Editor’s notice: This case examine was initially printed in June 2020. It has been up to date for accuracy and to mirror trendy practices.
In digital advertising and marketing, you by no means make guarantees you possibly can’t maintain or set objectives you possibly can’t attain.
However, in some circumstances, ad copy, the proper messaging, and the proper alternative all line as much as produce outcomes that blow away any typical expectations.
On this weblog, we’re sharing an unimaginable Fb Adverts case examine a couple of former consumer of ours, Seltzer Items. They’re a B2C model that sells uniquely impressed house items for contemporary dwelling.
Like most companies initially of the COVID-19 disaster, they noticed a pointy drop in orders. However, as an alternative of pulling again, they determined to double down and enhance ad spend throughout this time — resulting in substantial outcomes, together with:
- 9.68x return on ad spend (ROAS)
- 785% enhance in month-to-month income
- $4.87 price per buyer acquisition (CPA)
However the success didn’t cease there. Along with the enhancements on the paid social channels, sitewide natural metrics elevated considerably, too, with:
- 6.6% natural conversion charge
- 183% enhance in month-to-month natural visitors.
- 931% enhance in model question and product searches
- 200% enhance in non-branded search question impressions
At this time, we’ll let you know precisely how we made all of it occur — so you possibly can replicate these leads to your eCommerce campaigns, too.
Defining the Scope of the Mission
Like many eCommerce companies, Seltzer Items was initially hit onerous by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their problem to our crew: Create extra gross sales from their B2C merchandise to offset the damaging results on their wholesale enterprise.
Happily, Seltzer Items’ merchandise lent effectively to the stay-at-home orders throughout early 2020, particularly their artistically distinctive jigsaw puzzles.
The model had the proper merchandise and loads of stock to make a splash; it simply didn’t have sufficient consciousness of those merchandise amongst customers to create the specified gross sales.
So, we got here up with an answer to drive the curiosity Seltzer wanted.
The substances:
- 1 Fb Ad
- 1 Instagram Ad
- Sturdy inventive and ad copy for each
- A receptive (chilly) viewers
- Fastidiously scaled ad funds
Setting Up the Adverts
Though Seltzer Items had by no means run campaigns earlier than on their Fb Ad account, we knew paid social promoting would finally be a key to their success. So, earlier than we even started our engagement, our crew added a Fb pixel to the eCommerce website.
This gave us a serious benefit: As a result of Fb had been amassing knowledge on purchasers and website guests for months, we have been in a position to hit the bottom operating when creating well-informed adverts.
The Marketing campaign
Right here at Influx, we imagine within the energy of the “See, Assume, Do” Fb Ad technique. It’s served us extraordinarily effectively when working with different eCommerce shops, so we used this framework for Seltzer Items, too.
As a result of we needed to achieve new prospects and see how they responded to our ad inventive, we began with a single marketing campaign that solely focused chilly audiences (with no retargeting adverts). By selecting a conversion-based strategy optimized towards purchases, Fb and Instagram would serve the adverts to customers who have been probably to take motion — removing the window buyers.
With this setup, we’d ship extra certified buyers into Seltzer Items’ gross sales funnel from the very begin.
The Ad Set
When creating an ad set on Fb, it’s simple to get misplaced in all of the choices you possibly can choose.
For Seltzer Items, we saved it easy and opted into all units and computerized placements. This could give Fb and Instagram’s machine studying extra choices to show the adverts, main to higher outcomes for our consumer.
Given the cheaper price level of the product and the probability that buyers would impulse purchase, we used a one-day click on supply optimization, as an alternative of the default seven-day click on optimization. (We advocate utilizing the latter provided that your product prices greater than $100 or in case your prospects have an extended shopping for cycle.)
The Ad Set Concentrating on
For our viewers focusing on, we began with an interest-based viewers ad set that was carefully associated to the puzzles we have been promoting.
