$435k revenue in 4 months – here’s how we did it

Author

Dmitry Fesenko

Date

15 October, 2019

Category

Facebook

Here at AdTribe, customers come to us to get help with their Facebook Ads. Perhaps they want to scale, or get traction when sales have slowed.

In the first of a series of upcoming case studies, we’ll be sharing our stories on how we worked with clients to get the results they needed.

First up, here’s how we helped a client generate $435 000 in revenue in just 4 months for a toy store.

Overview: The client started his business selling miniature 1:3 gun replicas two years ago and had built a decent organic following on Instagram.

The problem he was facing was to scale his business to 7 figures. He knew that it was possible, and that Facebook ads was the right fit for him, but his accounts were constantly shut down.

Also, he couldn’t get a profitable ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) when he started increasing ad spend.

Challenge: AdTribe worked with this client to set a goal of achieving 100k in revenue per month whilst maintaining a profitable level of ROAS (at least 2.5).

The AdTribe Strategy

In order to scale fast, we used a multilevel campaigns structure strategy that helped us to scale whilst we kept the ROAS consistent.

This is what the purchase funnel looked like:

Level 1	Targeting cold traffic (lookalike audiences based on the customer list, FB pixel data and FB page engagers + interest-based audiences) excluding all previous engagers and buyers. Campaign Objectives: Conversions/Engagement/Traffic.
Level 2	Targeting all warm traffic (FB/IG engagers, website visitors). Excluding those, who already made a purchase. Campaign Objective: Conversions.
Level 3	Targeting people who added to cart or viewed website content but didn’t make a purchase. Campaign Objectives: Conversions/Catalog sales.
Level 4	Targeting previous purchasers (cross-sell, up-sell). This clear and simple tactic helps us to engage potential customers, by showing them new products. Campaign Objectives: Conversions/Catalog sales .

Initial steps

Firstly, we made an extensive audit of the client’s ad account and all the assets he had.

The main goal here is to understand what type of creatives and ad copies client was using, so we could understand why his ads were blocked by Facebook.

Next, we looked through the data and analyzed our client’s approach to his whole Facebook ads strategy.

The main insight we found here was that the client didn’t leverage retargeting well and his targeting of a cold audience wasn’t based on his ideal customer avatar.

Market research

After that, we knew where the issues were, we started doing extensive market research.

We worked with the client to define his buyer persona.

For this, we took people from his customer list and searched for their FB profiles in order to get more information about their Age, Gender, Location, Job title, Family size.

Based on this data we created buyer personas.

We assumed that Military/Army/Gamers/Veterans would love this product, so we created ads that talked about a replica collection and mentioning the army.

Knowing more about the prospect we created ads that talked about replica collection and mentioned the Army.

Here are the results we got in the first month of our cooperation.

Amount Spent – $37,113.80

Monthly Revenue –$106,238.48

ROAS – 2.86

Number of Purchases – 1,961

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Challenges

#1: When you try to scale up campaigns, you usually lose valuable ROI. So we needed to make sure we maintained a high ROAS and also scaled the ad spend at the same time.

We did this by using Campaign Budget Optimization campaigns with a different campaign bid strategy (target cost, lowest cost, bid cap). It helped us to scale the budget smoothly.

If you have a large budget and more than 1 million audience, it’s wise to use other objectives than conversion objective to scale.

Therefore, we ran a traffic campaign to the blog post content and engagement campaign by boosting posts from the Facebook page.

Then we were able to retarget blog posts visitors and Facebook post engagers with an offer to buy our products (our level 2).

We used different combinations of lookalike audiences (up to 5-10%). Lookalike audiences allowed us to build on the success of your existing audiences. They enable Facebook to find people similar to those in a “source” audience you choose. This is especially useful when increasing your budget.

Using broad audiences, we tested a broad audience of men aged 55+ without detailed targeting.

Given that the Facebook pixel has a lot of data, the algorithm worked even better in comparison with lookalike audiences.

#2 When we started, we targeted all genders aged 18+, but it appeared that our core buyer with the highest ROAS was men aged 55+, so we started specifically targeting them with ads using review copy.

Tip: Always test. It’s helpful to have your buyer persona at the beginning but only data will tell you whether your assumptions were right.

Another challenge was that we faced a lot of ads being disapproved by FB even though our ads follow the FB policy because they were replica guns.

Mainly our ads are getting disapproved because the algorithm can’t always detect real guns from fake.

We overcame this by adding “Notice: This is a 1:3 model toy with no firing capabilities” to our ad copy, and also appealing to reps for manual review.

#3 We couldn’t use the catalog sales objective for the same reason – ads were disapproved. (Every marketer knows how powerful dynamic ads are, right?)

As a solution, we used manually created carousel ads with their best-selling product:

The results

So how did we do?

By implementing multilevel campaigns structure, CBO campaigns, adding new campaigns with Traffic and Engagement objectives, and using broad audience we managed to maintain high ROAS and scale the ad spend.

Here are the total results for June 1 – September 30, 2019:

Amount Spent – $138,000.84

Revenue –$435,305.98

ROAS – 3.15

Number of Purchases – 7,893