To drive traffic to your Shopify store, you need people to find you through search, social media, email and paid ads, and a reason for them to come back. There are millions of live Shopify stores, so a new one will not be found by accident.
This guide covers the tactics that work for most stores, what each one costs in time or money, and how to tell which ones are bringing in visitors.
Key takeaways
- Time-limited discounts and offers give shoppers a reason to visit and buy now.
- Useful content, influencers and affiliates bring in visitors you do not pay per click for.
- Email is the cheapest way to bring past visitors and customers back.
- Paid ads bring traffic fastest. Keep budgets tight and retarget visitors who left.
- SEO and free Google listings take longer but keep working once set up.
- Tag your links and install your pixels so you know which channels bring sales.
Offer Exclusive Deals And Discounts
Exclusive deals give shoppers a reason to visit your store instead of a competitor's, and a reason to buy today.
Shoppers expect to find deals online. Surveys report that 90% of shoppers think they can find better deals online than in store, and 72% want personalized discounts on items they buy.
A common pattern is to let shoppers browse at full price, then send a discount code to people who added items to their cart and did not buy. Some stores follow up with a second, larger offer if the first is ignored.
Most of these codes have a time limit, such as 48 hours, to encourage a quick decision. Even small discounts of 5% to 15% can tip someone into buying.
Countdown timers in emails, on the home page or at checkout make the deadline visible. They will not work on everyone, but they suit shoppers who wait for bargains. Only use them for real deadlines.
If timers do not fit your brand, send offers to your email list and remind subscribers when a code is about to expire.
Create High-Quality Content
Content brings in visitors who are researching a problem your products solve, and it keeps bringing them in without paying per click.
Write the guides and make the videos your customers are already searching for. If you sell gel blasters, the most useful articles about gel blasters will attract buyers. The same goes for car covers, skincare or anything else: people want to know how a product works and whether it is right for them.
Short video is now one of the main ways shoppers learn about products. Sprout Social reports that 44% of people prefer to learn about products through short videos.
Content types to try:
- Customer stories. User-generated content (UGC), where customers explain why they use your products, works as social proof. People trust their peers more than your marketing.
- Tutorials. How-tos and instructional videos show how your products work and how to get the best from them.
- Product use cases. Case studies show a real customer's problem and how your product solved it. They work like long, detailed reviews, especially for niche or in-house products.
- Short videos. Clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts that show the product in use.
- Infographics. Useful for complex products that are easier to explain with a diagram.
- Podcasts. A way to go deep on your subject, interview experts and talk to manufacturers.
Content takes time to pay off. Publish regularly, see which pieces bring visitors, and make more of those.
Work With Influencers And Affiliates
Influencers and affiliates send you their audiences, who already trust their recommendations.
Influencers work because their followers trust them. A recommendation from someone you follow saves you the work of comparing products yourself.
Affiliates are usually less personal, such as review sites and deal blogs, but readers still follow their links when the recommendation is relevant.
To find influencers in your niche:
- Use an influencer platform to search by niche and audience size.
- Look at who already comments on your posts or talks about your products.
- Ask your customers who they follow, for example in a survey.
Then set up the program:
- A brand influencer program, with product samples, briefs and paid deals.
- An affiliate program, with commission rates, rules and tracked links.
Influencers suit visual products on TikTok and Instagram, such as fashion, cosmetics and homeware. Affiliates suit products people research before buying. Many stores use both. Give each partner their own tracked link so you can see who sends visitors and sales.
Construct Your Email Marketing Strategy
Email lets you bring visitors and customers back to your store for almost no cost per send.
The hard part is collecting addresses. Most Shopify stores use:
- A discount in exchange for an email address.
- A pop-up or sign-up form that offers something useful, such as early access or a guide.
Once you have subscribers, send emails that are worth opening:
- Discounts and special offers.
- New product launches.
- News that affects customers, such as new shipping options or restocks.
Some stores send useful content too. A supplement brand might send a seven-day health plan in January. A skincare brand might send a routine for winter. Pick what suits your products and your customers.
Set up automated emails as well: a welcome series for new subscribers, abandoned checkout reminders, and follow-ups after a purchase. Shopify Email and tools like Klaviyo handle these.
Use Paid Advertising, But Don’t Go Overboard
Paid ads bring traffic faster than any other channel, which matters most when a store is new, so long as you set a budget and watch the return.
The main options:
- Google Ads. Search and Shopping ads reach people searching for what you sell.
- Meta Ads. Ads on Facebook and Instagram, targeted by interests and behavior.
- TikTok Ads. Short video ads on TikTok, suited to products that look good on camera.
Choose by where your customers spend time. Someone shopping for fishing tackle is likely to search on Google. Someone looking for skincare may find it on TikTok. Pinterest, Snapchat and LinkedIn also sell ads if your audience is there.
Start with a small budget. Each platform bids for ad space for you within the budget you set, and most let you cap daily spend or set a cost per result.
Before you spend, install each platform's pixel so it can see visits, add-to-carts and purchases. Without it, the platform cannot optimize for sales or tell you which ads worked.
Also retarget people who visit your site. Retargeting shows your ads to visitors after they leave, often with the products they viewed. It usually costs less per sale than reaching new people, because these visitors already know you. See remarketing vs retargeting for how the two differ.
Use Social Media Marketing
Social media puts your products in front of people while they browse, and gives them one tap to your store.
