This case study shows how a completely new online e-commerce brand with a single product category was able to achieve 8.5X ROAS in the first three months of its launch since its first launch in September 2019. Also, ROAS reached its peak in the month of December with ROAS being around 18X in total.
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Problems
- Marketing a single line of products with different variants in color
- Launched during the most competitive quarter of the year
- Hard to crack on Facebook
The strategy was to launch the product in two phases. The first part involved brand awareness and the second part involved conversion-based campaigns. During the first month of its launch, September, we learned a lot. Here are a few areas we failed and learned:
- Facebook was the perfect platform for the launch
- We tried remarketing to the video views, engagers. It seemed working in the beginning. There were a lot of comments, shares, and reactions but however, Facebook ads were not going across ROAS of 2. We tried a ton of strategies.
But below is how our strategy looked like after we failed on Facebook –
Strategy – Brand awareness (Phase 1)
In the first phase, we started to leverage social media engagement heavily for brand awareness. A part of the social media brand awareness strategy was:
- Showing the premium-ness of the product through professional photography and videography
- A real-life scenario video specially made to entice the prospects
- Stop spending budget on the Facebook campaign (we learned that all products cannot be marketed on Facebook)
As a part of the above strategy, we boosted the above two types of posts for a lot of customer engagement. Customer engagement generated a wave of shares, likes, and comments. It also helped us gain a lot of organic audience on Facebook and Instagram. After we had around almost 3 to 4 weeks of brand awareness on social media, we moved on to the second phase of strategy.
Strategy – Conversion-based campaigns (Phase 2)
We decided to go ahead with three types of campaigns on Google ads. We could have leveraged social media engagements but surely we had failed there to cross 2X ROAS with some testing. That’s why we decided to test Google.
- Branded search
- Dynamic search ads
- Smart campaign
Here are a few pointers for each of the above campaigns based on the settings I had in the account. Though there are a lot of intricacies to it, the below pointers would give you a high-level idea about each of the campaigns
Branded search
- The simplest one to set and forget.
- Used as broad as possible targeting such as networks, age range, etc.
Dynamic search ads
I had a lot of success with DSA campaigns in the past and that’s why I wanted to try DSA.
- First, we made an exhaustive master negative list and attached to the DSA campaign
- Used maximize conversion bid strategy type from the beginning itself.
- Kept updating the negative keyword list on a regular basis. Google will show your ads for weird search terms in the beginning, do not panic. Keep on weeding those irrelevant keywords out.
Smart campaign
This campaign might surprise you but we thought of testing it as well. In the past, the smart campaign had worked really worked well for the narrow-targeted campaign. I would suggest you be as precise in your targeting as much you can while providing your products or services in the smart campaign. We also created an urgency in the ad copy
Scaling and performance
Some campaigns were a little slower to pick up compared to others. In terms of picking up the performance, here is the order of the campaigns in their descending order
- Branded campaign
- DSA and,
- Smart campaign
Individual campaign performance
Branded campaign
The branded campaign reached it’s peak to a ROAS of 20X during the month of December. We had no separate ad copies for the month of December or BFCN.
- Branded campaign performance was at its peak in December and ROAS on branded campaign dropped in January
DSA campaign
DSA campaign picked up slowly and is still picking up on month on month basis. The ROAS is the highest as of today on a monthly basis.
- Unlike other campaigns, DSA campaign performance kept on increasing even though we had just 5 products in total from the same product line.
- We used Google Index of the website (SEO) for dynamic search ads
Smart campaign
Smart campaigns were at their peak in the month of December due to the offer that we were running but there was no change in the ad copy either.
- Just like the branded campaign, the smart campaign also peaked up the most in December but the ROAS dropped to 4.21X in January which was still higher compared to the ROAS of 3.56X of December
Case Study Outcome
Amount Spent: ~$1154
Conversion Value: ~$9705
ROAS: 8.41
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