21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC

November is said to be one of the toughest trading months of the year for online retailers
and also potentially the most lucrative. But we implemented a winning formula that works for
us all year round - except the results were magnified!

We first spoke to the client in August and their challenge was to significantly increase YOY
sales and drive them up from 7-figures to deliver an 8-figure revenue within a 6 month time
period. And also whilst maintaining a cold audience ROAS of above 5X, and blended ROAS
(with retargeting) above 10X. For a $200 AOV product this was a tall order but they had
some ingredients already in place: a great product and great understanding of their
customer.

The store sold ski and snowboarding apparel/gear with AOVs in the $200 range. Store
owner, Linus, ran ads himself previously but with a growing team and customer demand,
wanted to bring an agency on board to take over and to accelerate growth and put the
challenge to the team at ​SM Commerce​.

Here’s the low-down of what we achieved:

● $7M+ revenue with just $340K in ad spend (21X ROAS) in November alone
● An early launch Thanksgiving Thursday promotion with 48X ROAS turning $5K
spend into $240K+ in sales revenue
● Generating over $15M revenue in 3 months

And for those that are impatient to read here’s the summary:
● LOTS of fast testing in September to find audience and ads that worked
● Found winners and scaled confidently
● Scaled hard whilst maintaining super low CPMs ($5-10 in Q4) and a decent website
conversion rate (3-4%)
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● Unleashed a CBO scaling strategy with big success and 5-figure daily spends
● Completely smashed Black Friday with a pre-launch promotion delivering 48X ROAS

For those that want to unpick the details, let’s jump in! Below are the 9 biggest takeaways
we took from this crazy campaign.

1: THE FACEBOOK ADS SECRET SUCCESS SAUCE

Old fashioned marketing; the secret sauce to sustainable, fast-growth with Facebook ads.

Obvious? Great you’re ahead of many Facebook ads marketers struggling to create
consistent results.

The barrier of entry to advertise on Facebook is so low, that simply boosting a page post
allows anyone to advertise. Realistically, how many of your Page posts would qualify as an
ad that addresses pain points, understands your avatar and creates a hook good enough to
generate a click let alone a sale?

At the core of the most successful Facebook ads campaigns is creative marketing. It’s one of
the key pillars that need to be in place in order to be able to scale a campaign to the moon.
And it doesn’t need a big budget or a marketing degree to get good at marketing either.
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Facebook advertising is a lot about shifting states - if a user is on the Facebook platform
(and by this, I mean any Facebook owned platform you can advertise on including
Instagram) then they are not there to buy. It’s the same principle as TV - who actually
watches a TV show waiting for the ads? But as with TV, Facebook users have accepted ads
as part of the experience.

Can you scale a campaign with sub-par creative execution? Sure. Can you sustain it,
unlikely. Facebook place big emphasis on the user experience; as an advertiser you cannot
ignore this.

Facebook introduced Relevance Score in 2015 to grade your ads in the auction and followed
it up with User Feedback in 2018, allowing Facebook users to rate a store’s buying and post
purchase experience. A way of further grappling with poor quality user experiences and
ultimately leading to account bans.
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With this Ecommerce store however, both brand image and user experience were core
elements of the outward message we wanted to reflect to potential customers. We wanted to
evoke the feelings of coolness, community and FOMO (fear of missing out) that the store
exudes. This representation of how people could feel owning the product leads to DESIRE;
people feel like they NEED what you sell.

Every project we begin starts by looking at the business with a marketing lens, starting with
researching the niche and competition, building an avatar and testing the angles and
propositions.

For an early stage business there is more guesswork involved in building an avatar but in
particular we use the 5W Avatar Model to uncover, in particular, emotional angles we can
play on, functional benefits we can reinforce and most importantly, to uncover objections.

Those objections combined with appealing towards the emotional, irrational benefits of what
you’re selling are a crucial way of cutting through the noise.

Once we knew via research and testing that the biggest motivator was the experience of
being on the slopes and the biggest trigger being the bright colours and lifestyle images,
everything else was built around this and their functional benefits.
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2: THE 21X PRIMER: FAST BITE-SIZED TESTING

With the creative direction for this store we kept things super simple and typically looked for
3 key elements - brand, personality and environment. We wanted a focus on the brand
experience itself, the essence of the creative had to FEEL something - cool, fun, intriguing,
and it needed to be clear that the brand was a snow/ski apparel brand, which we achieved
through use of environment.