Then, we rapidly added in lookalike audiences for 3 segments of tourists that took motion on the positioning:
- Key web page guests
- AddToCart customers
- Purchasers (as soon as the seed audiences have been ample)
Having the Fb pixel correctly carried out and firing on key occasions resembling ViewContent, AddToCart, and Buy expedited the info assortment on the seed audiences and constructed higher lookalike audiences sooner.
Professional Tip: Pay attention to the age of your lookalike viewers. For instance, a 14-day lookalike viewers may look and behave dramatically in a different way from a 180-day lookalike viewers, notably throughout irregular time intervals resembling pandemics, holidays, or Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
When implementing the lookalike audiences, we used the present publish ID from the interest-based ad units. This allowed us to retain social proof (likes, shares, and feedback) from the unique adverts, which might act as a constructive sign to Fb’s algorithm and potential patrons.
Subsequent, we utilized a clear and constant naming conference construction from the marketing campaign to the ad units, the adverts, and the UTM tagging on the again finish of the URL. This streamlined our optimizations inside the marketing campaign and made reporting a lot simpler.
Moreover, it allowed us to leverage the ability of Google Analytics alongside the native reporting from Fb Enterprise Supervisor/Ad Supervisor, which is essential in understanding your attribution fashions and whole viewers journey.
The Price range
For the most effective Fb advertising and marketing outcomes, we advocate incrementally scaling your funds over time. Within the case of Seltzer Items, we scaled up budgets by 10–15% each couple of days, so long as the ROAS was at the very least 5x.
A extra important enhance can wreak havoc on well-performing campaigns and harm ROAS or price per acquisition (CPA) metrics when Fb has to rapidly modify to new info and decide one of the simplest ways to serve it.
Breaking Down Our Adverts
Whereas focusing on and funds are necessary for Fb Ad success, you received’t get wherever with out first having a beautiful, partaking ad.
Fb A/B testing is essential to creating an ad your audience needs to see. By testing a number of choices, you possibly can mix the most effective inventive and replica to drive gross sales, fairly than waste cash operating one ineffective ad at a time.
For Seltzer Items, we began by operating two totally different ad creatives towards the identical in-ad copy.
The Artistic
When creating our Fb adverts, we chosen single-image adverts in a 1:1 ratio.
As a result of the vast majority of social media consumption occurs on cellular units, the 1:1 ratio provides advertisers the most effective likelihood of displaying the adverts in an optimum format to a wider viewers.
This specific inventive captures the enjoyable, brilliant, and creative essence of Seltzer Items’ puzzles and makes it a really perfect selection for Fb and Instagram promoting. By capturing the consumer’s consideration, it stops the proverbial scroll and lends itself to a more in-depth look.
Ad Artistic #1:
Ad Artistic #2:
Keep in mind, your ad inventive (picture, video, or carousel) is an important consider a profitable ad. It’s the one factor that’s completely yours and one of the simplest ways on your model to face out within the crowded social feeds.
The Copy
For this marketing campaign, we selected to retain the identical copy throughout each ad choices for a number of necessary causes:
- It’s related. Seltzer Items acknowledged the worth of individuals staying indoors through the time interval wherein we ran the ad.
- It’s constructive. Exercising the thoughts is one thing that everybody — from medical doctors and nurses to grandmas, aunties, and your seven-year-old nephew — can agree is sweet for you.
- It makes use of a pure name to motion. The assertion “Strengthen your puzzle recreation” is subtly woven into the textual content area and invokes a problem to buyers.
- It invokes a message of togetherness. Seltzer Items’ Higher Collectively sequence featured puzzles with trendy designs from artists who meant one thing to the model. It’s distinctive to Seltzer Items, and, by highlighting this info within the ad, customers had yet one more strategy to join with the corporate.
- It makes use of positivity and hope as an alternative of onerous gross sales. The copy’s headline, “Brighten Your Day One Piece at a Time” is definitely not your customary ad headline (“Get Your Puzzle At this time!” or “Hurry, Provides Are Restricted!”) — however it sparks extra pleasure for purchasers in a time of stress and uncertainty.
