From Zero to $1 Million in 35 Days on the GDN—During Most Competitive Time of Year

Background:

This client's business was founded on the ethos that scientific advances in general health and longevity should be made available and affordable to all people. They specialize in producing a variety of all-natural supplements for adults.

Challenge:

Since 70% of American’s New Year’s Resolutions revolve around health and weight loss, January is one of the most competitive times of the year for businesses that fall within the health or diet industry. This client approached us with a new sales funnel for a weight-loss supplement on December 11, 2016. We had approximately 3 weeks to scale as high and as fast as possible on the Google Display Network (GDN), with a CPA below $110.

Strategy:

The usual approach to scaling on the GDN, is to start gradually and collect statistics in order to optimize. However, we did not have a lot of time to work with. Our experts devised a time-considerate and results-driven action plan, which involved two key phases:

Testing Phase (December 16-28)

We started by building targeted campaigns simply based off the demographic profile of the target customer. We then began a period of aggressive creative testing. During this time, we pitting banners – made by our in-house creative studio – against each other on a $500/day budget.

We simultaneously built a robust Google Search campaign, which helped cover the costs of the Display campaign until a winning creative emerged from testing—just 17 days after opening the account.

Scaling Phase (December 29 and Beyond)

Once we found a winning creative, we began to focus on targeting. There were three major ways we achieved this:

1) Segment Analysis

We focused on the most profitable segments on the GDN, those that would lower the CPA as much as possible so that we would have room to grow.

2) Proprietary Bidding Technology

We used our proprietary bidding technology, which helps us learn how to bid without large volumes of data by using information from other campaigns and by creating more data points.

3) Maximize Inventory Coverage and Avoiding Intra-Competition

We expanded to other devices, ad sizes, and relevant geographical locations to ensure that we were not competing with ourselves.

All-in-all, we scaled from zero to $1 million in just 35 days and to $1.5 million in 44 days!