Here’s how we approached testing using the Graduation Framework:

1. The basic account structure at this stage was a COLD campaign for prospecting and
HOT campaign for retargeting those that had visited but not purchased. Our testing
approach uses a Campaign designed for testing and another designed for scaling.
Once a full account structure is setup, we introduce a set of WARM campaigns
(targeting those that have engaged in an ad, video, page, etc. but not yet clicked)
and an EXISTING customer campaign to focus on LTV (lifetime value). However in
the early stage, the simpler the setup, the better.

A typical mature account thus follows the below setup:

1. COLD (prospecting)
2. WARM (engaged - video views, IG/FB engagers, email etc)
3. HOT (retargeting - web traffic, view content, add to cart)
4. EXISTING (retention - past purchasers, cross sell)

We created a launch plan based on historical data found within Facebook and
Google Analytics combined with our understanding of shifting market trends within
the sector. This meant we broke out our COLD prospecting campaigns into 9 core
countries initially with the goal of finding breakout winners to scale.
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We also split out our HOT DPA campaigns in the same way which gave us greater
flexibility over the product sets we promoted and translations per country.

2. We initially tested 12-16 creatives across 3-5 different audiences in ONE country (a
range of Interest based audiences and LAAs) using rules to pause ads once a certain
impressions threshold was met. For this particular store the best correlation was
between cost per ATC (Add To Cart) and CPA/ROAS. Therefore, ATC was our lead
metric to benchmark performance.

With the initial round of testing we were looking to consolidate the 12-16 creatives
down to 6-8 by finding our strongest set of creative/copy pairings across the 3-5
audiences.

With our strongest 6-8 creatives, we tested against a range of different seed
audiences:

- Interest based
- Broad targeting
- Lookalikes based on all stages of the funnel

As with our initial round of testing, we found that 50-70% of the creatives had a good
audience fit but it’s NOT always the same 50-70% for different audiences. If an
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audience had less than a 50% creative/audience match, we looked into the specific
creatives that are working and create some variations.

If that does not create better results, the audience is simply no good and we scrap it.
It’s important to understand that groups of people in your audience may need
different creative messages to nudge them into taking action on your ad which is why
we test lots of ad variations for any given ad set.

3. Through testing we discovered that high contrast close ups gave us the best
performance for good front end metrics - but don’t be tricked into thinking CTR
(clickthrough rate) is of importance when it comes to profiting and scaling - many of
our best ads had a CTR of 0.8-0.9% which you might consider poor - yet our ROAS
hitting 10-20X would tell you otherwise.

Instead, we initially focussed testing on getting a good cost per Initiate Checkout (IC)
and in particular, testing creatives with up to 5,000 impressions. If we got a sale, we
knew we were on to a winner.

With our CPM (cost per thousand impressions) at around $5 that meant we could test
each ad with $25 - with an average order value (AOV) of around $200 and
generating 1-2 sales we knew we had a strong signal of success from the start using
the Graduation Testing Method.

This is a core secret to ads that get attention and have action taken - using a series
of techniques, such as a face looking directly at the user in the newsfeed or stories,
using high contrast images which ‘pop’ and testing to find the best ad formats for
each set of videos and images we had. Just don’t focus too heavily on CTR and look
further down the funnel for a measure of the quality of traffic. I’d take low CTR and
high conversion rates all day long!

4. We implemented the 3N Ads Formula, which is derived from the AIDA marketing
principle: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. The 4-steps to taking your prospect
from not being aware of your business, to creating that desire in them to take action.
It’s the model I’ve been using for many years and still surprises me that people are
not aware of it.
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We use a concept built from this called the 3N Ads Formula - at the core, there are
only 3 things we’re interested in achieving for an ad:

- STOP users from scrolling past our ad

- ENGAGE them in our ad to read, watch, and take an interest
- CONVERT them into an action

