PP In Depth Case Study

CRO AOV Sitewide Metrics (ROAS/CPA) TikTok

This year has been quite the ride and full of obstacles. With the early onset of iOS 14 brands started to suffer due to ambiguous tracking. With definitely felt the impact our brand PokepetShop. (Show Yearly Rev Chart)

At the start of the year we were focused in on running ads through Facebook, but it quickly became difficult to scale profitably (whereas it was so easy previously). 

We were forced to reduce ad spend month by month which resulted in much lower revenues. By the end of the June, the brand launched a new product which didn’t really garner the success that we wanted. However, with this slow time we were able to optimize the website to increase conversion rates. We focused on the user experience and shortening the time length to get to and order the actual product. These changes resulted in nearly 100% CR uplifts during Q4.

During this time we also started to experiment on TikTok with organic posts. By August, we had our first viral video reaching 1.5 Million views and that alone brought in $13K in ORGANIC revenue. Literally the day before, the brand did just $500! From that point on we put ALL HANDS ON DECK to truly understand how to exploit the platform to its maximum potential.

We immediately started to test TikTok ads and quickly found that scaling was easier and more predictable through this platform than Facebook has been for the past year - taking our daily ad spend on Tiktok from $200/day to nearly $4K/day within 3 days!

We dove deep with our content team to analyze creatives that performed well. Through tests and process optimizations we were able to create a system to churn out short form creatives on a daily basis, in order to combat creative fatigue. This was especially necessary as Tiktok as a platform reaches creative fatigue much quicker than platforms such as FB & IG. 

Another thing that we learned from this brand was that TikTok creatives surprisingly work extremely well on Facebook! By reformatting creatives that performed well on TikTok, and then placing them on Facebook, we were able to significantly scale our spend on FB & IG at a time when this felt impossible for the brand previously (due to the iOS tracking update). 

Tracking issues was the biggest challenge we faced during the year. FB's tracking had already been decimated by iOS 14. Once we started cross platform marketing, we observed even more misattribution. 

We then focused our attention to our detailed P&L sheets during this time, rather than rely heavily on platform metrics to guide our ad spend. We would compare metrics like our Sitewide ROAS (MER, Total Sales/Total Ad Spend) and Sitewide CPA (Total Ad Spend/Total Store Orders) to the metrics we saw on the marketing platforms in order to make informed decisions. During our scaling period we were spending nearly 10k a day on both FB and Tiktok. The platforms themselves were giving us a total ROAS of 1 based on their tracking, however, we knew this wasn’t true because our P&L’s said otherwise. This allowed us to continue pushing budgets regardless of the red flags thrown up by the ad platforms, and fully transition to using the P&L sheet to dictate our marketing spend. 

In November, now that we had our new marketing strategies set up for execution, we started to focus on the store AOV. We A/B tested various upsells and downsells which allowed us to increase the AOV by $10-$15. Our AOV went from an average of $60 to $75. These heavy increases in AOV, tied in with Q4 holiday sales, increased the brands profit per order by nearly 30%!

With the combined learnings and strategies we implemented across the website and our marketing activity we had a very successful Q4 for this brand. Total Marketing Ad spend across all platforms from Nov-Dec was $545,940 which resulted in $1,857,582 Million in Revenue. Giving us a Sitewide ROAS of 3.4. After all COGS, fixed costs, brand payroll, etc this brand enjoyed a whopping 34% net profit margin during this time.