High-performing Facebook Ads campaigns for Black Friday
CASE STUDY
Niche: Home & Garden
Period: 13-15 November 2020 [Black Friday]
Goal: Non-specific
Campaign Optimisation: Conversions*
Conversion Event: Purchase**
We used Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO)***
We are kicking off a new content series from the LEADLION world of Performance Marketing. We want to keep it as practical as possible, built on concrete examples we have implemented ourselves, so we are opening with a recent case study. The focus is a simple but very effective strategy for major e-commerce events such as Black Friday.
The client operates in the Home & Garden niche and came to us with a brief for a Black Friday campaign lasting 3 intense days, from 13 to 15 November. We were not given a specific goal, but we knew we had to deliver the best possible results within the budget the client set. The total budget was 3000 RON for the 3 days of sales, split 50/50 between Facebook and Google. Per platform, that came to 1500 RON for Facebook and 1500 RON for Google, or 500 RON a day.
With the budget agreed, the campaign dates set and the client’s discounts matched to the promoted product ranges, it was time for the strategy.
Our strategy
We chose a very simple strategy, because experience shows us that simple strategies tend to work best.
We started by segmenting the total audience as follows:
- Existing Customers;
- Warm Traffic, excluding buyers recorded by the Facebook pixel;
- Cold Traffic (people who had not interacted with the brand before).
Next, we wanted to work out how to target each of these segments.
- For existing customers, we decided to set up an email campaign, since their details were already in our database (full name, email address and so on). That way we did not have to spend any of the budget telling them about the promotion, which maximised our ROI.
- For Remarketing, we created custom audiences in advance and split them as follows:
- Visitors to the product categories on the site;
- Facebook Engagement;
- View Content (content views);
- Add To Carts (products added to the basket);
- Purchase (completed purchases).
We then segmented them like this:
We grouped the Category Visitors with the Facebook Engagement audience and excluded the View Content audience. We made this choice because we wanted the ad to reach only people who had not viewed a specific product but had interacted with our brand in one way or another.
ATC-PUR: We targeted only people who had added products to the basket but had not completed the purchase. This traffic segment is considered warmer than the rest.
VC-ATC: This audience is made up of everyone who viewed a product on the website but did not add a product to the basket.
Results of this campaign
Over these 3 days of heavy discounts, we invested 875.29 RON at a ROAS (Return on Adspend) of 54.91 and generated total sales of 48064.60 RON.
- The strategic idea behind the Cold Traffic campaign was to take advantage of potential customers’ heightened interest in shopping in November and bring new traffic to our site, which we could then retarget in the months that followed.
The campaign structure looked like this:
We used Lookalike audiences for View Content and AddToCart, because the pixel held enough data on these 2 audiences to build the strongest possible Lookalike. Both audiences also sit fairly low in our sales funnel, which means they are very close to purchase. With a more generous budget for this campaign, we could have tested many more audiences and reached even greater exposure.
From these audiences we excluded all buyers from the last 180 days, as well as the ViewContent audience from the last 30 days. The goal was to reach new traffic that had never interacted with the brand in any other way.
As we expected, the results were not as spectacular as those of the Remarketing campaign. Our efforts were still profitable.
We invested 905.10 RON at a ROAS of 8.21, and the campaign generated 7430.85 RON in sales over the 3 days.
Overall, the Facebook results look like this:
Total investment: 1780.39 RON
Total sales value: 55495.45 RON
Total ROAS: 31.37
*We optimised for Conversions because they mattered most to our client. Facebook is a very good tool for this kind of result and helps us achieve it. Had we optimised for Traffic instead, for example, we would not have seen the same results, because Facebook would have sent us traffic that was not qualified enough to buy a product.
**This is the event we want to optimise for at AdSet level. Purchases are all we care about. That is the result we want, and we want Facebook to deliver it.
***We chose Campaign Budget Optimisation because the account held enough data for us to be confident that Facebook would make the right call and allocate the budget where it knows it can bring us the most sales at the lowest cost. Even so, we took back some control and added a Minimum Spend Limit to each Adset. This guaranteed that every Adset would spend at least 40 RON, with Facebook allocating the rest of the budget wherever the algorithm judged it most efficient. In this way each Adset had an equal chance to spend at least 40 RON.
Important note: the Google Ads campaign was based on the same strategy.
Combined, our efforts delivered:
Sales of 145225.40 RON
Conversion Rate: 2.71%
AOV: 628.68
Transactions: 231
The most important result, though, is a happy client, and we are already looking forward to designing and implementing new successful strategies for them. We hope you found this first case study interesting. Keep an eye on us for more LEADLION best-practice examples.
BOGDAN - Facebook Ads Specialist