You goal is to nudge them (hence the 3Ns) from one state to the next. Whilst I’m a
big believer in balancing great copy with great creative, I can also confirm that strong
visual creative far outweighs copy. Take a look at the example below which is one of
our strongest performing ads. We tried multiple copy variants, short and long, using
various types of ‘best practice’ copy templates and none of them beat this version.
Why? Because the copy didn’t matter ​as much as the visual.​ This ad stopped people
in their tracks and said a 1,000 words more than we could write. The power of
brand-led performance marketing right here.
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That said, bad copy would have taken this ad the other way - "BUY NOW EMOJI
EMOJI up to 60% off" would not have worked for this store. This is the approach
taken by many novice store owners trying to get users to click at any cost - quality of
clicks matters more than quantity as we saw with low CTR and high website
conversion rates.

5. Through the Graduation Testing Method we concentrated on high output testing.

Each ad set had around $50-$150 per day for testing. The idea was to test fast and
test at scale. With up to 5K impressions, we knew if we had a winner based on sales.

But in many cases, 2K impressions was enough to allow us to gauge success based
on cost per ATC as a proxy for likely success.

We tested formats (carousel, static, videos, collections) as well as various stylised

shots (single man, single woman, two men, two women, a man and woman, various
garments, colours, poses etc.). With this rapid based testing you can churn through
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many variants at low cost before ‘graduating’ the winners to test if you can replicate
the same with higher spend. In pretty much all cases, this worked as expected.

We started the above in September with fast testing and a goal of scaling aggressively for
Christmas and peak Q4. At that point the store was already doing 6-figure months in
revenue but we needed to 20X that quickly!

Ideally, you’d enter September having already spent months testing and building up your
creatives and audiences so this isn’t a recommended strategy to start so late heading into
Q4! For reference, the budget was around 90% testing, 10% retargeting, with the test budget
reduced as we found winners and started to scale up, leaving around 20% for testing, and
the rest split between scaling and retargeting.
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3: THE LOW CPM TRICK TO MAXIMISE ROAS

An important update Facebook made in early 2018 was to shift to ‘meaningful interactions’
as a way of measuring post engagement. This meant posts which asked people to comment,
or posts which Facebook deemed as low quality were penalised in favour of posts that
gained quality engagement in the form of more than one word comments, with threaded
replies amongst other things.

However, one shift that many missed was the impact on Page engagement - it’s a common
tactic of low quality advertisers to create new Pages and start running ads against them with
little regard for the page. In reality, a legit business is going to go to some lengths to ensure
their Page is of good quality, sharing regular content and growing their fans following in a
predictable way.

In every ad account we worked with the past 12 months, those with high, organic
engagement (using ads to promote the better content for higher reach) attracted a lower
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CPM. Whilst this alone doesn’t guarantee a low CPM, it’s certainly a tried and tested way of
ensuring your CPMs and thus profitability remain strong.

We use the GC10X Method to bring about better CPMs - testing potential page posts as ads
for high engagement and pushing the best into the Page and supporting with ad spend to
further help reach because of Facebook’s shift towards meaningful engagement. Don't look
for posts to simply create likes, shares and comments, but whether it enhances the User's
experience on Facebook..

Facebook rewards high engagement right now more than simply gaining likes on the post. In
the example above we tested 3 posts via ads to fans with about the same spend (about
$100) - the results were clear that the middle post gained far more traction, not just in likes
but in comments. It captured people’s imagination and gained virality through the copy
together with an amazing video of a skier balancing a ski on one foot before slipping it back
on whilst skiing on one left; totally impressive in execution all round!
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4: ​SCALING PREDICTABLY & PROFITABLY

Going back before Q1 of 2018, the scaling techniques we used were more focussed on
H-Scaling (horizontal scaling through duplicating ad sets and segmenting into age, gender,
placements, devices, etc. with higher budgets). However, Facebook changed the game with
the algorithm favouring ad set history and stability around Q1 2018 - including changing the
previously required 25-30 conversions per week for a given ad set running a Conversion
campaign objective, to now requiring a minimum of 50.

