Facebook Ads for E-Commerce Store (Watches)

Performance Marketing Specialist

Facebook Ads

Step-by-Step Process: How This Brand Went From $6,896/month to $57,647/mo in 3 Months with Meta Ads

… while achieving a 544 ROAS%

Overview

I started working with this brand in early December, 2023.

However, we first met around June 2023 when they were referred to me by another client I work with. However, this brand owner had already been burned by a previous media buyer and was hesitant about trying Meta Ads again.

In about 2.5 months, they had spent $20,000 and generated… $12,640 in total.

That’s a 63% ROAS.

Obviously, this explained why they were hesitant about running ads again.

However, there were multiple reasons why I was confident we could turn results around. I’ll cover these in detail in this case study.

And that’s exactly what we did.

Since December 1st 2023 to February 28th 2024, we spent a total of $14,261.94…

… and generated $77,588.38 in sales. That’s a 544% ROAS.

In fact, this client went from averaging around $6,000/mo in sales to $57,000/mo in about 3 months.

Want to learn how we did it?

Read on as I’ll walk you through the step-by-step process in this case study.

Account Audit: What Are We Working With?

As soon as I got access to the account, my immediate goal was to answer one question: why did this brand’s ads fail so hard the first time?

To do so, I rolled up my sleeves and started auditing the account. I broke this audit down into 4 sections.

Conversion tracking

Account structure

Product performance

Ad creative

So let’s get started.

Conversion Tracking

One of the first things I always do with new accounts is to test conversion tracking thoroughly.

You would be surprised how many brands think their tracking is accurate but is far from it. In this brand’s case, I immediately uncovered a red flag.

→ They didn’t have the Conversions API enabled.

Plus, they’re using Shopify so this was a very simple fix that would immediately help improve results.

Account Structure

Now, in my opinion, the account structure is one of the least important things in an ad account.

For newer accounts, I often recommend a simple setup of 1-2 campaigns (scaling and testing) and that’s essentially it.

In this brand’s case, the previous media buyer had drastically overcomplicated things.

Campaigns segmented by funnel stage (lower, middle, top). This used to be common practice a long time ago but is no longer necessary or the best practice.

Campaigns segmented by gender. In this case, the rationale was that there were different watches for men and women. However, there was a bigger issue that we’ll talk about later.

Ad groups segmented by interests, lookalikes, genders, and ages. This is a waste of time and budget as it is not what will move the needle, especially for newer accounts.

Around 4-6 ad groups per campaign. With such a small budget and a +$300 AOV, this would never allow a single ad set to exit the learning phase properly.

In less than 30 minutes, we were able to spot at least 3 low-hanging fruit opportunities to improve our performance.

Product Performance

Remember when I just mentioned there was a bigger issue in the account?

Here it is.

After a quick analysis, we noticed that this brand had one product that accounted for +95% of the brand’s sales. However, the ad budget was equally distributed across all products.

This was a major red flag.

Why wouldn’t this brand focus almost exclusively on the top-selling product? Unless there was a clear reason why this would happen (there wasn’t), the ads should’ve been focused on the top-seller.

Ad Creative

Lastly, the most important element in the campaign: ad creative.

This brand had dozens of studio-quality photos of all their products. The products looked great, and the photos were great too.

However, here’s the kicker.

The brand had not tested a single video in the ad account.

100% of the ads were static banners – that admittedly looked very good but weren’t performing well enough.

So we knew this was the first step we had to take: create videos to showcase the brand’s products.

Account Revamp: What Did We Do?

Now that we had identified all of the ad account’s issues, we got to work.

Retracing our steps, here’s what we fixed.

Conversion Tracking

This was the easiest fix of the entire process.

We simply re-enabled the Conversions API by tapping into Shopify’s built-in Facebook Pixel app.

Took us two minutes to fix and solved a (big) problem.

Account Structure

As for the account structure, we focused on two things.

Doubling down on our proven winners.

Simplifying the account as much as possible.

So here’s what we planned.

1 campaign dedicated to scaling proven winners.

1 campaign dedicated to testing new creative assets (videos and images).

Both campaigns focused exclusively on the top-selling product.

At first, we started only with the creative testing campaign until we found some ads that we could move into the scaling campaign.

Here’s what this looked like.

Each new ad concept was tested in its respective ad group in the ad creative testing campaign.

As soon as we found a winner, we would use the existing post ID to move the ad into the scaling campaign and thus retain any social proof that was generated during this testing phase.

Mapping Out Funnel Metrics

Since we knew we were focusing on the top-selling product exclusively (at least at the start), we first had to calculate this product’s breakeven CPA. We could do so with this calculator (feel free to steal this for yourself)

After filling this spreadsheet out, we gathered that our breakeven CPA (including a 15% profit margin) was $168.

With this knowledge and access to the account’s previous data, we were able to forecast our funnel metrics to understand what wasn’t working on the account.

Here are the account metrics before we started.

CPM: $7.62

CTR: 0.48%

Conversion Rate: 0.15%

With the assistance of another calculator, we could work backwards to figure out which metrics needed to be improved in order to hit an average CPA around $168.

In short:

We needed to double our CTR

We needed to triple our conversion rate

Ad Creative

Since we knew we needed to double our CTR, we focused on shooting and creating new videos focusing particularly on the top-selling product.

But we also knew we had to make the products stand out somehow.

After some research, we found some new ideas to focus on:

This product was endorsed by an A-list celebrity, so we used that as leverage in our ads.

The watch had bioluminescent properties which led to some very cool-looking ads (lights going out and the watch started glowing)

The watch came with an engraved message on the back which users frequently pointed out. So we knew we had to leverage that.

We worked together to create:

Studio-shot product close-ups that could show how beautiful the watches were and highlight the fine details that were missed in the static banners.

UGC video ads shot by the brand’s owner with his own phone to make the ads look more native and authentic in our audience’s feed.

Most importantly, we started working on a content flywheel which would generate us video content consistently in a somewhat automated manner.

We prepared an email flow asking customers for video/photo reviews, in exchange for a free gift.

We partnered with an influencer to start delivering videos to us on a month-to-month basis.

Scaling: From $6,896/month to $57,647/mo in Revenue

As stated before, this brand went from making around $6,896 to $57,647/mo in just under 90 days.

To scale this account, we scaled horizontally by entering new markets such as Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and a few other countries.

In other words, we started scaling horizontally.

To do so, we first started testing each market in its own individual campaign. Once we assessed the performance and identified top performers, we consolidated different countries into fewer campaigns.

For example:

United States, United Kingdom, and Canada

Japan & Singapore

Germany, France, Switzerland

We’re now in the process of scaling each of these campaigns vertically and will likely hit +$100,000 in sales for March.

Recap: The TLDR Version

We fixed tracking by implementing the Conversions API

We re-structured the account by implementing one campaign for testing, and one for scaling.

We used broad targeting only, on all ad sets.

We defined clear KPIs and identified where we were falling short in the funnel.

We created a content flywheel to allow us to generate more video content consistently. Additionally, we planned a new photo and video shoot in a studio to deliver us some new assets.

We scaled horizontally by entering new markets.

Once these markets were proven, we consolidated them into groups of similar countries.