How We Scaled Fitness Equipment Brand To $1,536,641.40 in Half a Year
Quick Overview:
- Profitably Scaling to $1,536,641.40 in 6 Months
- Increasing Their Return On Ad Spend By 140% In The First Month Alone
- Keeping Around 3x Return On Ad Spend Throughout This 6-Month Period
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Introduction
Basically, exponential growth is what every brand owner wants.
The problem is that it usually isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
You are probably in the same situation as what our client was in.
Trying to scale their paid acquisition channels, while trying desperately to maintain their breakeven ROAS.
Before we came on board they were getting around 1.8x ROAS. They knew it wasn’t sustainable so they hired us because they needed help with increasing profitability and scalability.
Within the first month, we took them to a 3.2x return on ad spend.
The best part? We’ve now sold over $1,536,641.40 worth of products directly attributed to our acquisition channels.
So In This Case Study, We’ll Be Breaking Down
- The Exact Campaign Structure We Used To Generate Over 1.5MM in Revenue
- How We Scaled The Budget From $300/day to $3,000+/day.
- Why Good Reviews and Influencer Feedback Can Make or Break Your Launches
Our eCommerce Paid Acquisition Funnel Structure
Like you probably know every eCommerce brand has a sales funnel.
Every customer goes through a journey from being a complete stranger to a loyal customer.
Coming up with a clients funnel was one of the first steps before we started dominating their paid Acquisition channels
Why? Because people need to be delivered specific content at each stage of the funnel.
Okay, so let’s get straight into the budget and how we decided to split it across our paid acquisition funnel (In this case – Facebook Ads) – It’s important that you allocate just the right amount into each channel so you get “the most juice out of your squeeze”
Here’s exactly how we allocated it:
- 85% for TOF (Top of Funnel) – This is where we target people who don’t know or never hear about your brand. Because this brand is relatively unknown we wanted to reach as many people as possible and also raise awareness for this brand. By allocating 85% of the budget to TOF allowed us to reach as many people as possible.
- 10% for MOF (Middle of Funnel) – Targeting those who’d heard something about your brand but still weren’t ready to buy. They need extra information before visiting your site (or a quick reminder).
- 5% for BOF (Bottom of Funnel) – And at the last stage of the funnel we are targeting those ready to buy but need an extra push. These were very product-focused ads. Since the audience was smaller and more defined, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on these ads.
Okay, let’s get straight into what kind of ads we used at each stage of the funnel.
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Refine Audience Targeting Based On The Stage Of The Funnel
You can keep sending all of your customers to your website. But if you’re not tracking how they engage on your site, it’ll basically be impossible to see whether your Facebook Ads are getting the conversion they deserve.
The most basic form of tracking for Facebook is their Meta Pixel.
Then you can create audiences based on the website data you collect about them.
Top of Funnel Targeting
Customers at top of the funnel don’t know about the brand we’re advertising.
…But that doesn’t mean we have to start our campaigns blind.
Meta allows us to upload their customer data— For example website visitors or customer lists—in the form of a Custom Audience.
And you can also turn them into a Lookalike Audience; a group of Facebook users with similar qualities to those already on your list.
Lookalike audiences can be created between 1—10%. The lower the percentage, the more specific your audience will be. Anywhere nearer to 10% means you might have a few people who’re not exactly similar to your initial list but have some overlapping qualities.
We created 3% Lookalike audiences based on three groups of people:
- Those who’ve purchased
- Those who’ve added items to their cart
- Those who’ve viewed content on the website
These Lookalike audiences should always be the backbone for any top of the funnel campaign.
You’re using Facebook’s algorithm and ability to target your ideal audience, based on people who’ve already done that action before. (It’s much more effective than targeting anyone and everyone with a basic interest in your industry.)
Pro Tip: we recommend stacking your lookalike audiences into one ad set.
Why? So you can avoid high overlap ad sets competing against each other. You’ll also be able to get out of the learning phase much, much quicker.
