Three Ad Platforms, One US Store

Design Dua makes organic baby bassinets and pet beds with artisans in West Africa and sells them online in the US. It needed paid campaigns that could find new buyers and bring back past visitors across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Google, with a clear monthly view of what each platform returned, through the swings of 2020: a spring slowdown, the US election and a busy holiday season.

We ran each platform for the job it does best and moved budget to whatever was converting. On Facebook and Instagram, separate prospecting, remarketing and re-engagement campaigns, with bid caps cut where they were holding delivery back and lookalike audiences built from the store's own customers. On Pinterest, conversion campaigns for new buyers, act-alike and dynamic retargeting audiences, and regular optimisation calls with Pinterest's account team. On Google, Shopping ads alongside the free product listings from May 2020. Holiday-themed creative and sale campaigns carried the peak season, and every month closed with a report on spend, purchases and return on ad spend per platform.

Across the seven months with complete platform reports (April, May, September to December 2020 and February 2021), the ads recorded more than US$1.2M in platform-reported sales, about 15 times the ad spend on the most conservative count. The strongest months ran well above that: in April 2020 Facebook returned 27x and Pinterest 37x, and in November 2020, the month of the holiday sale, Facebook returned 19.75x and Pinterest 25.86x. These are platform-reported figures: Meta, Pinterest and Google each count the sales their ads influenced, so the same order can appear on more than one platform, and they are not a count of Shopify orders.