At QuietKat, a leader in electric bikes for outdoorsmen and commuters, John led a campaign backed by data to position spending in the strongest eCommerce performance channels that made up the highest average order values.

Like any strong eCommerce brand with a high price point offering, QuietKat's data at points to one campaign that outperforms all the rest - branded search.

While a great signal to see, branded search revenue is something of a dead end. You can't scale the campaign itself because it comes from users knowing about your brand in advance and having the intent to search your name online and then click on your branded search ad. But where does that intent come from?

That's where assisted conversion data comes in handy. Places like TripleWhale have made this type of attribution modeling easier but within Google Analytics you can also locate this info within their assisted conversion report. This report shows you what channels made up the conversion journey for your largest conversions.

You might see something like non-branded search, direct, social, direct, organic, direct. If you were looking at a Last Click report, direct would come up as the source for the purchase, but when looking at a multi-channel conversion path you can learn where users first found out about your brand and then scale up the touchpoints that you can control.

This is how I was able to learn how to scale spend, measure, and optimize QuietKat's paid media spend across channels.

TLDR: In the first quarter of 2023, I deployed a social ads strategy that enabled segmented audience targeting despite fintech advertising constraints, resulting in the most cost-effective acquisition results recorded by the brand to date.

In late 2022, we successfully acquired new customers on LinkedIn by leveraging the platform’s engaged professional audience. However, we reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of budget and scalability, prompting us to bring new channels into the mix.

Our challenge: to optimize and scale up LinkedIn acquisition tactics on Facebook while navigating Facebook’s Special Ad Category targeting limitations, strict content guidelines, and added approval processes. The complexity of this challenge was further amplified by our partner’s request to allocate more resources toward the worker segment, which historically experienced more consistent demand than the seasonal student segment.

This challenge gave us a unique opportunity to retrofit our social ads approach to efficiently find and convert individual audience segments, despite having fewer levers to pull.Here’s how we tackled the challenge.

A creative approach to audience segmentationWe launched parallel prospecting campaigns that paired personalized, segment-specific creative with relevant interest-based targeting, effectively circumventing regulatory obstacles to expand Nova Credit’s reach, boost channel diversity, and achieve cost-effective outcomes.

What We Did:1. Develop creative assets with highly specific, compliant messaging and imagery for students and workers (see below)2. Secure approval copy + creative from Nova Credit’s legal team3. Configure ads to ensure compliance with Facebook’s Special Ads Category4. Secure approval (again) from Facebook and launch campaigns5. Measure performance, validate hypotheses, and call out top performers6. Optimize and scale up the campaigns that drove the highest CPA

Results:By pairing targeted performance creative with applicable interest categories, we successfully engaged and converted both audience groups on Facebook. Our efforts increased conversions by nearly 300% compared to the previous year’s LinkedIn ads, positioning Facebook as the top-performing channel for Nova Credit to date.Not only did this strategy help us identify and target the two segments individually, but it also validated our hypothesis that the worker segment was both: (a) more prevalent on Facebook and (b) more engaged with posts related to financial products and services.This data informed our decision to reallocate student segment budgets to the worker segment to minimize wasted spend and continue driving high-intent, worker segment traffic to the site.

AKKO, an up-and-comer in the phone and gadget insurance space, needed to counteract low onsite metrics and a lack of conversions that users exhibited once they got to the landing page from social ads.

To do this I developed a landing page specifically for our social campaigns that would use strong creative and copy to draw the user in and make the transition from the ad to the website much easier. This would be the test to see if it was our ads or overall strategy to develop intent for users within social channels. We leaned on FinTech inspiration from Neobanks to guide our design concepts. The reason for this was simple – banking is boring. No one is thinking about finding their next bank when they’re scrolling feeds or binge-watching cat videos on Youtube. While not immediate, we saw a quick change in behavior by users once they got to our social ads-specific landing page. After a couple of weeks of testing, here are our social ads landing page compared to our PPC landing page. We saw a 256% increase in our time on site average when users entered this landing page, but the biggest difference was in CVR and purchases. Not only were users more engaged when the website through the destination URL from our ads, their likelihood to convert increased by 1,186%.