As well as allowing for account simplification, which is one of the ‘Power 5‘ that Facebook themselves recommends.
As for the rest of our TOFU targeting strategy, we added a handful of interests that our customers needed to be interested in. There’s a huge overlap of interests, though. Combining them keeps the account structure clean and manageable.
We also went broad, targeting anyone between 18 and 65+.
I know: going broad with targeting doesn’t sound logical initially. But it gives Facebook free reign to take learnings from the Pixel, and bid on who it deems is the correct audience.
Having big, broad audiences really allows for scale too. If you want to reach those big budgets, you need to think broader & wider.
As for creatives, we ran with:
- 1x Carousel
- 3x Single Images
- 1x Video (with 3x variations of the thumbnail)
We stick to a range of formats with TOFU targeting because Facebook is the expert at their own algorithm. They know which format is most likely to convert for each user based on their historical engagement with ads on their platform.
Your top of funnel ads should also focus on testing multiple messaging variations.
Different angles will make different people convert, and because they’re brand new to your brand, you don’t know what headlines, descriptions, or ad copy will hook them in.
We made 3 variations of messaging to test this, whilst also continuously tweaking messaging depending on seasonality and time of year.
Bottom of Funnel Targeting
Not everyone you’re targeting your middle-of-the-funnel content will buy instantly.
Chances are, people still have last-minute questions about the product they want to buy. And whilst they might’ve added the product to their online cart, as many as 69% can abandon their purchase and leave your site.
Our final audience consisted of those who had added items to their cart within the last 30 days.
Meta’s Pixel can collect the product data of items they’ve added, and find the matching profile so that you can show the exact product a person left in their online cart through Facebook ads.
This means you can be hard-hitting your copy when your audience has added items to their cart. They’ve already shown intent to purchase—but something small has got in their way.
More often than not, that’s extra shipping costs, a complicated checkout process, or slow delivery times.
Your ad copy can ease those last-minute issues and nudge them back to the site to purchase the product they were interested in.
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Set-up Exclusions in Each Ad Set
One of the most common mistakes I see in ad accounts is failing to set-up exclusions in your audience targeting.
So, take some time to exclude your previous audiences from each Ad Set.
We excluded people we’re already targeting in the MOFU Ad Sets.
Excluding other audience groups allow us to control each customer journey, from initial touchpoint to conversion.
Once they’ve seen a campaign designed for them at the top of the funnel, it’s time to show them different content—such as social proof, testimonials, or ways to use the product.
There’s nothing worse than delivering a 20% discount designed for new customers to someone who’s just bought your product, right?
Not only that, but excluding other audiences from each Ad Set makes sure the frequency for your top-of-the-funnel campaigns doesn’t skyrocket.
If your AOV is lower then 30$, we’d recommend to do a 30 day period for people visiting the website. Items are typically impulsed purchases with a small consideration period, so after a month has passed, there’s a good chance they’ve forgotten about buying the item.
However, if it’s a higher ticket product that requires more touchpoints, we would recommend increasing this to 90 days or whatever your typical purchase cycle looks like.
People Will Look For External Reviews & Comparing You With Your Competitors In Your Niche
Fitness equipment, especially when higher-priced than average, is not impulse purchase.
People shop around and see what the best options are available before making a decision.
Your advertisements are often thus the catalyst of their purchasing journey, rather than a persuasion tool.
This is especially true because customers will read external reviews, look at what influencers are saying about the product, etc. and you can’t control this independent review environment much.
To make matters worse, initial bad reviews can tank any chance of success – as negative reviews tend to snowball.
The quality of your product must be as good as feasibly possible, as your products will live or die based on reviews. If your brand starts to get some mixed reviews from influencers you’ll probably see a huge decrease in conversion rates.
However, it bears saying that regardless of the quality of your product it will likely always have some negative feedback.
There would be two main ways to satisfy user’s concerns, as well as provide them with the info they need to make a purchasing decision:
- Advertorials: Adverts that are also tutorials, wherein you explain what the product is, how it works, why it’s better quality than the competition, etc.