- It emphasizes a fast turnaround. Throughout a time when out-of-stock points abounded, utilizing the phrase “In Inventory & Prepared To Ship” reassured customers upfront that Seltzer Items’ merchandise have been stocked and able to go.
Outcomes & Takeaways
In relation to paid social promoting, efficient inventive and replica are your not-so-secret weapons. Keep true to your model, delight your prospects with an ad inventive, and also you’ll win each time.
On the similar time, scaling vertically and horizontally also can reap enormous advantages. However you want good viewers knowledge to do it proper.
The more moderen your seed audiences, and the bigger they’re, the higher lookalikes you possibly can create — and the extra gross sales you possibly can drive by your campaigns.
Utilizing these methods, we noticed nice success with Seltzer Items’ campaigns, together with a 4.5x ROAS(9.68x ROAS with Fb attribution) and fewer than $10 CPA ($4.87 with Fb attribution).
In complete, this marketing campaign accounted for 25 % of Seltzer Items’ month-to-month income. Sitewide gross sales throughout this era, nonetheless, have been equal to the overall from the final seven months of gross sales — a 785% month-to-month enhance.
So, what did it imply?
Our Fb Adverts campaigns didn’t simply have an effect on social income. It additionally affected different channels, too.
How Paid Adverts Have an effect on Different Channels’ Efficiency
After the whole lot was calculated, Seltzer Items’ paid social adverts solely accounted for 25% of the overall income generated on this 30-day marketing campaign.
That leaves one other 75% of the generated income unaccounted for, which we will attribute to different channels — natural, direct, and referral visitors — that additionally skilled important will increase in efficiency.
In different phrases, Fb and Instagram adverts can (and sometimes do) have a quantitative and qualitative constructive impact on different channels, too.
Beneath, you’ll see Seltzer Items’ top-level supply knowledge for natural, direct, and referral visitors, evaluating the primary month we launched our preliminary Fb campaigns to the month earlier than.
Along with the brand new cost-per-click (CPC) visitors, direct and natural channels skyrocketed in each visitors quantity and conversion charge (185% to 533% and 351% to 903%, respectively), suggesting each a rise in demand and intent.
Whereas we acknowledge that this specific time-frame was opportune for puzzle distributors, we additionally know that no advertising and marketing effort exists in a silo. Whereas different eCommerce purchasers have additionally seen elevated demand, visitors quantity, and transactions on account of COVID-19, Seltzer Items is a singular case — as a result of the one advertising and marketing change we carried out was centered solely on Fb and Instagram adverts.
Elevated Referral Visitors
Our paid social campaigns elevated the publicity of not simply Seltzer Items’ puzzle merchandise, but additionally the model as a complete. With that elevated consciousness got here backlinks and referral visitors from BuzzFeed and Architectural Digest, in addition to a better-established social media presence for the model.
Utilizing Google Analytics, we additionally noticed that a few of the referral visitors (resembling that from BuzzFeed) discovered Seltzer Items by Fb and Instagram adverts. It was high quality visitors, too; for referrals from BuzzFeed, customers, conversions, and conversion charges elevated by 1,206%, 1,001%, and 18%, respectively.
The development continued once we examined the natural aspect of those social platforms. For instance, the natural Instagram referral supply noticed an nearly 1,700% enhance in visitors and transactions — which speaks to an elevated degree of engagement and intent from the customers consuming Seltzer Items content material.
Elevated Natural Visitors
Google natural additionally confirmed robust enchancment throughout the board. With a conversion charge of greater than 6.6%, we needed to dig a bit of deeper.
Beneath, you’ll see a comparability between natural visitors through the time interval the adverts have been operating and the earlier interval — a 183% enhance in customers.
On the similar time, we noticed:
- 105% enhance in complete model impressions
- 319% enhance in clicks
- 105% enhance in click-through charge (CTR)
Naturally, we needed to know what sorts of queries have been surging in natural visitors. What we discovered was extremely encouraging for anybody struggling to convey the worth of Fb past the platform’s attribution mannequin.