Many shoppers discover products this way. A Statista survey found that 58% of consumers had bought a product after seeing it on social media.
Most Shopify stores focus on visual platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. Some niches do better elsewhere: B2B suppliers on LinkedIn, brands for teenagers on Snapchat.
To make social media work for your store:
- Post visual content, mostly video.
- Show products in use.
- Share UGC from customers and creators.
Giveaways create interest quickly. Ask people to sign up to your email list or follow your account to enter. Make sure you can afford the prizes.
Low-cost stunts can also get attention: a bold comparison with the market leader, a challenge, or a reply to a trending topic. Keep them honest and on brand.
Make Your Store SEO Friendly
SEO brings visitors from Google without paying per click, so start it early, because it takes months to build.
Shopify covers the basics. You can edit:
- Page titles and meta descriptions
- Image alt text
- Product descriptions
- Collection and landing pages
- URLs
Most Shopify themes also add structured data for products and load quickly. The part Shopify cannot do for you is earn links from other sites, and links still matter for ranking.
To get links, make content other sites want to reference: original research, useful guides, tools. If you work with a link-building agency, check that it earns links in ways that do not break Google's spam policies.
Write unique, useful pages. Google ranks thin, copied content poorly.
Also list your products on Google for free. Connect your store to Google Merchant Center through Shopify's Google & YouTube app, and your products can show in free listings on the Shopping tab and other Google surfaces. Clear titles, good images and accurate prices help them show up.
Tools that help with keywords and competitors:
- SEMrush: keyword research and competitor analysis.
- Ahrefs: keyword research, backlinks and site audits.
- Ubersuggest: a cheaper keyword tool from Neil Patel for planning pages and blog posts.
- Google Search Console: free, and shows which searches bring people to your store.
Measure Where Your Traffic Comes From
Measuring each channel tells you which tactics to keep and which to drop.
Shopify's own reports show sessions by source. For campaigns, add UTM parameters to the links in your emails, ads and influencer posts, so each one shows up separately. For ads, the platform pixels report which campaigns led to purchases, and GA4 gives you a view across all of them. Compare the numbers every month and move time and budget to the channels that bring sales, not just visits.
Understand Your Audience
Knowing your audience makes every other tactic work better, because you know where to find them and what to say.
Start with buyer personas: short descriptions of the typical people who buy from you. If you do not know, ask with a survey or look at your order data.
Details worth knowing:
-
Demographics
- Age: the age range of your buyers, such as 18 to 24
- Location: the countries and regions you sell to most
- Language: the languages your customers speak
- Income level: what your customers can afford
- Life stage: students, young families, retirees
-
Behaviors
- Response to discounts: whether your buyers wait for sales
- Media habits: which apps and sites they use to find products
- Shopping preferences: whether they like to shop online, in store or both
- Buying habits: how often they buy and how much at once
-
Psychographics
- Goals: what your customers want to achieve
- Communication style: whether they prefer playful or straightforward messages
- Motivations: why they buy products like yours
Now You Know How To Drive Traffic To Your Shopify Store
Driving traffic to a Shopify store takes a mix of channels: offers and email for quick wins, paid ads with retargeting for fast reach, and content, social media and SEO for traffic that builds over time. Measure each one and put more into what brings sales.
Paid ads and retargeting both depend on your social media pixels working. MultiPixels installs Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and GA4 pixels on a Shopify store without editing theme code. Install MultiPixels on your Shopify store to run several tracking pixels at once.
FAQs
Where should I even start if I want more visitors coming to my Shopify store?
Start with the channels you can set up this week: email sign-ups with a discount, free Google listings through Merchant Center, and posts on the one or two social platforms your customers use. Add a small paid ads budget with retargeting, and work on SEO and content alongside.
Which channels tend to bring the most new visitors to a Shopify store?
Search (organic and paid), social media and paid social ads bring most new visitors for most stores. Email and retargeting mostly bring back people who have visited before.
My store has been live for a while but nobody’s visiting, what’s going wrong?
Usually the store is not listed or promoted anywhere people look. Check that Google can index it, connect Merchant Center for free listings, post regularly on social media, and test a small ad campaign. Then use Shopify's reports to see which channel moves first.
Is it actually worth putting effort into Shopify SEO for traffic?
Yes. Good titles and descriptions, useful blog content and links from other sites bring visitors you do not pay for, and that traffic keeps coming once you rank.
Can you give me a quick checklist of tactics to boost traffic and sales?
- Offer exclusive deals and discounts
- Create useful content
- Work with influencers and affiliates
- Build an email list and automated emails
- Run paid ads on a set budget, with retargeting
- Post on social media
- Optimize your store for search and list products on Google for free
- Measure each channel
- Get to know your audience
I just launched my store, how soon will I start seeing real traffic?
Paid ads and social posts can bring visitors in the first days. SEO usually takes several months to show results. Expect traffic to build over time, and keep the channels that work.
Should I put money into paid ads to speed up traffic growth?
Yes, paid ads are the fastest way to get visitors. Set a budget you can afford to test with, install your pixels first, target the right people, and retarget visitors who have already been to your store.
How do I know which channel is bringing me sales?
Use Shopify's reports for sessions and orders by source, add UTM parameters to your campaign links, and check the ad platforms' conversion reports, which rely on your pixels.