- Celebrities as Brand Ambassadors: By getting celebrities as influencers for your brand you can leverage people’s parasocial relationships with them and monetize them.
Nonetheless, the second option is very expensive, so we haven’t taken this route. But advertising rivals have used this strategy with great success to create a premium-brand image and increase trust in the brand
How to Scale Your Facebook Ad Campaigns
Once we started to see some results from our funnel-based Facebook Ads structure, scaling was the next task.
You can be pretty aggressive with scaling using Campaign Budget Optimisation.
As it works by distributing your budget in the most effective way between each of your ad sets, to ensure a bigger budget goes towards your highest-performing ones.
But it should still be done with some caution and close monitoring.
Here’s how we did it.
Increase Audience Sizes
Our first step to scaling our client’s Facebook Ads was to increase our Lookalike audiences’ width, from 3% to 5%, and then 10%.
We now don’t work with anything smaller.
Why? Because Facebook wants you to feed it broad audiences.
Small-sized audiences will kill your campaign once you start to push the budget because you’re restricting how many people are in the audience pool that actually sees your ads.
You’ll use the budget, reaching the same person over and over again.
Your ads get boring (and in the worst case, can frustrate your target audience into clicking “I don’t want to this ad anymore.”)
We tested what worked with smaller audiences. Once we’d nailed that, we scaled to reach more people knowing what already did and didn’t work.
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Quick Overview:
- Profitably Scaling to $1,536,641.40 in 6 Months
- Increasing Their Return On Ad Spend By 140% In The First Month Alone
- Keeping Around 3x Return On Ad Spend Throughout This 6-Month Period
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Introduction
Basically, exponential growth is what every brand owner wants.
The problem is that it usually isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
You are probably in the same situation as what our client was in.
Trying to scale their paid acquisition channels, while trying desperately to maintain their breakeven ROAS.
Before we came on board they were getting around 1.8x ROAS. They knew it wasn’t sustainable so they hired us because they needed help with increasing profitability and scalability.
Within the first month, we took them to a 3.2x return on ad spend.
The best part? We’ve now sold over $1,536,641.40 worth of products directly attributed to our acquisition channels.
So in this case study, we’ll be breaking down
- The Exact Campaign Structure We Used To Generate Over 1.5MM in Revenue
- How We Scaled The Budget From $300/day to $3,000+/day.
- Why Good Reviews and Influencer Feedback Can Make or Break Your Launches
Our eCommerce Paid Acquisition Funnel Structure
Like you probably know every eCommerce brand has a sales funnel.
Every customer goes through a journey from being a complete stranger to a loyal customer.
Coming up with a clients funnel was one of the first steps before we started dominating their paid Acquisition channels
Why? Because people need to be delivered specific content at each stage of the funnel.
Okay, so let’s get straight into the budget and how we decided to split it across our paid acquisition funnel (In this case – Facebook Ads) – It’s important that you allocate just the right amount into each channel so you get “the most juice out of your squeeze”
Here’s exactly how we allocated it:
- 85% for TOF (Top of Funnel) – This is where we target people who don’t know or never hear about your brand. Because this brand is relatively unknown we wanted to reach as many people as possible and also raise awareness for this brand. By allocating 85% of the budget to TOF allowed us to reach as many people as possible.
- 10% for MOF (Middle of Funnel) – Targeting those who’d heard something about your brand but still weren’t ready to buy. They need extra information before visiting your site (or a quick reminder).
- 5% for BOF (Bottom of Funnel) – And at the last stage of the funnel we are targeting those ready to buy but need an extra push. These were very product-focused ads. Since the audience was smaller and more defined, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on these ads.
Okay, let’s get straight into what kind of ads we used at each stage of the funnel.
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Refine Audience Targeting Based On The Stage Of The Funnel
You can keep sending all of your customers to your website. But if you’re not tracking how they engage on your site, it’ll basically be impossible to see whether your Facebook Ads are getting the conversion they deserve.
The most basic form of tracking for Facebook is their Meta Pixel.
