged across products, applied to revenue), not exact per-order accounting, since Shopify doesn't report which specific products made up a given order's revenue. Treat it as directionally useful, not penny-precise.
Campaigns & creative terms
Campaign
A single advertising effort with its own budget, audience and creative, for example, "Summer Sale" or "Best Sellers Retarget". Campaigns are stored by Meta and/or Google; Ephermal provides connected creation and management controls for the actions it supports.
Creative
The actual ad itself: the headline, copy, and (on Meta) media a shopper sees. Ephermal can generate ad copy and UGC-style scripts for review. Growth and Scale video generation uses a separate video-credit pool and a public HTTPS product image; it works only when the configured video provider is available.
Live / Paused / Draft / Failed
Live means the provider reports the campaign enabled; delivery and spend still depend on provider review, schedule, budget, and eligibility. Paused means it exists but delivery is disabled. Draft means it has not been created at the provider. Failed means creation did not complete, which may reflect validation, credentials, provider policy, or a transient API error.
Audience & targeting terms
Custom audience
A specific group of people you build to target with ads, for example, past customers or people who visited your site but didn't buy. Built on the Audience Intel page.
Lookalike audience
A new audience Meta builds automatically by finding people who resemble an existing custom audience (e.g. your best customers), so you can find more shoppers likely to convert. A "0.02" similarity ratio means the top 2% most similar people to your source audience: smaller ratios are more precise but reach fewer people.
Meta Pixel
A tracking integration that can send Meta events such as product views, add-to-cart actions, or purchases. These signals support attribution and audience building, but browser restrictions, consent, configuration, and Meta's attribution model all affect reporting. Check the reported status on Audience Intel.
Install it through Shopify's Meta sales channel.
- In Shopify admin, open Sales channels and install or open Facebook & Instagram by Meta.
- Open Settings, then Share data settings, and enable data sharing.
- Select the right sharing level for your consent setup, then connect an existing Pixel or create one.
- Confirm the connection, then verify events in Meta Events Manager before relying on campaign reporting.
Do not paste a second Meta Pixel into your theme after connecting it through Shopify. Duplicate Pixels can produce incorrect reports.
Read Shopify's current Pixel instructionsGoogle Search Ads
A genuinely different kind of advertising from Meta - worth understanding before you launch your first one.
Meta is asset-based. Google Search is intent-based.
On Meta, you upload an image or video and Meta shows it to people it thinks will like it, based on interests and behavior. There's no equivalent creative to upload for Google Search: instead, your ad is a few lines of text that appears when someone types a search that matches your chosen keywords. You're not interrupting a scroll, you're answering a search someone already typed. Same product, completely different mechanic and completely different ad format.
Ranking works differently too
A Meta ad's reach depends on your budget and the algorithm's read on relevance to an audience. A Google Search ad's position on the results page depends on your bid and Google's Quality Score, how well your keywords, ad copy, and landing page all match the searcher's intent. A well-matched, lower-bid ad can outrank a poorly-matched, higher-bid one.
Keywords & match types
Keyword
A word or phrase you're telling Google to show your ad for, e.g. "waterproof running shoes." Ephermal's AI generates these from your product catalog when it builds a campaign.
Match type
How closely a shopper's search has to match your keyword for your ad to show. Ephermal uses a deliberate mix, not one blanket setting:
Exact match - only very close variations of the keyword trigger your ad. Tightest control, used for your highest-intent, most specific terms.
Phrase match - searches containing your keyword phrase (with extra words before or after) trigger your ad. Broader reach while staying relevant.
Broad match - Google has the most latitude to match related searches. Used sparingly, only for genuine discovery terms, since it carries the most risk of showing your ad for an irrelevant search.
Negative keywords
Terms you explicitly tell Google not to show your ad for, even if they'd otherwise match. For example, if you sell full-price running shoes, you might exclude searches containing "free" or "jobs" or "diy repair." Ephermal generates a negative keyword list automatically for every campaign it builds - without one, an account can burn real budget on clicks that were never going to buy anything.
Ad extensions
Extra pieces of information Google can attach to your text ad to make it larger and more useful, at no extra cost. Ephermal generates three kinds for every campaign:
Sitelinks
Extra clickable links to specific pages on your store, e.g. Best Sellers, New Arrivals, Sale - letting a shopper jump straight to what they actually want instead of landing on your homepage.
Callouts
Short, non-clickable highlights like "Free Shipping" or "30-Day Returns" that add credibility and detail to the ad itself.
Structured snippets
A themed list under a fixed header (like Brands, Styles, or Types) showing specific things your store offers.