Summary:
EyeBuyDirect, a e-optical retailer, provided a clear goal: ROAS. With previous paid social campaigns, this objective had eluded them. The client was looking to partner with a media agency that could drive ROAS without utilizing a retargeting strategy. After meeting and discussing their goal, Engine Media was entrusted with making sure that positive ROAS was realized.
Goals:
1. We established a goal of 101% ROAS so that, for the first time, the client could reach ROAS positivity from paid social advertising.
2. We added a secondary goal of reducing CPO (cost-per-order) by 30%.
All of this needed to be done by the end of Q4 2016 in order to ensure the client could report back strong numbers that could prove paid social advertising is worth the investment.
Challenges:
1. Paid social is not an intent-based channel and there isn't behavioral targeting available for Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest users who buy glasses.
2. Retargeting could not be utilized and instead had to focus on prospecting.
3. E-optical retailers as a whole have little brand awareness compared to traditional optical retailers and actively are trying to gain share/awareness.
The above challenges needed to be addressed in order to have a successful campaign that could generate meaningful revenue to the client.
The strategy was designed with a six-month sprint in place that examined available data to use to our advantage at every turn. Utilizing Google Analytics and past Facebook/Pinterest data, we could establish benchmarks within key age groups, the gender breakdown, and how many impressions it took a person to go to the site and convert. We identified that the 18-24 year old female demographic could provide the highest ROAS, but it was 25-35 year old females that had the lowest CPO on Facebook. Our targeting began to focus on these demographics while still targeting other age groups and the male audience with a spend that would be beneficial to the client's goals. We rethought the former utilization of detailed targeting interests selected and combined it with new custom audience lookalikes to hone in more precisely to our most desired audience.
On Pinterest, we kept our bids a bit above the average highest bid price in order to win more bids. We examined what pins had the highest close-ups each week, increased the bid price of those pins by 15%, and turned off those that had lower close-ups.
For Instagram, we needed to ensure that the targeting was unique from Facebook and was actually delivering content that fit the platform. Thus, we selected pieces that had an "aesthetic" feel and targeted hip, young audiences with an expressed interest in optics and glasses.
We utilized Google Trends to see how certain keywords like "glasses" and "optometrist" trended on a month-by-month basis, identifying when users were most likely interacting with the product and what rising keywords we could leverage on paid social. We also explored available user data, habits, and behaviour available through Facebook Audience Insights and our social platform representatives to glean insight on how the users would likely interact with the material at any given month or holiday.
Keeping the uniqueness and integrity of each platform was key to our strategy, but it was also important to keep an integrated strategy that would complement across the social platforms. This came into play with identifying pieces that could specifically do well on Facebook that we could reimagine for Pinterest and vice versa. Most notably, we took a high performing cinemagraph and requested a static version that was formatted for a pin. Constant optimization and iteration were the key cornerstones of ensuring that each platform could work together while still providing content that fits in the environment at a competitive price.
From the beginning, the goal was to reach 101% ROAS in order to get the client to be ROAS positive in the paid social channel.
1. ROAS: We delivered an average 141% ROAS across all Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram campaigns. Each respective channel was above the 101% ROAS goal.
2. Cost Per Order: We drove down CPO by 86% from previous buys on Facebook.
3. Qualified Traffic: Drove over 531,000 link clicks across all platforms with almost 9 out of every 10 customer being a new prospect. With paid social, we were able to show that the channel works for both the top and bottom of the funnel by driving prospecting traffic that ended up converting.
4. Targeting-driven engagement: Despite low awareness of e-optical retail brands, we achieved an average 5.5% engagement rate across platforms; including over 158K saves on Pinterest that users can revisit at a later time and a total of over 149MM impressions across platforms.
Through our efforts, we provided stellar results that were able to have a meaningful impact on a rising company that needs their media to be effective in order to grow their business.
