How to prepare for big events

Hey there! 👋

As I am writing this it's pouring rain and I've just come home from an afternoon walk drenched from it. Post-lunch walks have been key for me. They allow me to unplug from the morning work I've been doing and give me a fresh feel after lunch so I can attack the afternoon with some new energy.

Don't forget to leave headphones at home and preferably go into a nature area and be alone with your thoughts!

So, enough self-care advice for today 😆. Time to get into this week's subject which is preparing for big sales events like Valentine's day, Mother's Day, Christmas, Halloween etc...

So I wanted to write this based on some actual work we did for one of our clients and how we managed to generate $1,200,000 in sales for this client in 1 month.

We've:📈 Increased revenue by 746%📊 Maintained a 5.12 blended ROAS✅ Brought down New Customer CPA by 25% to $46.1

So to start out, this brand is in the gifting space and has a very good Valentine's offer. I hate threads like these myself that don't provide any context so wanted to be straight up about it! Let's break it down!

Preparation

We started at the end of December by planning out all creative ideas, concepts and hooks to test. We gave ourselves 3 weeks to plan ahead before we could start testing stuff out in the second part of January as that's when we implemented the Valentine's Day ads/angles.

This wasn't just a one-off thing. As the weeks followed, we continually came up with new creatives as we knew we'd be ramping up spend pretty hard so we had to make sure we had enough creatives to support it.

In the end, we produced around 200 videos and static images to test in this period and were spending roughly 10-14K per day at the peak.

I think planning and making sure everything was ready to go was crucial in this process and allowed us to get the results we've gotten.

Facebook setup

Most of the spend went to Facebook. Our setup was pretty simple as we knew we could generate most of the results by having 4 campaigns in the account.

• Campaign 1: CBO for testing/scaling (we would test new creatives and increase spend as we go)

• Campaign 2: ABO for more testing (specific country testing outside our main country)

• Campaign 3: Advantage+ Shopping campaign to scale winners.

• Campaign 4: Bid caps (to scale)

To give some context, at some point our bid caps were contributing to 30-40% of our daily ad budget so I would say in scaling periods like these try to set up as many bids as possible. For example, your winning creatives are getting a CPA at $25...

Try setting bids like these:$20$25$30All the way up to 10X your target CPA...

The higher your bids go the lower budget I would recommend avoiding overspending without results. So for example try setting a bid at $200 at a $20 per day budget, you might outbid competitors.

TikTok setup

TikTok was our lowest spending channel, but we were seeing some incremental revenue.

Our setup was simple. One campaign on ABO using mostly ACOs and throwing in 5 creatives at a time with 3 different ad copies.

Good results? Scale using cost caps same method as Facebook, but in this case, we would not go as high and only go up to 50% above our target CPA.

Next to that, we did simple horizontal scaling, and vertical scaling (20% each day) and we tested doing interests to scale more.

Google setup

Google was a massive contributor to the account by spending roughly 81K with a 7.13 ROAS reported by Triple Whale (a must-have to be honest when scaling like this) we couldn't have scaled so hard if it wasn't for the direct feedback Triple Whale was giving us.

With Google, we started prepping around the same time when doing the creative planning as we had to build out multiple campaigns for different categories and had to make sure the messaging makes sense as with the product there were a lot of high-intent searches around Valentine's.

The competition was also very big, but due to our planning, we managed to throttle up spend pretty rapidly on the Google side as well.

The campaigns that spent the most were Performance MAX. We simply started out with some broad ones and continued to set up more for product categories as we went on and continued to see good results.

Additionally, we set up standard shopping and search campaigns to get higher intent keywords and dominate the search results to make sure the competition didn't stand a chance.

At the start of this massive campaign, we had target ROAS numbers in place for the campaigns, but we noticed that campaigns were spending their full amount with amazing results. We removed the targets and kept on increasing the budgets and results remained stable.

That was pretty much it! We beat last year's numbers pretty hard and made sure the brand was happy with the scale. Even to the point that they had to jump into the warehouse themselves to help out with the massive influx of orders!

Most Valuable Piece of Content

Every week I want to share a piece of content I've found valuable and learned a lot from.

My good friend Ron and his co-founders Ash and Ankit from Obvi uploaded this banger of a video this week talking about performance vs branding. Being a performance marketing agency this usually is a touchy subject for brands we partner with. What should you focus on most when scaling a brand and at what do you value more, good ad performance and/or branding? Check it out here:

Top 5 Ads of The Week

I've been using Foreplay for months now, and I can honestly say it's one of the best value-for-money tools for any eCommerce brand, agency owner or anyone that runs paid media. It allows you to save ads from TikTok's and Facebook's ads library and keep them forever in your inspiration boards!

Go get yourself a free trial here!

Tweet of The Week

That's a wrap!

I hope you've enjoyed this week's issue of DTC with Dennis and it brought you value on how to attack big events like Valentine's Day and how to make sure you beat last year's numbers!

See you next week at 7 PM CEST.

All the best,

Dennis 💚

P.S. On Twitter? Follow me here for daily value bombs about eCommerce and DTC!