This case study talks about how I was able to bring in the ROAS of 8.5X during the last two festive weeks in the year of 2018.
Page Contents
Problems
- Highly competitive market and high CPM during the festive season
- Less time to do any test and let an AdSet/ Campaign optimize
Strategy: Advance Preparation
We did not wait for the week of Christmas to arrive. We started targeting & curating the early-bird shoppers from the first week of December itself. Usually, early-bird shoppers are projected to outspend late shoppers. So, we thought of taking advantage of heightened intent and influence conversations along with shopping behavior – especially among gifters!
Building, Curating & Testing Early-Birds
We did not spend a single extra penny in curating the early birds. So how did we target, curate, and tested early birds? We extensively used Google Trends and Google Search Keyword planner to find out the seasonality and trend of the products that we were going to sell. Here is a screenshot of the search trend for the new year gift. It starts picking up from the first week of December, that’s what we leveraged.
Some of the ways we started building and curating the audience were:
- Putting out organic posts about our upcoming offers and making a list of the warm audience which interacted with those posts
- Inserting extra carousel video/ Gifs for upcoming offers during holidays and making a list of the audience which watched or interacted with those videos.
- Early Bird Offers and Holiday offers page visitors on the website.
- We also used a lot of micro-conversion signals to identify and funnel the user intent which we will use in the different AdSets later.
- We also broadened our audience while targeting
First Launch – December 20-24
We launched two campaigns on December 20. One campaign was a completely conversion-based campaign, until 2nd January, and another campaign was based on the landing page view (I have highlighted the start and end date in the first image of this post).
Conversion-Based Campaign
Some of the audiences that we targeted in the conversion-based campaign are:
- The warm audience which interacted with holidays posts or GIFs or videos
- The very warm audience which interacted with holiday offers page views and other micro-conversion events
- Lookalike of HLTV audience
- Lookalike of HAoV audience
From the conversion-based campaign, both of the AdSets, (as highlighted above), gave an average of 9.5X of ROAS. If you also look carefully at the different AdSets of the Single conversion-based campaign above, for a faster campaign learning, we included all the AdSets in the same campaign.
Landing Page View Campaign
We already had a tested and curated audience for the conversion based campaign. But, we also wanted to keep the campaign being fueled with a more interested audience. So, we also ran a landing page based campaign from 20-24th as well.
Highlights of this phase:
- Early Bird Offers
- Error and the trial period from campaign optimization PoV
- We kept the HLTV & HAoV audience excluded as there was more to come in the second phase
- Testing different creatives, copies, offers on different categories, etc.
- Testing with a lesser budget
Second Launch – December 25 – 27
Again, we launched two AdSets in the conversion-based on December 25th for the second phase from December 25th to December 27th. While just like in Phase 1, we also ran a parallel landing page view campaign. The strategy was a little different during the second phase though.
Highlights of this phase:
- Mouth dropping deals and offers
- Targeting HLTV & HAoV audience and some high-intent remarketing audience based on micro-conversions based on custom events
- Going out loud with almost triple the budget of phase one in just three days
- Running two different kinds of adsets with different ads and creatives
From the conversion-based campaign, both of the AdSets, (as highlighted above), gave 20X of ROAS (average of 19X & 21 X) Which was huge.
Third Launch – December 28 – Jan 02
Again, we launched two AdSets in the conversion-based campaign on December 28th for the third phase from December 28th to Jan 2nd. While just like in Phase 2, we also ran a parallel landing page view campaign. The strategy was also again a little different during the third phase.
Highlights of this phase:
- Deals that the audience missed and chance to grab them
- Using signals to target those who did not convert such as cart abandoners, multiple product viewers, longer session duration, etc.
- Running two different kinds of adsets with different ads and creatives
From the conversion-based campaign, both of the AdSets, (as highlighted above), gave 10X of ROAS (average of 12X & 8 X)
Resources for you:
- Facebook Marketing for Holidays
- Facebook ECommerce Optimization tips
- Why FB is not performing?
- Facebook Ads Optimization Guide