How We Achieved Facebook Ads ROAS of 19 for the Jewelry E-commerce Business

*Comparison to Christmas sale campaign excluding brand campaigns (29.05.20 – 20.07.20 to 28.10.19 – 24.12.19)

Growing a business can be hard, especially when you want fast but meaningful results like a massive increase in Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). This exact result was on the wish-list of a leading Polish jewelry business that came to us recently for some marketing magic – and we delivered. Along with implementing techniques that took their revenue from silver to platinum in no time, we forged a strong and lasting partnership with our client by sharing our knowledge with their in-house team. Here’s how we rolled…

• PRODUCT: Jewelry
• LOCATION: Poland
• PRICE: $10-2500+

When one of Poland’s biggest jewelry brands challenged us to boost their revenue and mentor their team, starting NOW… we simply couldn’t resist. While completing an audit for them and after the talks on previous seasonal campaigns, together with our client, we spotted an opportunity to boost their profits by increasing their ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) from 11 to 16+.

Immediately we set to work on the summer sale campaign, at the same time segmenting accounts and campaigns by brand awareness, evergreen acquisition, and seasonal promotions types.

With the campaign launch just days away, we had to work fast. To make the workflow as efficient as possible, we agreed that the client’s team would handle brand awareness and that Tribe47’s team would be responsible for promotion and acquisition (including evergreen campaigns and the launch of new jewelry collections).

Below, we share 10 tactics we used to raise our client’s ROAS from 11.15 to 19.16 in their Facebook seasonal sale campaign.

Key Goals

1. Achieve a ROAS between 16 and 19.5
2. Complete accounts and campaigns hygiene
3. Provide mentoring and coaching to client’s team

II. What We Suggested As a Solution

The ten most important tactics we used:

Tactic 1. KPIs are everything

KPIs are like clues to a detective. Without them, you can’t solve mysteries like how to achieve a particular ROAS or conversion value.

Tip: When creating KPIs, first check your CR from add to cart to purchase. If you need to have 100 sales and your CR is 10% (we wish!), you’ll need 1000 add-to-carts to reach this goal. Next, check your CR from the product page view to add to cart. When building KPIs sheet, start at the bottom and work your way up to the top to learn how many people are needed to achieve 100 sales.

Tactic 2. Differentiate between campaigns

A brand awareness campaign differs from an acquisition campaign in KPIs, objectives, and optimization. Use your brand awareness campaign to build audiences to convert later. Don’t expect high ROAS, but keep in mind that you still could have KPIs as video views, engagement, or product page views.

In your acquisition campaign, focus on prioritizing and working your metrics. Yes, you need to optimize CPCs, CTRs, etc, but don’t freak out over high CPCs, and avoid optimizing for shallow objectives.

Tip: Usually, conversion value from evergreen would be higher than from seasonal promotions with discounted items. But discounts combined with scarcity and proper communication will often increase the conversion rate from add to cart to purchase.

In acquisition campaigns, evergreen, and seasonal promos in e-commerce, all have different rules and goals. In seasonal promos, more needs to be spent on the constant acquisition of cold traffic to build remarketing lists. However, in evergreen, you can spend more on “warming” remarketing and deep remarketing.

Launching a new collection requires both brand awareness and selling strategies together with a budget that balances what you spend on engagement and conversion campaigns. Customers often prefer to purchase more expensive items in physical stores, so your immediate ROAS could be lower on these items.

Using your KPIs, audiences, and (possibly) accounts segmentation for these campaigns will help you spend your budget wisely and drive up your ROAS.

Tactic 3. Respect the algorithm

Facebook Ads function best when they target the right audience. Instead of trying to find your dream customer by narrowing the audience, let Facebook’s clever tech find the BEST audience for you.

When you launch an ad set, the Facebook Ads algorithm starts learning about who you are targeting, how they react to your ads, and what segment of the audience gives the best conversion rates. This period of intensive data gathering and analysis is called “the learning phase”. In this phase, Facebook is like a new puppy experimenting with what it can chew, so expect a few mistakes to occur.

Give Facebook maximum freedom (over budget and sheer audience size) to reach large numbers of people and get enough conversions to exit the learning phase as quickly as possible. Remember that any significant edit (i.e. any change to targeting, the launch of a new ad) you make while a campaign is active will interrupt the learning phase and re-start the process. Avoid disturbing the puppy while it absorbs all the new information.

Tactic 4. That’s Cold

We followed a specific cold targeting framework that covered each step of the process from the brainstorm to the launch.

We sorted the effective ads from the ‘think again’ ads by sending traffic to each cold ad set with enough budget to get beyond the learning phase, then observing what worked. To give Facebook Ads the space for optimization, we tried to keep the size of the audiences above 1 million.

