Business Summary
The Ski Monster® is an American enterprise focused on ski gear. They exist to reconcile a huge market gap in the retail experience for skiers and snowboarders. From the beginning, they had only one goal — helping people find gear that actually makes them better on snow.
Their crew is made up of people who actually use the gear they sell, so every recommendation comes from firsthand experience. Their business has seen growth due to exceeding customer’s expectations. But that’s not enough to become the best ski and snowboard shop in the world.
Ski Monster’s competitors have used any and all marketing channels to achieve their own dominant status, and this is where our client decided to invest next. The Digital Marketing landscape provides plenty of opportunities for discovery, but there’s less and less blue oceans to conquer.
So, after 10 years of steady brand development and growth, the team decided that it’s time to start competing directly with the giants, clashing in the paid ad space.
THE CHALLENGES
The client was very transparent about their history, requirements, expectations, past failures and dubious decisions:
They had done some SEO before, but not consistently and not a lot.
They have content producers and creatives ready. A content pipeline was already in place for social media, but they felt it’s wasn’t leveraged correctly to support their SEO and website.
They weren’t sure if transitioning to Shopify was the right decision and need some technical guidance and analysis.
They’ve built a well-respected brand and all of the produced content has to be in alignment with that.
They had a list of specific products they’d like to advertise
They already had Meta Ads running and needed us to improve the ROI even if that meant creating new campaigns from scratch.
This case study focuses on the great performance of Meta Ads and our optimization of campaigns during a 2-week period. Here’s how we did it…
THE PROCESS
- We needed access to the catalog within Facebook ads manager from the manager of the business account.
- Note:
- All of a Shopify store’s products live inside Facebook and Instagram so the system knows what you sell. It connects your website inventory to your ads and shop. Once it’s set up, Facebook automatically pulls your product images, prices, and availability into your ads and shop pages.
- After connecting our manager accounts, and getting all the necessary access, we started making a list of observations and necessary actions to take:
- We investigated the new product process to streamline it for the client so it doesn’t have the product gaps.
- Ad copy, informational copy, and Call to Action copy were all planned to be subjected to AB testing, combined with high quality creatives from YouTube.
- Clear communication and internal teamwork were crucial. We also have to commend the client for timely responses to our requests, which made the whole process very fast.
SOLUTION & STRATEGY
The suggested Campaign Plan was as follows:
- Objective: Sales (Conversions)
- Buying Type: Auction
- Performance Goal: Maximize Purchases (Purchase Event)
- Attribution: 7-day click / 1-day view
- Budget Type: Advantage Campaign Budget (CBO Enabled)
- Optimization Model: Advantage+ Shopping Campaign + Manual Prospecting/Retargeting Ad Sets
Three different ad sets were set up in the pipeline:
- One for cold audiences
- One for warm audiences (retargeting)
- One for hot audiences (retention and upsells)
We noticed that we needed to craft better hooks at the beginning, and better CTAs at the end, so that was obligatory to work on.
The budgets were re-adjusted later on after the AB testing which lasted 5 days.
RESULTS
The new campaigns outperformed the old one across every meaningful metric.
Meta automatically concentrated spend into the highest-value audience: men ages 25–44, especially 25–34 which drove consistent, lower-cost conversions.
The values above are for the combined 2 campaigns that were created. We replaced an underperforming single ad set with a dual-campaign structure:
- “Catalog Carousel” campaign with high CTR / lowest CPC
- “Ski Monster Video Creative Ads”, with high conversion efficiency despite higher CPC.
This blended structure increased both volume and profitability. The lift in ROAS showed higher-quality traffic and stronger purchase intent.
Old Campaign (10/1–10/15) AUGUST PRODUCT AD – HARDGOODS SET
New Catalog Carousel Campaign (10/29–11/12)
New Ski Monster Campaign (Youtube Creative)
Aggregated New Campaign Totals
(Combined Catalog + Ski Monster Creative)
- Total Spend: $1,862.53
- Total Purchases: 52
- Total Revenue: $12,894.12
- Blended CPA: $35.82
- Blended ROAS: 6.92
- Weighted CPM: $11.59
Weighted CPC: $0.52
CONCLUSION
After initial talks with the client and identifying points of concern like budget bleeding or under-performance, we immediately set off to create a plan of action that leverages all the experience we had in PPC, and the resources available to us. Luckily, the client had enough creatives for our purposes scattered across various platforms.
Time was of the essence, not just because of the mentioned concerns, but because the PPC space is such that we know for a fact we can get fast results and establish an early ROI that can help build trust!
Then, once the campaigns are at a satisfactory level of quality, they can easily be maintained for a long time while our other teams are working on optimizing the site itself and doing more long-term work like SEO link building campaigns.
Automations are also in the pipeline currently, and we’re excited to show our expertise in this regard using our previous experience in the e-commerce industry.
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The new campaigns delivered cheaper traffic, cheaper impressions, and more purchases at the same time.
If you like how that sounds, give us a call or fill out the discovery form on our website!
Call us at: (206) 800-7756 or, email vlad (at) logicinbound.com to get started today!