Blueprint Eyewear is an eyewear brand based in Amsterdam. They sell sunglasses and snow goggles in Western Europe to young millennials with a love for the outdoors.
The owners of Blueprint Eyewear, Maarten Roodenburg and Floris Zwolsman, wanted to free up their time to focus on growing Blueprint and their other e-commerce brands. They’d tried hiring other agencies before, but nobody could beat their performance – leaving them paralyzed in the day-to-day ad management.
By implementing our 3-Step e-commerce scaling strategy, we beat their performance and helped them scale their brand from €39K/mo to €148K/mo with Facebook ads. During peak season, we scaled from €300/day spend to €3500/day whilst generating €7K-€9K/day in FB attributed revenue.
Best of all, we removed Maarten and Floris from the day-to-day work – so they could free up their time and focus on higher-level activities for their business.
STEP 1.
Analyse
Before we launched our campaigns, we conducted a thorough analysis of product margins and goals with Facebook advertising. These formed the target ROAS for the account.
Here’s how we set the benchmarks:
Cut at 1.5 ROAS on prospecting (people who don’t know the brand), and scale as long as ROAS is 2 account-wide.
Benchmarks are further split by:
ROAS target of 1.5 across prospecting/cold (65% – 70% of total spend).
ROAS target of 2.0 on warm retargeting. This includes video viewers/ad post engagers/collection page visitors and newsletter subscribers.
ROAS target of 3.0 on hot retargeting (viewed a product page or added to cart but didn’t buy).
We worked out that 1.5 ROAS is breakeven. This was calculated from AOV, COGS, VAT, processing fees, agency fees and other variable costs. Therefore, we can scale at a 1.5 ROAS on prospecting to remain cashflow positive and keep the focus on new customer acquisition.
We set higher ROAS thresholds on our retargeting campaigns – since it’s likely we’ve already paid for visitors to reach that stage of the funnel. We also factored the repeat purchase rate into the ROAS target. For a brand such as this one where the returning customer rate is high (45%), it’s fine to sacrifice margins to scale on the front-end, since we know that almost half of all customers will come back and buy in the future.
Analysing Blueprint Eyewear’s margins, cash flow, repeat purchase rate and overall brand objectives formed the daily spend and ROAS targets that we aimed to achieve.
STEP 2.
Strategise
After the initial analysis phase, we began by developing the campaign strategy. When starting out with an account built, we always opt for a full-funnel account structure. This means that we target customers at all stages of the customer journey. Most advertisers only run conversion campaigns to acquire new customers – and that’s about it.
We’re missing out on all the other potential customers and different stages. So here’s our strategy and how we set up a full-funnel account build:
Cold – Conversions
Here we used a mix of broad interests, lookalikes from the pixel, lookalikes from Klaviyo purchases – each based on different time periods.
E.g 1% Purchases Klaviyo – 30 days, 2% Purchases Pixel – 180 days, etc…
Warm Retargeting – Conversions
In our warm retargeting campaigns, we want to target those who have shown some interest but haven’t yet checked out specific products. Here’s how we structure our warm audiences:
We include anyone in the last 7 days who:
Engaged with any ad or post
Watched any video past 50% (to which we are retargeting)
Visited the website
We exclude anyone in the last 7 days who:
Visited the product page (to which we are retargeting)
Purchased any product in the last 180 days
Is on the lifetime customer list
So in the audience above, we are retargeting people who have shown some intent in the last 7 days.
We also repeat this warm audience for anyone who has met the criteria above in the last 30 days. Then we exclude the audience that we include for the 7-day warm audience.
So in total, we have 2 warm retargeting audiences per collection. One warm audience is between day 0 and day 7. The other is for people who fall between day 8 and day 30. As people drift further away from seeing the brand they will usually have lower intent, so we like to segment it out here.
We see a lot of people miss this step out and only retargeting product page visitors and cart abandoners.