Then you can create audiences based on the website data you collect about them.
Top of Funnel Targeting
Customers at top of the funnel don’t know about the brand we’re advertising.
…But that doesn’t mean we have to start our campaigns blind.
Meta allows us to upload their customer data— For example website visitors or customer lists—in the form of a Custom Audience.
And you can also turn them into a Lookalike Audience; a group of Facebook users with similar qualities to those already on your list.
Lookalike audiences can be created between 1—10%. The lower the percentage, the more specific your audience will be. Anywhere nearer to 10% means you might have a few people who’re not exactly similar to your initial list but have some overlapping qualities.
We created 3% Lookalike audiences based on three groups of people:
- Those who’ve purchased
- Those who’ve added items to their cart
- Those who’ve viewed content on the website
These Lookalike audiences should always be the backbone for any top of the funnel campaign.
You’re using Facebook’s algorithm and ability to target your ideal audience, based on people who’ve already done that action before. (It’s much more effective than targeting anyone and everyone with a basic interest in your industry.)
Pro Tip: we recommend stacking your lookalike audiences into one ad set.
Why? So you can avoid high overlap ad sets competing against each other. You’ll also be able to get out of the learning phase much, much quicker.
As well as allowing for account simplification, which is one of the ‘Power 5‘ that Facebook themselves recommends.
As for the rest of our TOFU targeting strategy, we added a handful of interests that our customers needed to be interested in. There’s a huge overlap of interests, though. Combining them keeps the account structure clean and manageable.
We also went broad, targeting anyone between 18 and 65+.
I know: going broad with targeting doesn’t sound logical initially. But it gives Facebook free reign to take learnings from the Pixel, and bid on who it deems is the correct audience.
Having big, broad audiences really allows for scale too. If you want to reach those big budgets, you need to think broader & wider.
As for creatives, we ran with:
- 1x Carousel
- 3x Single Images
- 1x Video (with 3x variations of the thumbnail)
We stick to a range of formats with TOFU targeting because Facebook is the expert at their own algorithm. They know which format is most likely to convert for each user based on their historical engagement with ads on their platform.
Your top of funnel ads should also focus on testing multiple messaging variations.
Different angles will make different people convert, and because they’re brand new to your brand, you don’t know what headlines, descriptions, or ad copy will hook them in.
We made 3 variations of messaging to test this, whilst also continuously tweaking messaging depending on seasonality and time of year.
Bottom of Funnel Targeting
Not everyone you’re targeting your middle-of-the-funnel content will buy instantly.
Chances are, people still have last-minute questions about the product they want to buy. And whilst they might’ve added the product to their online cart, as many as 69% can abandon their purchase and leave your site.
Our final audience consisted of those who had added items to their cart within the last 30 days.
Meta’s Pixel can collect the product data of items they’ve added, and find the matching profile so that you can show the exact product a person left in their online cart through Facebook ads.
This means you can be hard-hitting your copy when your audience has added items to their cart. They’ve already shown intent to purchase—but something small has got in their way.
More often than not, that’s extra shipping costs, a complicated checkout process, or slow delivery times.
Your ad copy can ease those last-minute issues and nudge them back to the site to purchase the product they were interested in.
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Set-up Exclusions in Each Ad Set
One of the most common mistakes I see in ad accounts is failing to set-up exclusions in your audience targeting.
So, take some time to exclude your previous audiences from each Ad Set.
We excluded people we’re already targeting in the MOFU Ad Sets.
Excluding other audience groups allow us to control each customer journey, from initial touchpoint to conversion.
Once they’ve seen a campaign designed for them at the top of the funnel, it’s time to show them different content—such as social proof, testimonials, or ways to use the product.
There’s nothing worse than delivering a 20% discount designed for new customers to someone who’s just bought your product, right?
Not only that, but excluding other audiences from each Ad Set makes sure the frequency for your top-of-the-funnel campaigns doesn’t skyrocket.
