Facebook Ads Case Study: Designer Clothing Store
How this online clothing store sells £24,911 per month through Facebook Ads.
Through our tailored marketing strategy, we have been able to successfully grow the revenue of this online women’s designer clothing store through Facebook Ads. We managed to turn an ad spend of £5,156 per month, into £24,911 in sales. A Return on Ad Spend (ROA) of 4.83X. See below.
About The Business
This business is a high end clothing store that sources quality, designer products from around the world, with a focus on latin inspiration. They have a physical store in sought after location Chelsea, in London. They already did well in store, but wanted to grow their online sales which were quite low in comparison to store results.
The store owner had been trying Facebook marketing with another agency for 6 months, and while the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) was positive, it was not yielding a positive Return on Investment (ROI) due to the product margins, agency fees, and ad spend.
The client needed to be able to achieve 3.5x ROAS to make profit, and they were currently at a lifetime 3.34x ROA which had rapidly started to decline each week. A reasonably good result from Facebook ads is a 3x ROAS, so this was a trickier situation. But we were still confident we could do better based on the current state of the business, and seeing some missed opportunities we knew would help.
Past Agency Mistakes
After spending time doing a deep dive into the business, the first thing we did was assess the current set up. We immediately noticed some issues:
- Retargeting audiences were tiny and not performing as well as they could be.
- Budgets were spread way too think across ad sets, not giving the algorithm enough room to work.
- Audiences were split out way too much for the budget and scale of the ad account, these are tactics you can use later and don’t make sense for a small account.
- Ads didn’t reflect the brand’s tone of voice. The grammar inconsistent, lots of ‘!’ were used (not very luxury), and one ad even had a reference to buying leather items in veganuary…?
- There were no unique selling points (USPs) in the cold ads at all.
- They weren’t selecting the instagram account in the ads. This doesn’t effect sales but, the client was missing out on growth. You should want the client to get as much as possible out of the money they are spending.
It was clear the previous person knew how to run great ads, but may have been used to huge budgets and potentially not used to luxury products, and they didn’t adjust their tactic accordingly. Essentially, they were trying a little too hard with the strategy, and it needed to be simplified.
Despite all of this, they had managed to maintain a lifetime ROAS of 3.34x over the 6 months they worked with the client. To be fair this was skewed by a couple really good random weeks. This is actually a good result for Facebook, but this client needs a minimum of 3.5x to see a return on their ads. This is because of ad spend, a lower margin, and fees.
Where Did We Start?
The first thing we did was fix up the retargeting. We created a staggered approach, with longer time intervals. Immediately sales started rolling in. Next, we started our rigorous testing phase to find out which audiences would work best, and what USPs would work well with this client.
Once we had our test results, we went ahead with two winning audiences, and created some great ads based on what we had learnt.
Our Challenges and Mistakes
Initially our new ads would do amazingly well for a few days, and then all of a sudden they would die. That’s when we came across our first challenge. The core of the business was to provide exceptional, unique, designer garments. The products are very high priced, and the ‘unique’ factor means only stocking a limited amount of each item. Usually 1-2 in each size. We soon worked out that due to the low stock of the items, creating winning ads that last over time was unrealistic, because the items would sell out very quickly or would often not have the size left available for the viewer.
Another challenge faced, was the low site conversion rate. Due to the low stock, but also due to the high prices. People would often love an item, click-through, and quickly leave upon seeing the price. Other times they would leave seemingly due to being sold out in their size (we had software installed to view what was happening on site which was how we knew these issues). The website itself also needed some changes to be better optimised and improve the conversion rate.
What We Did
There were a few things that helped us get this client where they needed to be. A few of those things were:
- Finding the right formula for dynamically updating ads for the cold audience to keep up with products selling out.
- Adding in a middle of funnel step, where we could create product focused ads around what was new.
- Staggering some ads in the bottom of funnel retargeting, across different time frames.
- Had out team assess the website overall, and make recommendations for changes. Once implemented, we saw a lift in the conversion rate.
- We also added things to the copy to pre-qualify traffic, such as the price of the items and that they were limited in stock.
Our Results
We have been working with the client for just over 4 months now, and have a lifetime ROAS of 4.46x. Already much better than the previous agency. For the last 30 days, we have managed a 4.83x ROAS. A total of 1.33 more than the target set for us by the client. Turning just £5k spend, into £25k.
Client feedback
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