Using Paid Social to Cut Through Signal Loss and Drive Real, Measurable Business Outcomes
The Challenge
Bonafide Health creates hormone-free and drug-free solutions for a more natural approach to address the symptoms of menopause. Menopause is not a one-size or one-click fits all solution because it manifests so differently from woman to woman. A major challenge is that each supplement in Bonafide’s product line is specially formulated to target different symptoms. Choosing the right one requires a customer’s time, understanding, and investment. Another formidable hurdle is that menopause is still so stigmatized that many women suffer in silence rather than seek out help. A woman’s need to obtain detailed information from the privacy of her own home was therefore key to the customer journey.
In the face of both of these obstacles came the biggest one of all – the new, privacy-first web. Finding the women who needed their products most became nearly impossible with the signal loss that came in a post-iOS14.5 world. The brand lost the hyper-targeting and segmentation abilities it had historically relied upon to find users ready to make this purchase. In fact, performance on social fell so precipitously in late 2022 that it went from being the largest source of customer volume to the smallest in just three months. Paid social sales volume dropped an alarming 91% in Q1 volume YoY from 2021 to 2022. The brand ended up turning off social channels completely with virtually no real impact on the bottom line. Bonafide was in a bind. It no longer knew what audiences it was reaching, nor did it have a clear understanding of what its creative strategy needed to be.
After months of heavy signal loss stemming from the changes to iOS, we were able to turn it around and help Bonafide reach the right audience. We found a creative solution to this problem that led to unprecedented new customer growth in a key quarter. We did it by pulling through the insights we gleaned from pre-click engagements to the post-click experience and that made a world of difference.
Emily Gates
Director, E-Commerce + Growth, Tinuiti
Results
+213%
APM Conversions per impression
+1400%
New-to-Brand Customers
-54%
Customer Acquisition Cost
*Paid Social campaign, January 2022-January 2023
How We Did It
Business metrics, not marketing metrics.
In a post-iOS 14.5 world, brands need a whole new approach to Paid Social that focuses on real business outcomes rather than marketing metrics. But we knew we couldn’t do that with ad performance optimized in separate silos – namely CTR and Conversion Rate. We needed to understand how they impacted one another. We audited the funnel to better understand what drives impression efficiency for Bonafide customers. Instead of focusing on whether an ad was engaging, we set our sights on engaging the right user into a funnel that was designed specifically for her and her needs.
Our analyses made it clear that our funnel had to do a lot of work in a short amount of time, getting users from low familiarity with a high-commitment product to conversion within a few sessions. We needed to weld together two parts of the funnel that are usually disjointed – ad engagement and website conversion.
Pre-Click (the ad)
Bonafide would need to develop ads that increased credibility but that at the same time conveyed empathy. The output was a series of engaging “whitecoat” videos of doctors talking about the product’s benefits. They delivered high credibility combined with a native-feeling, influencer format that spoke on a personal level to the correct audience, without relying on a heavy targeting overlay. It worked. The ads moved the right customers out of their feeds and onto the Bonafide site.
Post-Click (the website)
Getting a consumer to click on an ad is just the beginning. Converting paid traffic post-click is what really matters to a business. Tinuiti went to work designing and building a series of high-converting landing pages to personalize the experience. We emphasized short, succinct information sharing and placed the spotlight on customer reviews instead of traditional CTAs so customers arriving from Paid Social channels would be able to find the right products quickly. To great success, we simplified complex buying decisions and shortened the buying funnel. Faced with the data blackout from signal loss on social, we uncovered other signals by reshaping how we looked at the data sets. In doing so, we were able to do more with what we had, with each click we drove doing heavier lifting than what Bonafide had done previously.
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