We’re sharing an incredible Facebook Ads eCommerce case study featuring a former client of ours, Palbox. They’re a B2C brand that sells Flavors of Palestine, Delivered Straight to Your Home.

Like most businesses at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, they saw a sharp drop in orders. But, instead of pulling back, they decided to double down and increase ad spend during this time — leading to substantial results, including:

• 9.68x return on ad spend (ROAS)

• 785% increase in monthly revenue

• $4.87 cost per customer acquisition (CPA)

But the success didn’t stop there. In addition to the improvements on the paid social channels, sitewide organic metrics increased significantly, too, with:

• 6.6% organic conversion rate

• 183% increase in monthly organic traffic

• 931% increase in brand query and product searches 

• 200% increase in non-branded search query impressions 

Today, we’ll tell you exactly how we made it all happen — so you can replicate these results in your social ad campaigns, too.

Defining the Scope of the Project

Like many eCommerce businesses, Palbox was initially hit hard because of covid. Their challenge to our team: Create more sales from their B2C products to offset the negative effects on their wholesale business. 

The brand had the right products and plenty of inventory to make a splash; it just didn’t have enough awareness of these products among consumers to create the desired sales.

So, we came up with a solution.

The ingredients:

• 1 Facebook Ad

• 1 Instagram Ad

• Strong creative and ad copy for both

• A receptive (cold) audience

• Carefully scaled ad budget

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Setting Up the Ads

Although Palbox had never run campaigns before on their Facebook Ad account, we knew social media advertising would eventually be a key to their success. So, before we even began our engagement, our team added a facebook pixel to the eCommerce site.

This gave us a major advantage: Because Facebook had been collecting data on purchasers and site visitors for months, we were able to hit the ground running when creating well-informed ads.

The Campaign

Here we believe in the power of the “See, Think, Do” Facebook Ads campaign . It’s served us extremely well when working with other ecom brands.  so we used this framework for pal box too. 

 

Because we wanted to reach new customers and see how they responded to our ad creative, we started with a single campaign that only targeted cold audiences (with no retargeting ads). By choosing a conversion-based approach optimised toward purchases, Facebook and Instagram would serve the ads to users who were most likely to take action — weeding out the window shoppers.

With this setup, we’d send more qualified shoppers into Palbox’ sales funnel from the very start.

The Ad Set

When creating an ad set on Facebook, it’s easy to get lost in all the options you can select. 

For Palbox, we kept it simple and opted into all devices and automatic placements. This would give Facebook and Instagram’s machine learning more options to display the ads, leading to better results for our client.

Given the lower price point of the product and the likelihood that consumers would impulse buy, we used a one-day click delivery optimization, instead of the default seven-day click optimization. (We recommend using the latter only if your product costs more than $100 or if your potential customers have a longer buying cycle.)

In digital marketing, you never make promises you can’t keep or set goals you can’t reach. 

But, in some cases, ad copy, the right messaging, and the perfect opportunity all line up to produce results that blow away any conventional expectations. 

Like most businesses at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, they saw a sharp drop in orders. But, instead of pulling back, they decided to double down and increase ad spend during this time — leading to substantial results, including:

• 9.68x return on ad spend (ROAS)

• 785% increase in monthly revenue

• $4.87 cost per customer acquisition (CPA)

But the success didn’t stop there. In addition to the improvements on the paid social channels, sitewide organic metrics increased significantly, too, with:

• 6.6% organic conversion rate

• 183% increase in monthly organic traffic

• 931% increase in brand query and product searches 

• 200% increase in non-branded search query impressions 

Today, we’ll tell you exactly how we made it all happen — so you can replicate these results in your social ad campaigns, too.

 

The Budget

For the best Facebook marketing results, we recommend incrementally scaling your budget over time. In the case of pal box, we scaled up budgets by 10–15% every couple of days, as long as the ROAS was at least 5x.

A more significant increase can wreak havoc on well-performing campaigns and hurt ROAS or cost per acquisition (CPA) metrics when Facebook has to quickly adjust to new information and determine the best way to serve it. 

Breaking Down Our Ads

While targeting and budget are important for Facebook Ad success, you won’t get anywhere without first having an attractive, engaging ad. 

Facebook A/B testing is key to creating a top-performing ad that your target audience wants to see. By testing a few options, you can combine the best creative and copy to increase sales, rather than waste money running one ineffective ad at a time.

For Pal box, we started by running two different ad creatives against the same in-ad copy.

The Creative

When creating our Facebook ads, we selected single-image ads in a 1:1 ratio. 

Because the majority of social media consumption happens on mobile devices, the 1:1 ratio gives advertisers the best chance of showing the ads in an optimal format to a wider audience. 

Results & Takeaways

When it comes to paid social advertising, effective creative and copy are your not-so-secret weapons. Stay true to your brand, delight your customers with an ad creative, and you’ll win every time. 

At the same time, scaling vertically and horizontally can also reap huge benefits. But you need good audience data to do it right. 

The more recent your seed audiences, and the larger they are, the better lookalikes you can create — and the more sales you can drive through your campaigns.

Using these strategies, we saw great success with Pal Box’ campaigns, including a 4.5x ROAS (9.68x ROAS with Facebook attribution) and less than $10 CPA ($4.87 with Facebook attribution).

In total, this campaign accounted for 25% of Pal Box’ monthly revenue. Sitewide sales during this period, however, were equal to the total from the last seven months of sales — a 785% monthly increase.

So, what did it mean?

Our Facebook Ads campaigns didn’t just affect social revenue. It also affected other channels, too.

Here is the screenshot of one month of sales.