Facebook Ads Case Study: How We Took 1 Dead eCommerce Funnel, Made A Few Simple Tweaks, And Turned It Into A $500k Per Month Business...

My team and I recently had had the privilege to work with a pretty unique concept ecommerce startup - Waft.  The Singapore-based brand offers personalised, high-quality perfume. 

While the product was interesting to say the least, the sales just weren’t there.

When we first started working with Waft, they were doing about 8-10 sales per day and it was costing them over $100 per sale (on a $100 product)... ouch! 

Less than two months in and we managed to turn that ship around, taking Waft from petty and horrible FB ad results to half a million dollar monthly revenues from $100K ad spend! 

I don't know about you, but that's pretty a pretty good ROI for ecommerce!!

I’m about to walk you through exactly how it was done. I’ll show you where we ran ads, how different traffic sources performed, what had the biggest impact on the success of the campaign, and what I’d do differently next time.

Pre-Facebook Ad Campaign... 

Before the rollout of new Facebook campaigns, we ran a full audit on the Waft ad account.

Following the audit, the final step before going live with any campaign rollouts was to do a full “secret shop” of the user experience to ensure the funnel itself and buyer journey was ready for conversions. 

 
In our initial findings for this we discovered that the brand used a lot of fancy language in ads (which typically don’t lend well to direct response copywriting).  
 
We also found that the flow to purchase was a little jolting a confusing from the initial sales page into the product customisation phase and that perhaps the brand would be better off to take a gamification approach here. 
 

 

The Campaign... 
Now that the funnel and campaigns had been properly assesed and that the brand was ready for traffic, it was time to go live with the campaigns. 

Previously, the brand had run all of it's geographical targeting under the same ad account, before we launched any of the new campaigns, we split up each country into new ad accounts.  There's a couple reason why we did this:

1. Splitting budgets into different ad accounts allows for easy and fast scale 
2. Splitting the campaigns across the different accounts diversified the risk (ie: if one ad account gets shut down for whatever reason, it doesn't completely stop or stunt the sales)
3. Protecting the pixel data - each country would have different audiences and data, different accounts cleans up the reporting and the pixel data

The Objective 

We were tasked with increasing sales and driving down the down per acquisition from $100 to under $30. 

We also recognised the huge importance in building a warm retargeting audience that could later be tapped into. 

The Hook 

Because Waft was selling personalised perfumes - we decided to use the gamification angle in the creative - using copy such as "What's your personalised scent, "Play Now". 

We also split out interest and behavioural targeting down to individual interests to identify the pockets that would work with the brand. 

And here's an example of one of the landing pages it directed traffic to - you can see here, it's less of a sales page and more of a "game", inviting users to put themselves into the funnel and discover their own unique scent. 
The Funnel 

We started off using a PPE (page post engagement) campaign and video campaign to the cold audience to build up a large and healthy custom audience that could be used for retargeting.  From there we split up the retargeting groups (Days 1-5, Days 6-10 etc) and encouraged them to pick up their customised bottles. 

We used placements like right hand column and desktop but the clear winner for conversions was Instagram.  
The Results 
The single biggest change was "tidying" up the ad accounts, optimisations and improving the user experience to stabilise sales and drop the cost per conversion- the secret sauce was adding the gamification element, which allowed for mass scale. 

2,715 sales from a $94,000 ad spend - resulting in $500,000 in revenue resulting in an average cost per sale of $34! 
The brand continues to scale and grow and is estimated to hit over $1million in revenue in the next six months. 

While the brand continues to scale and grow and is on track for $1M/month revenues it's important to mention here the fact that we were offering a quality product with a proven history of sales. That’s important. If you’re trying to sell something that no one wants or that just isn’t good, it really doesn’t matter how good your ads are.

We can't wait to see what our next ecommerce client brings in! 


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P.S. - if you're skimming and just wanted to see what the offer was... you can request a free strategy call to have myself and my team personally audit your business and ad campaigns and advise on how to scale and succeed with FB ads!

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