Analyzing a few primary metrics (ROAS and CPA) and taking into account some supportive metrics (CPC, CTR, cost per add to cart) gave us enough data to confidently state which ads nailed it.

Tactic 5. Audience segmentation and merging

Deep segmentation’s glory days are gone but regular segmentation – showing the same offer to different warm audiences to see how each audience performs and where to allocate budget – can be a help.

More useful still is empowering Facebook algorithm to optimize effectively and exit the learning phase fast by making ad sets highly dense. We increased density by merging ad sets that yielded similar results (i.e. ROAS, CPA) and scrapping any small ad sets stuck in the learning phase by budget limitation.

Tactic 6. A champion creative

Testing creatives and copies is as important for Facebook Ads management as Netflix is for cold winter evenings. Besides boosting your ROAS, it teaches you tons about your persona.

The more you test, the closer you will get to finding the “champion” – the creative or copy that resonates most highly with your audience.

Our rigorous testing regime followed a few “golden rules”:

• Spend the majority of the budget on your best-performing creatives/copies for sustainably good results;
• Follow a “Facebook algorithm-friendly” framework of launching and testing
• Like romancing your partner, the testing process should never stop!

To minimize any interruptions to Facebook’s learning phase (let that puppy be!), we launched multiple ads variations at once, switching some off (so, each ad will get enough budget). The ads were rotated as soon as we got enough traffic to get conclusions on their performance.

P.S. We achieved this incredible ROAS boost while sticking to our client’s branding guidelines. Just think what you could do with total creative freedom!

Tactic 7. Catalog sales vs purchase conversion objectives

The first thing we tested after launching our brand new campaign was different campaign objectives: catalog sales vs. conversion campaigns optimized for purchases. We found the conversion objective campaigns (square banners, carousels, videos) worked better than catalog sales campaigns (images of specific products that the user interacted with on the website). We used this knowledge to redistribute the budget in the most effective way, then kept testing new angles with other variations of square banners.

Tactic 8. Go team!

Raising the ROAS relied on creating synergy between us and the client’s teams which we did through sharing knowledge, establishing trust and mutual cooperation.

For cooperation to work, unite everyone with a common goal and practice seamless and frequent communication. We honestly believe that you can’t over-communicate! Encourage and share open and immediate feedback in a supportive environment and be appreciative of each individual’s contribution.

As Tribe47, we often operate as an Execution and Testing Lab, later transferring our findings, insights and best practices to our client. Imparting knowledge in this way builds trust as it shows the clients that we care about their ongoing success.

Tactic 9. Scale and downscale daily

Contrary to popular belief, we think the monthly/quarterly budget should not be spent linearly. Instead it should be flexible and responsive, so you don’t end up amplifying a campaign at the wrong moment. Particularly since Facebook Ads results have some bad times (CR and ROAS go down) along with the good (ROAS and CR are high).

Being flexible allowed us to downscale following an unexpected 3-day drop in the results and upscale (over what we had budgeted for) when we saw a great ROAS and high conversion rates.

Sometimes you’ll feel the temptation to scale/downscale your campaigns by 40% at once. Woah there! Such a drastic change will lose you money by disrupting the Facebook algorithm. Instead, make changes incrementally. A daily budget change of 20-25% usually won’t restart the learning process.

Tactic 10. Keep it clean

As any nerds will know, nothing important gets done without some serious data organization. Could humans have achieved space flight without an immaculate information management system? Absolutely not. And there’s no way a big e-commerce account can be managed without a good system for naming creatives and a checklist for analyzing which ones excelled.

Detailed weekly reports based on your KPIs and daily budget tracking may not be sexy, but the results they can get you are hotter than a pepper sprout. Find our basic list of must-have documents below:

• KPIs
• Monthly budgets planning segmented by accounts and campaigns
• Weekly reporting, monthly reporting (based on KPIs)
• Creatives performance report
• Daily & weekly budget tracking
• UTM structure
• Accounts segmentation & structure
• Campaigns, ad sets, ads naming structure
• Daily & weekly optimization checklist
• Creatives and copy testing plan & checklist

Creatives

Traffic Channels

• • Facebook
  • Instagram

III. The Results

This rapid ROAS rise was built on fast, frequent and honest communication with our client. Smart cooperation enabled both parties to play to their strengths; while they focused on brand awareness, we fired up Facebook and set the algorithm in motion. Our intimate knowledge of campaigns, teamed with a rigorous monitoring and testing regime got the right ads in front of the right audience at the perfect time.

When you’re ready to grow your ROAS to the kind of number that had us and the client letting out a collective “yaaay!”, you now have ten helpful tactics and documents at your disposal. Follow the clues left by your KPIs, don’t disturb Facebook’s algorithm, and never stop testing, analyzing and responding. Above all, keep communicating with your workmates and you will soon be celebrating your successes together