Our approach for scaling with this account was initially looking at V-Scaling (scaling budgets
up), which Facebook again made another update with allowing you to bump budgets up by
40% per day without affecting the learning phase, or so Facebook say. We bumped 30% per
day using these rules:

We’re big fans of Revealbot but you can likely set this up using Facebook’s built-in rules
engine or other software. The idea with this rule is, with our ROAS goal for COLD
(prospecting) ads at 5x minimum ROAS, to scale automatically at 7am each morning by 25%
if the above rules are met. We’re looking at yesterday’s performance and the average of the
last 3-days being positive before scaling up - we noticed when frequency was higher than 2
over 3 days performance would start to drop so we included this as a fail-safe.

It’s a steady and slow way of scaling, but it was readying us for faster growth. It’s a key part
of the GT-CBO Method which you’ll read about shortly - it’s the bridge between the
fast-iterative testing and being able to scale harder.

When testing since we usually test higher funnel optimisation events like ATC or IC, scale
testing is using these plus the Purchase event to see which yields the best performance. For
a $200 AOV product, often optimising for IC works better - it’s very close to the Purchase
pixel event, so you get high quality, in-market people from your audience, but it’s often
cheaper. Sales are then pulled in through retargeting.
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However for this account, despite it being a high AOV store, we found the Purchase event
brought the best ROAS - with our low CPMs, high relevance scores and 3-4% website
conversion rates we had the right foundations to scale this hard.
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5: GEO SCALING FOR FASTER GROWTH

Whilst not all Ecom stores can scale into multiple locations, many are probably not taking
advantage of the opportunities to test new markets. In our case, we were able to work with
the store owner in markets that they had translation capabilities in but also to test and
validate new markets using English ad copy, website and the Euro currency as our main
target was to scale in Europe.

A key part of our strategy was to implement our testing process, whilst learning which ads,
creatives, copy, CTA would work in different markets. It’s a marketing fact that cultural
differences do lead us to react differently to creative and copy. So don’t assume that a
country has failed because those killer ads from your lead market didn’t work. Do your
research - especially by spying on ads from competitors in that new market using the Info &
Ads link on their Page (thanks Facebook!).

Our preference is to split key markets into separate campaigns mainly so we can test local
differences and also test local language ads for markets that showed greater traction.
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One Facebook tool that did help with scaling was implementing dynamic language ads -
allowing us to write an ad in up to 5 different languages - very useful for retargeting, despite
the downside of not being able to bulk up social proof or analyse the ads at an individual
level. When you’re scaling to 20-30 different countries, every optimisation matters.

The other tip is to use a catch-all Worldwide retargeting campaign, to capture sales in
countries you might be attracting visitors from organically via your Page or through small
spends in prospecting campaigns.
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6: HIGH ROAS CREATIVE USING MIND HACKS

Throughout testing we aim to ensure we don’t take our opinions or ideas from other
accounts into new campaigns which may cloud our judgement. Instead, we’re always testing
with audiences to see which ad format and creative work best and letting data dictate our
decisions; with this account it was Collection Ads that blew the roof off of performance - to
the tune of ​$153k in ad spend in November alone​.

This ad format delivered a performance-driven ad experience that still felt lifestyle and brand
focused. After testing core elements and refining our approach, below are the learnings that
allowed us to deliver a HUGE​ 8.6x ROAS​ with COMPLETELY COLD TRAFFIC using
Collection Ads alone.

Some key insights into getting Carousel ads to work:

1. Format is important.

The type of creative you use and how it is formatted plays a big role in performance
across the different platforms. With Instagram, we were restricted to 1:1 square
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format collection ads, but on Facebook we found that the type of photography we use
typically lends itself much better to vertical format (4:5) and this was generally
reflected in the performance of collection ads on facebook when compared to square.

2. Intuition sometimes trumps purchase insights

Collection ads give you the ability to curate the HERO products displayed within the
ad. What you choose to display in these 3 or 4 spots will have a massive impact on
CTR and potentially other metrics further down the funnel, so naturally it makes most
sense to reserve these spaces for your bestsellers right? WRONG.

We found through extensive testing that for us, high contrast products yielded much
better front end metrics, had better relevance scores by 1-2 points and resulted in a
much lower cost per ATC and higher ROAS. Take a look at the ads above - the ad on
the left shows high contrast products below the hero against our best sellers on the
right - which of the two ads draws your eye better?