If your AOV is lower then 30$, we’d recommend to do a 30 day period for people visiting the website. Items are typically impulsed purchases with a small consideration period, so after a month has passed, there’s a good chance they’ve forgotten about buying the item.
However, if it’s a higher ticket product that requires more touchpoints, we would recommend increasing this to 90 days or whatever your typical purchase cycle looks like.
People Will Look For External Reviews & Comparing You With Your Competitors in Your Niche
Fitness equipment, especially when higher-priced than average, is not impulse purchase.
People shop around and see what the best options are available before making a decision.
Your advertisements are often thus the catalyst of their purchasing journey, rather than a persuasion tool.
This is especially true because customers will read external reviews, look at what influencers are saying about the product, etc. and you can’t control this independent review environment much.
To make matters worse, initial bad reviews can tank any chance of success – as negative reviews tend to snowball.
The quality of your product must be as good as feasibly possible, as your products will live or die based on reviews. If your brand starts to get some mixed reviews from influencers you’ll probably see a huge decrease in conversion rates.
However, it bears saying that regardless of the quality of your product it will likely always have some negative feedback.
There would be two main ways to satisfy user’s concerns, as well as provide them with the info they need to make a purchasing decision:
- Advertorials: Adverts that are also tutorials, wherein you explain what the product is, how it works, why it’s better quality than the competition, etc.
- Celebrities as Brand Ambassadors: By getting celebrities as influencers for your brand you can leverage people’s parasocial relationships with them and monetize them.
Nonetheless, the second option is very expensive, so we haven’t taken this route. But advertising rivals have used this strategy with great success to create a premium-brand image and increase trust in the brand
How to Scale Your Facebook Ad Campaigns
Once we started to see some results from our funnel-based Facebook Ads structure, scaling was the next task.
You can be pretty aggressive with scaling using Campaign Budget Optimisation.
As it works by distributing your budget in the most effective way between each of your ad sets, to ensure a bigger budget goes towards your highest-performing ones.
But it should still be done with some caution and close monitoring.
Here’s how we did it.
Increase Audience Sizes
Our first step to scaling our client’s Facebook Ads was to increase our Lookalike audiences’ width, from 3% to 5%, and then 10%.
We now don’t work with anything smaller.
Why? Because Facebook wants you to feed it broad audiences.
Small-sized audiences will kill your campaign once you start to push the budget because you’re restricting how many people are in the audience pool that actually sees your ads.
You’ll use the budget, reaching the same person over and over again.
Your ads get boring (and in the worst case, can frustrate your target audience into clicking “I don’t want to this ad anymore.”)
We tested what worked with smaller audiences. Once we’d nailed that, we scaled to reach more people knowing what already did and didn’t work.
Schedule a Call With Us
Are Your Ready To Take Your eCom Brand To The Another Level?
Fancy Seeing the Same Results From Your Facebook Ad Campaigns?
There’s no reason why you can’t get a 4x RoAS from your own Facebook Ads strategy, or increases your ROAS even more than you have right now with the right structure in place.
So if you don’t have enough time to implement yourself, or you need a trusted pair of hands to create a bespoke Facebook Ads strategy for you, click the button below to book in a free consultation call with our team.
Frequently Asked Questions
This is part of the reason we have a call! The final quote would depend on your businesses unique needs in order for the partnership to be fruitful. Book a call to figure out the best plan for your brand. All our offers are custom, no two proposals are the same.
If we don’t add 50% to your bottom line revenue in 90 days after working with us, we will work for free until we do.
We are transparent and guarantee results. We don’t look to promise the world like other agencies. We are battle tested and can tell if it’s going to be a good fit from the get-go. If we genuinely don’t believe we can help you, then that’s exactly what we will tell you on the call!
We work with ecommerce brands who are already established and looking to scale their performance creatives and paid acquisiton to the next level.
We help our clients achieve omnipresence through Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Pinterest Ads, and more.
We’ve partnered with brands that had an entire marketing department. The more brains, the better. We make the most out of your team, and resources to combine them with our processes to truly help you reach your next target.
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