• 51x increase in ROI for Facebook Dynamic Ads last holiday season
  • 36x increase in ROI for Facebook Dynamics post-holiday

About G/O Digital

G/O Digital, a Gannett company, is a one-stop shop for local businesses looking to connect with consumers through digital marketing, from search to social and everything in between. For national brands and agencies, G/O Digital delivers local digital activation at national scale with push-button simplicity powered by G/O Digital brands. G/O Digital partners with more than 5,000 of the nation's top brands and retailers, including P&G, Target, Walmart, and Walgreens, and leads digital marketing programs with thousands of local businesses across more than 110 local markets.

Dynamic Ads on Facebook drive impressive results for our retail clients, often returning a great deal more than their initial investment. In this client’s case, it was exponentially more, but even under normal circumstances these ads can be impressive. The great thing for our client is that in addition to reaching sports enthusiasts, Facebook is also uniquely strong in selling faith-based items, as that culture is outspoken and engaged on the platform. The perfect combination of a great target base and an active and dynamic advertising campaign drove huge profits.

Jeremy Spaulding
Sr. Social Advertising Specialist at G/O Digital

The Goal—Hit It Out of the Park

For this campaign, G/O Digital wanted to increase its retail client’s sales rate above the 2.5x ROI it was seeing from the client’s own Facebook website traffic ads. The team set a goal of 7x ROI, to be more in alignment with industry retargeting standards.

Since the client serves two huge and outspoken markets—religion and sports—Marin Social and Facebook Dynamic Ads (DAs) seemed like a perfect fit.

Facebook Dynamic Ads for Greater Engagement

During the 2015 holiday season, G/O Digital implemented a simple but elegant campaign strategy—run the client’s existing website traffic ads to generate interest in its products and garner website hits, and then define and target two key audience segments of potential customers with specific ad types:

  • People who added a product to their cart were served single-product ads
  • People who viewed content were served Carousel Ads with top sellers

Thanks to Marin Social’s simple interface, G/O Digital was able to get up to speed quickly and see fast results in time for the holiday season. Within a short amount of time, the team was able to determine the best-selling items on the client’s site, allocate budget to direct traffic to these items, then use Facebook DAs to automatically pull and serve ad creative from the client’s website.

The Results—A Landslide Victory

The client saw a massive increase in ROI — a 51x ROI — between December 10th and Christmas Day. After the holidays and through mid-February 2016, this retailer was able to maintain a 36x ROI from their Facebook DA campaigns.

Now, the client uses Marin Social on a daily basis, and will continue using it in its marketing strategy for the foreseeable future.