3. Social proof and engagement is KING!

One of the downsides to running the collection ad format is that it is not possible to
share the POSTID between Ad Set for a specific ad. Well, we found a way to do this
and we’re pretty sure nobody else knows about this little hack! We’ll be releasing a
video on this soon!

4. Ad fatigue is real
When scaling this aggressively you will need to have multiple winning creatives that
you can rotate once performance starts to dip. Many marketers preach a creative
burn approach which just isn’t scalable i.e run 1 single creative (perhaps with
multiple dupes) until a point of diminishing returns.

We prefer to keep performance as optimal as possible by rotating creative frequently

as required. We aimed to have 8+ pieces of creative in any given scaling campaign
with 3 active. As soon as performance dips a little or is showing downward
momentum, simply rotate out for something else. Doing this allows for your creative
to last much much longer - you can even pause ads that drop in performance and
restart them again 2-3 weeks later as new people are targeted in your audience and
old ads that may have become wallpaper, are forgotten.
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7: UNLEASHING THE GT-CBO METHOD

Facebook introduced Campaign Budget Optimisation late 2017, into 2018 and at first, it felt
like a way for Facebook to take even more control of your spend but perhaps not to your
benefit. Indeed it took us many months to be convinced this was worth using. However, the
truth is, whilst CBO is a decent feature, it’s not the tool that counts but how you use it.

What we discovered was:

1. CBO was not good for simply testing ads. We initially tested CBO as a way of
replacing elements of our Graduation Testing techniques. But it wasn’t stable enough
in sending spend into the right ads. We couldn’t align our objectives with what CBO
was delivering.

2. CBO wasn’t a catch-all solution to drop multiple ad sets and ads expecting to scale
up. Again it didn’t give us stability.

3. CBO was unpredictable without manual overrides, in our case, pausing bad ads and
ad sets.

So, if CBO was so volatile how were we able to scale CBO campaigns to $5-10K spend per
day whilst delivering consistent results? And to do this in Q4 when CPMs were rising whilst
maintaining high ROAS?
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We figured out a winning formula. Here’s our approach, which has been tested across
multiple stores and works every time:

1. Use Graduation Testing to find the winning ad sets and ads

2. Push those winners into Scaling campaigns to ensure the ‘graduation’ was
successful aiming for 10+ sales with strong ROAS

3. Take the winning ad sets/ads and push them into a CBO campaign
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This 3-step formula is the core of the GT-CBO Method. However, the devil is of course in the
detail:

1. CBOs work best from our testing when ad sets are grouped - in the image above you
can see we’ve grouped campaigns with similar size lookalikes (1%, 1-2% etc) and
also pushed Interests and campaign specific ad sets (in this case Black Friday) into
separate campaigns. More recently we’ve also pushed retargeting (HOT) campaigns
into CBO with good success

2. We also found that using 1 day optimisation window gave us far better stability and
consistency than 7d. Our guess is that since the budget is spread across ad sets, the
7-day look back to optimise for performance is not required as the conversions data
is also held at Campaign level, not just Ad Set and so keeping the data ‘fresh’ counts
for more. This has held true on AOVs from $20 up to $300 across multiple accounts

3. We implemented automated rules to cut bad performing ads, allowing Facebook to

push budget into other ads - we would also add in new ads to ad sets that ended up
with no ads running. We usually ran no more than 3 ads per ad set and a minimum of
5 and max of 10 ad sets with spends of $500+. It’s important to note budgets didn’t
matter because our rules kicked out bad ads and let good ones run.

4. CBOs worked better with higher budgets, which makes sense since you’re splitting
into multiple ad sets and multiple ads. By moving tested ad sets and ads into normal
campaigns after Graduation Testing we’d see if we could scale them using traditional
techniques first, then scale via CBO with higher budgets. You need enough budget to
allow Facebook to push all your permutation of ad sets and ads into the auction - it
will learn over time where best to push the spend.

5. In addition because the auction competition fluctuates daily this gives us the best of
both lifetime budgets, which won’t spend if you’re not likely to get good performance,
and normal scaling because we could pause out bad ads and funnel the spend into
the best ad sets and ads.

6. The final tip is to go for Highest Value or Lowest Cost optimisation. Put simply, it
does exactly what it says - to get you the best ROAS and/or lowest cost.
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And in case you’re wondering - ​there was no manual bid in sight ​whilst scaling​ ​as we used
the GT-CBO Method to shoot right through Q4 to 8-figures. Why? How?