For evaluation, we break up the positioning’s natural search queries into two main classes and subcategories:
- All Model Visitors
(“Seltzer Items”)
-
Model visitors + product-specific point out (“Seltzer Items” + “puzzles/pens”)
- Model visitors + puzzle product-specific point out (“Seltzer Items Ramen puzzle”)
-
Model visitors + product-specific point out (“Seltzer Items” + “puzzles/pens”)
- All Non-Model Visitors
(“500-piece jigsaw puzzles,” “paper vegetation,” “seven-year pens”)
- Non-brand visitors with a puzzle product-specific point out (“Ramen Noodle Bowl puzzle”)
Upon slicing the info additional, we noticed impressions for “Model Queries + Puzzle” bounce 931%, with an 831% enhance in clicks.
Much more thrilling: The non-brand phase of puzzles confirmed almost a 200% enhance in impressions, accompanied by a 1,134% enhance in clicks — the phase with the most important enhance in CTR (315%).
So, not solely did the paid social adverts have an effect on the quantity of branded search queries in the major search engines, however additionally they had a outstanding influence on the intent of these queries (additional mirrored by the elevated conversion charge).
Whereas it is a smaller portion of visitors, it displays the goal market we have been partaking and lends credence to paid social’s influence as a branding effort. Keep in mind: There have been no energetic website positioning changes made throughout this time that might have had an influence on natural visitors.
This knowledge is especially encouraging for 2 causes:
- It exhibits the correlation between robust paid social media campaigns and natural visitors from a brand-awareness, upper-funnel perspective.
- It demonstrates the correlation between a powerful paid social media marketing campaign and its influence on the underside of the funnel.
Spend money on Paid Social & Reap the Rewards
Let’s be sincere: It’s very seemingly that Seltzer Items would have seen a rise in puzzle gross sales, given the demand introduced on by COVID-19.
Nonetheless, with out these robust Fb and Instagram adverts campaigns, the outcomes wouldn’t have been as explosive throughout all digital channels.
This new model consciousness that led to hyperlinks and model searches most likely wouldn’t have elevated to such a level, nor would now we have anticipated the lifts in natural social, both.
It’s onerous to parse the precise influence, however we strongly imagine that we took a wave of potential efficiency and turned it right into a tidal wave of gross sales.
Finally, Fb and Instagram adverts accelerated the unimaginable enhance in visitors, enlargement in visitors portfolios, and enchancment in buy intent. By combining related focusing on and robust inventive that embraces each the model voice and the promoting platform’s capabilities, we have been in a position to ship the proper message to the proper viewers on the proper time.
All of those parts are vital in operating a profitable digital advertising and marketing marketing campaign that has wide-reaching impacts throughout your entire digital ecosystem.
“Influx helped us rapidly enhance eCommerce gross sales within the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. A multi-year technique for rising gross sales and conversions was all of a sudden kicked into excessive gear. We actually love their responsiveness, effort to grasp our enterprise, and dedication to ship the best ROI potential.” — Homosexual Lam, Seltzer Items
That stated, this success wouldn’t have been potential with out one thing worthwhile to promote. With a number of merchandise that radiate enjoyable, brightness, and positivity, Seltzer Items saved its promoting messaging and inventive true to its model. It delighted its prospects by providing nice experiences and first-class customer support, together with handwritten notes with the purchases — all of which led to a COVID success story.
Comply with this system with your personal model, and also you’ll win each time.
Need an knowledgeable to do it for you? Our crew can create paid social media promoting methods that influence your digital ecosystem, measure your outcomes, and put you on a path for steady enchancment. Request a free proposal from us anytime to get began.
Learn extra of our Fb Adverts case research under:
- How a Twin Paid Social & Search Technique Earned Tactipup Report-Breaking Gross sales
- Furnishings Fb Adverts Case Research: ROAS 0 to 29.5 in 3 Months
- How We Used Fb Adverts to Assist Vitrazza Attain $1 Million/Month in Gross sales