Want Better Ad Performance? Mix Brand in With Your Direct Response

Chubbies’ 9-figure exit was your classic overnight success that took a decade. Evolving our conversion ads from focusing only on the left column to focusing on both - for the same ad - was the simplest tweak we made to go from a slowly-weakening Brand measuring all marketing by how it drove 1-day click revenue to a growing, profitable Brand focused on driving short term revenue AND quantifiably increasing our resilient base of organic revenue

Since I did it wrong for so long, I gathered some painful lessons on this front. Here are the 3 things I learned about evaluating ad performance so you can effectively drive short term conversions - AKA the Activation Engine™™™, AND that resilient base of organic revenue, AKA The Free Money Machine™™™

1) This resilient base of revenue is the most important, and simultaneously under-appreciated business metric for building fundamental asset value for your brand

It is the revenue that’s there when you turn everything else (ads, discounts, promos, emails) off

This = the strength of your brand

Since our ads were reaching more people than any other marketing tactic, it became clear we needed to use our ads to also build that base

But it required a shift in how we evaluate success of our ads, and therefore, how we made budget optimization decisions across the ads we were running

This leads to lesson 2…#segue

2) We can’t just follow ROAS as the determiner of which ads or ad sets to allocate budget to

This means we’re driving a lower ROAS

Every once in a while, you get an ad that’s got the highest ROAS, AND is satisfying everything we want to accomplish in the right column. I wish every ad would do that

But unfortunately, that wasn’t the case

In the early days, as a data driven team, we’d let the data be our guide. Therefore, we’d follow ROAS, killing and ad with a moderately lower ROAS, even if it felt like it delivered on both columns

We learned to do the opposite, killing ads that had higher ROAS, but only satisfied the left column

You might be wondering, “Are you saying you just used your gut to determine if the ad hit the points on the right column? There’s no way we’d be able to confidently invest according to gut feel”

Lemme explain

3) If an ad is doing the stuff on the right, it should drive valuable behaviors as well - they just won’t necessarily be purchases

Which behaviors? There are tons, but start by looking at the engagements on the ad itself

If your ad is driving likes, comments, shares, etc, it’s having an impact on the people viewing the ad

They’re just not clicking or purchasing, because based on the 95/5 rule, 95% of people viewing your ads at any given time are not in-market for your product category

But when they engage on your ad, it’s basically an RSVP YES (some flakier than others) to the Purchase Party you host every day

They just leave the ‘date of arrival’ blank

Doesn’t mean they’re not coming

They just have other stuff going on

#ecommerce #brand #marketing