We truly believe if you can line up a strong creative campaign, keep CPMs low, maintain a
strong website conversion rate with fast-loading pages and high funnel conversion,
Facebook ​will​ reward you with the best Users in the auction. If you keep the User happy, you
keep Facebook happy.

Manual-bid is a way of by-passing the auction constraints when your user experience (ads
and sales funnel) are not good enough or if you feel your ‘offer’ (ad and landing page) are
better than Facebook thinks it is and you want to override Facebook’s auto bidding to reach
more people in your audience. It’s a good idea to try outbid competitors using manual-bid if
you’re certain your ads are going to work - if not, you’ll simply end up burning through your
budget.

We’re big advocates of manual bidding and have used it multiple times to scale up
significant spends and revenues since introduction around 2015. However, it is no longer our
preferred or go-to scaling strategy when we have figured out a strong match between our
ads and audiences together with favourable CPMs using the techniques mentioned here and
of course the GT-CBO Method. Will we manual bid in future? Yes, when the time and place
requires it.
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8: 16X ROAS ON COLD TRAFFIC​ THROUGH BLACK FRIDAY

If the amazing performance above wasn’t enough, how about a 1600% ROAS for Black
Friday? That’s $16 back for every $1 we put into Facebook ads spend without even factoring
in retargeting sales!

Whilst we couldn’t predict how well the campaign would run, the success was by design. We
did this in Q4 of 2017 as we did it each year before that. Not at this level of ROAS of course
which requires many things to come together including low CPMs, a super slick sales funnel
that converts highly and ads that cut through the noise. Oh and of course a product that
creates DESIRE.

To give us the best chance of success when it came to black Friday A LOT of testing and
planning went into it.

We mapped out a detailed plan, which included: our testing schedule, a killer lead gen
campaign (more on that below) and pre-planned campaign structure. We cannot stress the
impact this had on the success of Black Friday for this store. With experience comes
planning for success and that’s exactly what we did.

For our audiences we picked out Custom Audiences (based on segmented emails, video
views, engagement with the Page, IG, posts etc) and Website Custom Audiences (based on
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visits to pages in our funnel) extended them out as far as we could (180 days in most cases).
We also created lookalikes of these from 1-10%, testing the smaller lookalike percentages
and if they were profitable we then tested larger percentages because Facebook is far easier
to scale with larger audiences.

Our initial goal was to find out ahead of time what our hero promotional mechanic was going
to be. For this we set up a series of A/B tests targeting existing customers using Facebook’s
Split Test feature - we used existing customers as it removed the bias of whether they’d like
the product or were interested in our vertical. We were interested in testing 3 different offers:

A: Up to X% off sale section

B. A special Black Friday exclusive bundle
C: X% off a specific bestseller

Our initial findings showed a much closer resemblance in performance between Offers A &
C, with Offer C slightly edging it across the board. We were not entirely convinced with the
outcome and waited a few days for delayed attribution to kick in. The subsequent results
were quite different - Offer A had the lowest cost per ATC ($0.35), lowest CPA ($1.74),
100% more sales than Offer C and a staggering 87X return on ad spend!

This is why it is important to give yourself as much time as possible to test. This is ​especially
important for stores that have higher ticket products ($200 AOV in this case), where the
consideration phase and thus attribution window is typically longer, which means delayed
attribution plays an important factor on analysis and decision making.

This together with creating campaign specific CBOs helped us scale fast on Black Friday
and maintain that momentum.
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9: THE THANKSGIVING 48X ROAS TRICK

Our lead gen campaign generated a bombastic 48X ROAS on Thanksgiving Thursday whilst
others waited until Black Friday to go big. Curious how we did it?

We blended a key FOMO tactic with our past knowledge of purchasing habits around Black
Friday:
1. Within apparel, selling out of your size during sales is the worst thing that could
happen
2. GOOD products will always sell out quickly during Black Friday.

We thus created hype around our Black Friday sale and gave customers and our retargeting
list a chance to get access to the sale privately before the public launch.This essentially
meant running a ‘below the line’ promotion to anyone on the email list before pushing the BF
offers live to a prospecting audience on the Friday. This method can work for any event
throughout the year such as Valentine’s or Easter.

