Facebook has grown to become a vital part of the digital marketing mix for brands and has proven itself as a powerful direct response channel for marketers, driving significant sales, revenue, and ROI. Over the past several years, Facebook advertising has contributed greatly to the growth of eco-friendly jewellery retailer Alex and Ani. The company is in a “hypergrowth” mode – exploding from fewer than 30 employees to almost 1,000, and witnessing growth of 3,569% with sales exceeding $200 million.
Challenge
In 2013, Alex and Ani began to really focus on refining its Facebook advertising efforts. Marketers have embraced social media as a way to grow brand awareness and engagement, but still, many have struggled to monetize this channel. Alex and Ani turned to eBay Enterprise to ultimately help them drive sales and achieve higher ROI through Facebook ads.
Solution
The e-commerce marketing company offered strategic guidance on how to best maximize Alex and Ani’s paid social efforts on Facebook, recommending that Alex and Ani run a test through Kenshoo Social, a platform which automates the creation, management, and optimisation of highly-targeted social marketing campaigns. After seeing the results of testing scenarios, the team at Alex and Ani discovered that Facebook could be a scalable, revenue-generating channel.
It was important for Alex and Ani to not only engage existing customers via Facebook ads, but also tap into new audiences. To achieve this, the company knew it was crucial to take advantage of the more sophisticated targeting features offered through Facebook and Kenshoo Social. By layering Facebook’s audience features, the team could find the brand’s offline audiences among people who are on the social network, and combine the information on existing customers with Facebook data on demographics, location, and interests. This allowed them to reach a completely new audience who shared much in common with the retailer’s existing customers.
In addition to these more granular targeting tactics, Siegel and team also utilised unpublished page post ads to create customized messaging for specific target audiences. The advantage of this ad type is that these posts are used solely for advertising purposes and are not published on the brand’s official Facebook page, allowing Alex and Ani to maintain a streamlined voice on its page.
Through Kenshoo Social’s campaigns, the eBay Enterprise team could automatically create and manage product-specific advertising on Facebook based on Alex and Ani’s product feed. This dynamic ad creation enabled product-specific ads to launch quickly, while prioritizing top-performing products based on demand and performance signals – both improving performance and better optimizing spend.
Shortly after coming onto the Kenshoo platform, Alex and Ani began to see positive performance from its Facebook ads, and this performance would continue to skyrocket into the peak end-of-year shopping season.
From the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, Facebook ads drove a staggering $1.6 million dollars in revenue. On Thanksgiving alone, Facebook ads generated more revenue than the retailer’s paid search campaigns through Google with an impressive 73.14% higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) on Facebook – all while spending less on the channel. On one peak day, Alex and Ani drove more revenue through Facebook than they did during the previous year entirely.
For the eBay Enterprise team, Kenshoo’s platform ensures optimal results for clients.
“Because we specialise in search for commerce driven brands like Alex and Ani, we utilise cross- channel teams that enable us to rapidly move funds between media like Google and Facebook,” said Jorie Waterman, Head of Performance Channel Delivery;
“This approach lets us get the most effective ROI and efficiency out of our clients’ media dollars. With Kenshoo’s tightly linked, highly advanced paid search and paid social advertising platforms, our team can always drive the best possible results.”
When comparing performance of Facebook ads for the six months before launching the campaign to the six months after, there were significant performance gains. Over this time period, ROI increased 80% while revenue saw an unprecedented 44x boost. Additionally, average order value (AOV) rose from approximately $14 to over $75 – an increase of 434%. These gains are attributed to the adoption of more sophisticated and relevant targeting, as well as the ability to efficiently scale.