Would You Grow Your Brand Like This Company Did? From $113k To $200k At 8.9X ROAS, In Just 3 Months

[Tomasz-SGX]

In this post, you’ll learn how to improve Facebook & Google ads performance, what CRO changes helped this store to increase the conversion rate.

The Strategy For Performance & Creative Testing

Matt: Jessica, please tell me how you approached performance and creative testing in this account? 

Jessica: We took a balanced approach towards media buying and creative testing. We did a funnel set-up on the campaign level to ensure that we were targeting, engaging with, and retargeting a new audience to get conversions. We also decided to test more ‘split-screen’, and ‘break down’ types of creatives.

Matt: Sounds good. Based on the results, it looks like it worked. What was their initial budget?

Jessica: Initial Facebook budget was around €25k per month. Now we’re hovering around €30k per month.

Matt: Going back to creative testing, how many creatives per week have you tested? 

Jessica: Anywhere between 5 and 7 creatives every week but if it was up to me, I would double this number. With more testing (so important at the beginning) we could’ve found out our winners faster. However, I’m aware of the client’s limitations in regard to creative production.

Battling The Marketer’s Biggest Nightmare: Fixing Attribution And Tracking

Jessica: Another challenge was, of course, attribution and tracking. I’ve read this quote somewhere that another billion-dollar company would be a company that would fix attribution problems. One thing is that iOS 14.5 wiped out 50% of the conversions. On the other hand, it’s the nature of performance marketing & tracking where it’s impossible to track attribution with 100% accuracy. 

Our role here was to double-check tracking and Facebook offline conversions, CAPI, domain verification, and UTMs. We also had to clean Analytics and make sure all the connections between ad channels, Analytics, and Shopify were set up correctly. 

Last but not least was to find an effective way for creative and audience testing. We have our own systems but each account is different and requires a custom approach. Sometimes you need to test all creatives in 1 ad set, sometimes you have to have 1 ad set for 1 creative. It really depends on the account. Usually, it takes us 1-3 weeks to find the best way to test creatives and we repeat this process every 2-3 months to make sure we’re doing it in the best way possible.

 

The Biggest Performance Challenge

Matt: Thanks Jess, that was a detailed answer! Could you please tell me (and our readers) what the biggest performance challenge was here?

Jessica: The biggest problem with performance was the lack of strategy and funnel in the ad account. The client used to run traffic and engagement campaigns for existing customers/engagers most of the time. There was no real acquisition in place, so the biggest problem was to fix their overall funnel setup. As you can imagine, having a lot of traffic campaigns brought a lot of low-quality visitors, so their conversion would stay really low – below 1%. Another point of friction was not bringing any “fresh” traffic as the previous media buyer was focused on remarketing campaigns only. At that time, the account ROAS was 1.35 and it was far from profitable. After all the changes we have implemented we got to a stable, profitable +3.00 ROAS.

One Recommendation For Performance & Strategy…

Matt: What would be your 1 performance recommendation for brands in the baby niche?

Jessica: Test, test, and test more. Without testing you won’t learn anything and you won’t optimize your campaigns. Test and learn and improve constantly. We started from creative and audience testing but now we’re focusing mostly on ad angles, hooks, and offers to test (but we didn’t stop creative dan audience testing). I really can’t stress it enough that your focus should go to testing. You might be just one ad away from breaking through and scaling your store to a much higher revenue level. Find that jackpot!

Matt: OK, last question about recommendations – what would be your 1 strategy recommendation for brands like this?

Jessica: My strategy recommendation for the brands would be to follow a proactive, systematic, and data-driven approach toward testing your creative assets. Then make decisions backed by data points. This will help them better understand what is performing, what their audience likes, and what to put more focus on. 

With paid ads you can’t really forget about other factors like CRO, having the right offer, AOV/LTV optimization or email marketing.  Running an eCommerce store is not an easy job but when it’s profitable, it’s an amazing feeling!

Any questions? I am happy to help 🙂