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. The running campaign with the best reported results carries a Best Performing badge next to its name.
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. The Best Performing badge ranks running campaigns by this figure.
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. Read how the Best Performing badge is measured.
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.
Campaigns, the Best Performing badge and how it is measured
What the badge on a campaign row means, the exact rules behind it, and what it does not tell you.
What a campaign is in Ephermal
A campaign is one advertising effort with its own budget, audience and creative. Ephermal lists the campaigns from your connected Meta and Google Ads accounts on the Dashboard and on Launch Ads. Each row shows ROAS, spend, CTR and status, taken from the ad platform over the last 30 days.
What the badge means
At most one campaign carries the Best Performing badge at a time. It marks the running campaign with the highest ROAS its ad platform reported, among campaigns with enough purchases for that number to mean something. Selecting the badge brings you to this page. It is a ranking of reported results and nothing more.
Which campaigns can earn it
A campaign can carry the badge only when all four of these are true:
- It is running. Its status is Live. Paused, draft and failed campaigns never carry it. See Live / Paused / Draft / Failed.
- It spent money. Its spend over the last 30 days is above zero.
- It has at least 5 purchases. Its platform reported 5 or more purchases over the last 30 days. A campaign with only two or three purchases can show a very high ROAS by luck, so it is not ranked.
- Its reported ROAS is above zero.
Among the campaigns that pass, the highest ROAS wins. If two are exactly level, the one with more spend wins when both report in the same currency, then the name that comes first alphabetically. If no campaign passes, nobody gets the badge. The badge is also withheld while Ephermal could not refresh one of your connected platforms, because the comparison would be missing campaigns. It appears on the winner's row, so if your plan lists only some of your campaigns and the winner is not listed, no badge appears.
What ROAS and purchases mean here
Both figures are attributed by the ad platform. Ephermal does not recalculate them from your Shopify orders. Meta and Google each apply their own attribution window and their own deduplication, so they can credit the same sale. For Google, only primary conversion actions categorised as Purchase count, so leads and add-to-cart goals are left out. A reported figure is not proof that the ad caused the sale, and revenue is not profit: ROAS ignores product cost, shipping, fees and refunds.
Why Meta and Google are never added together
A Meta campaign and a Google campaign are ranked against each other using each platform's own ROAS. Their attribution rules differ, so the comparison is a rough guide, not a like-for-like test. Ephermal never adds Meta and Google revenue or purchases into one total, because one sale can be credited by both and the sum would count it twice. For a whole-store view that does not depend on attribution, see MER.
A worked example
Four campaigns, all measured over the same last 30 days. Value is the purchase value the platform reported, and ROAS is that value divided by spend.
| Campaign | Platform | Status | Spend | Value | ROAS | Purchases | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summer Sale | Meta | Live | $400 | $1,800 | 4.5 | 36 | Best Performing |
| Brand Search | Live | $250 | $1,000 | 4.0 | 18 | Qualifies, ranks second | |
| New Hook Test | Meta | Live | $60 | $720 | 12.0 | 3 | Not ranked: too few purchases |
| Winter Retarget | Meta | Paused | $300 | $1,500 | 5.0 | 29 | Not ranked: not running |
Only the first row wins. The row with the highest ROAS has too few purchases, and the paused row beats the winner's ROAS but is not running, so neither is ranked.
What the badge does not mean
It is not advice to scale. Ephermal never changes a budget, pauses a campaign or turns one on because of this badge, and any budget change happens only after you review and approve it. A campaign can be the best of a weak set, and a high ROAS can still lose money once your costs are counted. Reported figures also move as platforms finish attributing recent sales, so the badge can change hands or disappear.
Where to see profit
The badge says nothing about profit. Enter your product costs on the Profit Tracker, then read margin on the Dashboard and the Revenue Tracker. See COGS for how the estimate works.
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 for every Google Search 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.