The Value of Pairing PPC and Paid Social

Oiselle specializes in selling premium fitness and running apparel to women all around the world. The brand was created by women athletes for women athletes, and their strong message and loyal customer base allows them to consistently perform well in branded search. However, the high quality of their products is reflected in their price point, which made converting new users via non-branded search challenging. In order to stay competitive in a space already saturated with big-time athletic brands with larger budgets, Oiselle needed to increase first-time customer traffic and grow their user base.

Historically, Oiselle’s non-branded search and Google Shopping traffic struggled to convert at a sustainable rate. There was considerable search volume and ability to spend in their space, even with long-tail keywords that indicated a high intent to purchase. Click-through rates were promising, but conversion rates were low, leading us to believe that current advertising strategies were touching users too late in their purchase journey.

Oiselle knew that once they acquired a new customer, their average lifetime purchase value would greatly exceed the initial cost to drive awareness. As a result, we needed to expand our approach to include higher funnel strategies aimed at targeting and nurturing potential new customers.

In February of 2018, Portent began a paid social strategy with a goal of introducing new potential customers to the Oiselle brand. The approach was two-fold: to create multiple touchpoints to engage new users on Facebook and Instagram, ultimately driving them to convert from a social ad, and to introduce these new users to Oiselle to increase brand awareness and generate more branded searches. Customized ad content was created to speak appropriately to these users while in their different stages of the funnel:

• Upper funnel – Since Oiselle products have a higher price point, we knew that we would see the biggest return by targeting users with middle and lower funnel campaigns. However, we had to build those audiences first. Upwards of 67% of the total budget was spent creating brand awareness and traffic. This was done via lookalike audiences and interest-based targeting using branded video and lead generation.
• Middle funnel – Moving users to the next touchpoint, product-focused assets in the form of video, carousel, and collection ads were served to users who had interacted with specific landing pages or engaged on-platform.
• Lower Funnel – Using the powerful dynamic retargeting capabilities of Facebook, custom ads were served based on cart visits, content views, and more.

Once the paid social strategy targeting upper-funnel users was fully implemented, Oiselle saw a significant increase in year-over-year branded searches and conversion rate within the first 12 months of running the campaign:

• 16% increase in branded search clicks
• 42% increase in branded search revenue
• 25% increase in SEM conversion rate

With additional touches earned from paid social, non-branded conversion rates nearly doubled, at 98% year-over-year. This resulted in a 47% increase in revenue from Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, and Microsoft Advertising combined.

Because building brand awareness was initially the most important part of the paid social strategy, we projected a negative ROAS (last-click) for the first three to six months and didn’t start regularly breaking even until the end of the first year.

By the second year, Oiselle saw a 22% increase in ad revenue and a 7% increase in last-click ROAS. Into the third year iterating on this paid social strategy, we have seen a 102% increase in ad revenue and a 100% increase in last-click ROAS. This is in addition to a 53% increase in new users YoY and a 23% increase in conversion rate.

This integrated PPC and paid social strategy continued to build on itself and since then, Oiselle has seen even larger period-over-period growth from their paid advertising efforts:

• 62% increase in branded search clicks
• 125% increase in branded search revenue
• 41% increase in SEM conversion rate

PoP Cumulative Non-Branded Search Revenue

PoP Cumulative Branded Search Revenue

PoP Total PPC Revenue