Hot Retargeting – Conversions
Ad set 1: Product Page Retargeting Day 0-7
Include: Anyone who visited the product page in the last 7 days. Exclude: Anyone who added to cart or purchased from that product page in the last 180 days. Lifetime customer list.
Ad set 2: Product Page Retargeting Day 8-30
Include: Anyone who visited the product page in the last 30 days. Exclude: Anyone who visited the product page in the last 7 days. Anyone who added to cart or purchased from that product page in the last 180 days. Lifetime customer list.
Ad set 3: Cart Abandoners Retargeting Day 0-7
Include: Anyone who added to cart from a specific collection in the last 7 days. Exclude: Anyone who purchased within the last 180 days. Lifetime customer list.
Ad set 2: Cart Abandoners Retargeting Day 8-30
Include: Anyone who added to cart from a specific collection in the last 30 days. Exclude: Anyone who added to cart from a specific collection in the last 7 days. Anyone who purchased within the last 180 days. Lifetime customer list.
The time split is dependent on how much traffic we’re getting. Here we use a mixture of carousels, dynamic product ads, unboxing videos, lifestyle and product images. All with different messaging.
We tested using scarcity, FOMO, discounts, reviews, repeating that we offer free shipping, money-back guarantees and more – whatever’s needed to handle possible objections and win the customers back.
Existing Customers – DPA and Conversions
This is to cross-sell previous customers. Strangely, DPAs didn’t perform well on this account, while conversion ads did, but we tried it out nonetheless.
Don’t neglect your existing customers!
Creatives
We are always preaching how creative is king in e-commerce ads. So here are some of the creatives we developed to help us scale:
STEP 3.
Optimise & Scale
Our framework for scaling is quite simple. In e-commerce ad-buying, product, then offer and creative are the most important things to focus on when scaling FB ads.
We ran a creative testing campaign for our proven audiences and isolated the best creatives that were getting initial results within KPI. Then we duplicated them into our scaling campaign on €500/day or €1,000/day budgets on proven audiences. We scheduled them for midnight the next day and ensured we applied automated rules (which we’ll talk about shortly) to cut the losers if they don’t perform well.
After our ad sets converted above target on auto-bid, we tested different manual bid types, bid amounts, optimisation strategies, etc. to see where we could improve performance.
Keep in mind that all of this tactical tinkering is redundant if your creative, offer, site, or AOV aren’t optimised. Focus on the basics first before the tactics.
About those KPIs we were talking about before, this is where we use them. We set automated rules to automatically cut off unprofitable ads and bump up the budgets on profitable ones. This ensures we’re maximising profit when scaling and minimising wasted spend on testing.
Here are a few examples from just our prospecting campaigns:
We’ve had ad sets at €500/day spend in the morning and at the end of the day, they’ve spent approx. €2K profitably. You can see in the google sheets screenshot it scaled well in the 3rd week when we combined that with a sale offer.
We like to use day rules in conjunction with 3 day & lifetime rules since performance can fluctuate by day. For example on this brand, we noticed:
• Sundays perform the best
• Sunny weather also improves ROAS
• ROAS is usually higher on paydays
We’ve had ad sets at €500/day spend in the morning and at the end of the day, they’ve spent approx. €2K profitably. You can see in the google sheets screenshot it scaled well in the 3rd week when we combined that with a sale offer.
We like to use day rules in conjunction with 3 day & lifetime rules since performance can fluctuate by day. For example on this brand, we noticed:
• Sundays perform the best
• Sunny weather also improves ROAS
• ROAS is usually higher on paydays
Conclusion
Overall, our 3-Step e-commerce scaling strategy helped Blueprint Eyewear increase its revenue, get more customers and free up bandwidth so that the owners could focus on working on their business. If you’d like to scale your Facebook ads, increase your revenue and start focusing on your business…Why not hop on a call with us and we can see if we can help scale your brand?
We offer free Facebook ad accounts for brands that are looking to scale. It will help give you the guidance to help unlock scale in your account and plug the leaks that are hurting your account ROAS.