Every month, our expert team of Media Buyers performs a series of Facebook Ads Tests to offer you expert tips on how to optimize your campaigns and strategies.

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Here are the results of our latest test as of February 7th, 2022.

This week, mobile applications are in the spotlight for a test that, we think, will shock you because of how HUGE the difference in CPA gets throughout the campaign.

The app in question has the potential to be of interest to a larger audience, but is for the moment geographically tied. It’s an app that allows consumers to shop fresh surplus food from their local grocers.

We kickoff with the following objective: we must first get audiences that do know the app to download it, then convince them to make a purchase via retargeting campaigns.

Throughout this month, our CPI and CPA were very high. For reference, our mandate was to hit a CPA of $5…and the difference was huge. Here are some of our ads.

The following month, we take a risk. We let Facebook take the reins and find a way to generate what we really need most: purchases. So, we launched a new TOF campaign, but this time we optimized for In-App Purchases.

The goal was to reach people who did not yet have the app to get them to download it and make purchases. To start, we targeted BROAD audiences from only our best-performing cities, as well as a LookLike audience based on the 1,000 biggest users of the app (to encourage loyalty and a high volume of purchases). Naturally, the audience volume for a conversion campaign increases significantly, going from a BOF campaign to a TOF campaign.

For a standard advertiser, this audience volume may seem low, but in order to generate In-App purchases, we’re forced to segment audiences by OS (Android vs iOS) so the volume is always cut in half.

But, this is not our only optimization. We also decided to change our creatives and adapt our Hook to fit the winter season.

Here are our results.

We hit a CPA of $3.10 per in-app purchase, and were able to scale our budget by $2000 thanks to this new campaign. We immediately stopped our other campaigns to keep running this one. Here are our results over the following two months.

The account’s spend increased by almost $6,000 without exceeding the target CPA. In the meantime, the Account Manager made sure to continue producing new ads with Hooks that touch on consumers’ reality.

The ads address a very real reality in Canada, the winter cold, which can hinder a simple trip to the grocery store.

So, what can we learn from this test?

If you’ve been following our tests for a while now, you know there are strategies we swear by. For this test, we intentionally included the following elements, which are what undoubtedly made it a success.

1/ Firstly: always ask Facebook for what you need. If Facebook fails, reformulate or change your goal.

2/ Secondly, repurpose and adapt your creatives. This is the best way to maintain a successful concept and avoid Ad Fatigue. Also, use your consumers' reality and daily struggles for your Hooks!

3/ BROAD Audiences (again and again)

Here are the results for our BROAD audiences vs. Lookalike audiences:

BROAD: $3.62 CPA / $36,362.5 spend

LK: $3.91 CPA / $16,990.52

Here are the results of our latest test as of February 7th, 2022.

This week, we’ll be talking about UGC and a test that completely turned one of our e-commerce client’s accounts around.

Context: This client sells children’s clothes, and our Account Manager (Sarah Martin-Brodeur) was running ads announcing a promotion on selected items.

The results above are the results for our acquisition campaigns only, circa mid-January. Below are the overall results for the account.

As you already know, we always talk about UGC At J7 Media, and Sarah was eager to try it for this client’s account. So, she made the following proposal to our client: send over free products, and she’ll shoot an organic video in exchange.

Our client accepted, curious to see what could come out of it. Sarah shot a 45 second video, and all our design team had to do was add subtitles.

The script was simple enough: an introduction to the brand, why Sarah likes their products, and a call to action to visit the website. It's important to note that the ad didn’t mention any promotional offer and was running against an ad offering a discount that had much more learning history.

Here are the results of the acquisition campaign for all audiences for the last 11 days of the month.

The campaign’s ROAS increased by 18.78%, which in turn increased the ad spend by 53%! AND, the ad’s CTR increased by 15%. Rather impressive, because it completely eclipsed our other ads with promotional offers! For reference, we also calculated the Spend/Visible Engagment for the last 11 days.

• Standard Ad: $35 per engagement
• UGC : $13.

Generating a simple like or comment on the post cost 2.69 times more for the standard ad than the UGC video ad. Let's see what the spend and ROAS looks like at the account level now.

The rest of the account followed, benefiting from this scale, resulting in a 22% increase in spend and ROAS.

Again, we strongly encourage you to shoot UGC videos, even if it's super simple content. Sarah is already working on refining this ad to make the most of it!