Case Study: Beyond the Rack

The Goal

As an e-commerce service, the Q1 goal was to significantly increase the member base through a major spending increase on Facebook. Beyond The Rack looked to AdParlor for a high level of experience in service and technology to efficiently scale their spending and acquisitions for optimal results.

Overview

In Q1, Beyond The Rack wanted to significantly increase their Facebook acquisition efforts, and looked to AdParlor’s experienced platform and operations team to scale those efforts efficiently. AdParlor helped Beyond The Rack see a 784% quarter over quarter increase in sign-ups from Facebook even while decreasing cost per sign-up by 20% – a win-win for Beyond The Rack.

Getting creative, wisely

A collaborative creative approach allowed us to test many different creative concepts and rapidly implement learnings. We quickly found the best performing creative types for Beyond The Rack.

We started by using our proprietary creative tagging software to test all elements of each ad: shoes vs. boots, logo vs. no logo, even testing which background colour performed best. Armed with this detailed testing methodology, we found that boots and footwear outperformed other product types in terms of customer response. We advised Beyond The Rack to mock up a series of targeted footwear ads that would run against their existing footwear sales. This helped us drive qualified buyers that were interested in specific products and brands.

Since the emphasis was on scaling the acquisition efforts, we advised more frequent creative refreshes to keep the ads fresh and relevant: instead of updating images every 5-6 weeks, Beyond The Rack now changed imagery once a week, and instead of lifestyle and clothing images, they were now product-focused. There was also a renewed emphasis on ensuring visual consistency between the ads and the landing page. By keeping creative fresh and up-to-date, we were able to sustain high click-through-rates and continue to drive the efficient volume that Beyond The Rack desired.

We found that by serving both evergreen and sale-specific ads concurrently, we could leverage the granularity in targeting offered by branded sales, along with the scale and reach allowed with evergreens to drive the most efficient overall growth.

Finding the audience

For a campaign focused on user acquisition, it’s critical to reach the audience that’s most likely to be interested in your service. AdParlor’s operations team leveraged our proprietary interest database as well as all the targeting features and functionality natively available on Facebook to reach the users who were most interested in Beyond The Rack’s service.

Facebook’s Custom and Lookalike Audiences products offered opportunities to scale acquisitions in the most efficient manner. AdParlor advised Beyond The Rack on ways to segment their CRM database to leverage Lookalike Audiences based off key member characteristics, including product affinity and purchase behavior.

AdParlor helped Beyond The Rack leverage Facebook Custom Audiences to exclude their entire Facebook user base from their acquisition efforts – wasting no impressions on current users. The acquisition goals were aggressive, and this meant making sure that exclusion list was updated on a week-by-week basis.

We also took advantage of new Facebook targeting options as they emerged, including Website Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences from a conversion pixel.

Getting optimal results

By building a strong relationship with Beyond The Rack, AdParlor was able to advise on budget allocation across creative, date ranges, posts, genders and ages, and placements in order to be nimble in adapting to marketplace trends as they arose. A key result of this budget freedom was Beyond The Rack’s ability to scale mobile web acquisitions. AdParlor, seeing the lower CPC on mobile web was able to significantly lower CPA by shifting resources to the placement.

AdParlor was also able to assist Beyond the Rack with revenue tracking and ROI optimization. During the numerous tests we performed, revenue was consistently tracked and we were able to optimize towards the highest ROI across many dimensions including creative, targeting, landing pages and placement.

AdParlor’s product capabilities and operations team meant that Beyond The Rack’s campaign leveraged the most cutting-edge optimization techniques. Proprietary ad clustering, (aggregating ads across ad sets and campaigns) and rules-based optimization (setting rules across ad sets and campaigns) allowed us to build custom logic tailored to Beyond The Rack’s needs to automate crucial cost-saving actions.

Ultimately, great care was taken to provide the best user experience. By testing different conversion flows, we were able to reduce bounce rates from users on the Beyond The Rack site and get the highest CVR possible. All tests were tracked through Facebook and by reacting quickly to the results, we were able to improve while also being ready to test again, anytime.

How did it turn out?

As a result of collaborating with AdParlor to learn from testing, streamline processes and be creatively adaptable, Beyond The Rack saw an enormous improvement: Q1 saw a 784% increase in total registrations over the previous quarter, even while CPA decreased by 20%. So we were able to scale the acquisition efforts significantly while pay less per user. That’s win-win!

How did AdParlor help?

• We were able to scale registration numbers by 8x while decreasing CPA by 20% Q1 over Q4.
• Worked with Beyond The Rack to open mobile web. The resulting CPA was significantly lower on mobile web, due to much higher CTRs and much lower CPCs.
• We worked collaboratively to open international expansion – which meant being strict about international budgeting and had aggressive CPA goals.
• By using fluid budget management, we were able to spend where it was most efficient across placements to increase ROI.
• Our constant testing and iterating of conversion funnel gave us the knowledge needed to reach the highest CVRs possible – which is important when acquisition goals are high, along with aggressive CPA goals.
• Above all, we provided the expertise and products that were able to improve Beyond The Rack’s business while working closely with them in order to respond to their needs.

The most important thing: a happy client