Here is what we did.

1. Publicised the upcoming Black Friday sale with a sign up link to access the sale 24
hours early

2. Got our influencers to build some hype around the event and post about the
upcoming sale.

3. Launched several lead gen campaigns targeting a range of EXISTING, HOT and
WARM audiences
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4. Our goal was to maximise potential reach. With such a small amount of time to create
impact (We launched the Monday of Black Friday week), it was important to have all
the placements covered (selecting All Placements). If we’d gone too soon we’d have
lost engagement in the lead up to BF so timing was important

5. We optimised for impressions to ensure we had as many eyeballs on our activity as

possible.

This resulted in an overall ROAS from the campaign of 48X ROAS from an ad spend of
about $5K dollars for lead gen resulting in $241K worth of revenue!

Using Facebook ads for lead gen to pull cheap (quality) leads into your email sequence to
close them works for Ecommerce and should be part of your marketing mix especially
around promotions as it’s easier to grab the email based on a promotion, then do the
DESIRE based selling via email to close them into a sale. Email here becomes the bridge
between Awareness and Interest, and Desire and Action.
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FACEBOOK’S EVOLVING - WILL YOU KEEP UP?

As Facebook adapts to external factors the one constant to big success is focussing on a
great User experience - because Facebook will always reward you for keeping their Users
happy. This involves testing to find the right triggers for your audience and getting them from
a passive state to creating desire which leads to action.

Conquering both the art and the science of Facebook marketing is the core of a high-scale,
profitable campaign like this.

Managing fulfillment and logistics is one of the biggest challenges own label Ecommerce
stores have, which makes dropshipping so much more attractive. But when you can own the
brand experience from end to end and create products like no other, that’s when you’re able
to create true blue ocean opportunity and stay ahead of the competition.

Facebook does require tactical shifts every few months as the platform matures and adapts,
however most of what we do is based on marketing principles first then platform strategies
and tactics second.

The biggest areas to focus on to win big with Facebook ads right now:

- Lots of testing to nail down your ideal customer and breaking down their barriers to
purchase using persuasive marketing techniques and well thought out creative and
copy.

- Better, meaningful Page engagement to attract lower CPMs.

- Using a structured approach to testing and scaling audiences and ads to create
repeatable, predictable success to keep feeding your scaling goals.

- Ensuring your sales funnel is fast and slick because Facebook reward you for this
with improved costs and reach.

- Experimenting with which scaling and profitability levers work for you business
because rarely does one-size fit all.

- Above all, a product or service that actually solves a problem or enhances customers’
lives and figuring out how to get the message across to your prospects to create
DESIRE whilst making it easy and informative to buy (and repurchase in future).
21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC

Big thanks to Linus and his DOPE team out in Sweden including the unsung heroes in
customer care, fulfillment and marketing - the years of hard work in brand and product
discovery you guys put in enabled SMC to come in and do the easy part to scale up.

And HUGE appreciation and thank you to the SMC team involved in landing this incredible
performance: Dan (Strategist), Arnas (Media Buyer), Kate (Account Manager) and Ayah
(Facebook Partner).

About SMC
SMC is a Marketing agency focussed on delivering client growth through the Facebook Ads
platform. We believe in a balance between both Art and Science of advertising; being highly
skilled technicians we blend traditional marketing with cut-through advertising campaigns to
help 7-figure businesses generate higher, profitable revenues through Facebook, Instagram
and other Facebook owned advertising platforms.

The agency is headed up by CEO Depesh Mandalia who leads with his 15 years digital
marketing experience having previously held positions as Chief Marketing Officer in VC
backed startups. Depesh leads the team at SMC to help SMC’s clients deliver their genius to
the world through Facebook advertising.

Depesh also leads a thousands of entrepreneurs and marketers in his Facebook community,
regularly consults for Facebook and speaks on global stages. His training courses and
coaching programs have helped bring big success to students around the world.

You can find out more or enquire about our services here:

SMC: ​www.smcommerce.co.uk

Depesh Mandalia: ​www.depeshmandalia.com

For any questions related to this case study please ask in ​Depesh’s Facebook Ads group​.