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Orbit: How We Scaled Single-Product Brand To 4.4X ROAS Using Manual Product Catalog Strategy

Have you ever felt like you’re stuck scaling up your ad campaigns?

Or you’ve gotten to a certain level, and no matter what you do, you just can’t generate any more sales while remaining profitable.

When Orbit came to us, that was exactly their problem. They had reached a certain level of success with Facebook ads, but they hit a ceiling and they couldn’t seem to get past it.

Fortunately, they came to the right agency. Scaling up is what Swipe Right does.

Orbit manufactures portable Bluetooth-enabled trackers for keys, wallets, and other personal belongings. Since reaching out to us three years ago, we have guided them through that period of decline as well navigated through two different product pre-sales and launches.

And that presents a special challenge when you’re trying to scale up your marketing while remaining profitable.

Nevertheless, we were more than up for the challenge. We met with Orbit and agreed on a goal: scale up their campaigns while shooting for an account-wide ROAS of 2.5x.

The first step, as always, was to do a deep-dive analysis of their current campaigns. We needed to diagnose what was working, what wasn’t, and where the underlying opportunities were to sqeeuze out and scale by reaching more buyers on social.

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Our Deep Dive Revealed Some Hidden Opportunities

The first thing we noticed when auditing their ad account, was that they were only using conversion campaigns.

We see this in a lot of accounts. Marketers have a tendency to overdo direct-response campaigns as the only campaign objective that they optimize for.

Yes. conversions and sales are what matter the most at the end of the day however, one thing we’ve learned in Swipe Right is that using a variety of campaign objectives—like optimizing for post-conversion traffic and engagement, on top of conversion objective—can actually help you to reach different people in your primary demographic audiences.

This is because Facebook will show your ads to different users depending on your campaign objective. So, a campaign with the objective of “Reach” will reach a different group of people, versus “Conversion” objective, even if they’re targeting exactly the same demographics and behaviors.

So, targeting a greater variety of campaign goals is an effective way to make the most out of your budget from the scaling standpoint, helping you maximize the power of Facebook advertising.

And the way we do it here at Swipe Right is by leveraging The 10x Ecommerce Ad System™ to run an Ad Account Healthcheck.

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What is The 10x Ecommerce Ad System, and How Does It Help Scale Campaigns?

The 10X eCommerce Ad System™ is a tried-and-true framework we developed after spending millions of dollars on Facebook & Instagram advertising to structure Facebook campaigns according to audience types. Using this system helps ensure that every site visitor is shown the best possible ad based on where they are in your marketing funnel.

Here’s what it looks like:

By implementing this ad system in the account, we were able to make each of their campaigns much more dialed-in and focused. Now we could measure the performance of each sub-ad sets for very specific audiences—and anytime something wasn’t working, we knew right then and there where it was going wrong.

With an account-wide system like The 10x eCommerce Ad System™ in place, it becomes much easier to spot winners and losers and ultimately optimize the entire account performance.

In a nutshell, it’s essential to scaling up your campaigns, especially if we want to generate results in a predictable way. That’s why it’s always one of the first things we do when taking over an ad account.

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🔒The Challenge

When it comes to scaling e-commerce companies on Facebook, Dynamic product ads (DPAs) are a very big deal. This ad type allows advertisers to showcase multiple product images (or videos) within a single ad.

What makes it dynamic is that it automatically serves the right products to the right people based on which products users have shown their interest in.

Here’s an example:

They are a must-have retargeting tool, and we have seen some great success targeting cold traffic as well.

Orbit had never tested a product catalog ad campaign for cold traffic. There was definitely an opportunity there!

…but there was also a challenge.

They only offered one core product at the time: a trackable key card.

As a result, they only had one single item in their product catalog with a boring flat-lay image like the following:

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Our Unique Manual Product Catalog Strategy

This is where most agencies would drop the ball. At first glance, one would think DPAs wouldn’t work here because Orbit only had one product. If Facebook ever tried to display it, it would just look like the same product over and over.

It’s worth noting here, creating a carousel ad type and manual product are two totally different things although they may look similar on the frontend. That is, even if one carousel ad and one product catalog ad were to target the same criteria (ex. Behaviors > Digital Activities Technology Adopters), they would be reaching different pools of users even within that target audience.

So instead, we created a manual product catalog.

In other words, we manually set up a catalog consisting of several different product images and headlines. And instead of using this ad format to feature product name and price, we used it to call out different product and company benefits.

Specifically, we wanted to call attention to the fact that this tracker…

• Allows you to stop wasting time
• Compact & convenient
• Comes with 5 year warranty
• Free US Shipping
• 30-day risk-free guarantee

We used these benefits in lieu of the product name. To give you a better idea, here’s what the ad looked like in the newsfeed:

See how this almost tells a little story?

You click through the carousel and each panel gives you a different benefit, a new reason to choose Orbit for your everyday needs. This narrative form builds confidence in the product (though benefits like “Saves you time”) while reinforcing brand values (like “Made in the Australia”).

In essence, it allows you to demonstrate more benefits than you normally would in a standard ad.

You’ll notice we also varied up the product images so it wasn’t just the same picture over and over. We did that by leveraging user-generated content of use cases.

Here’s what our new product catalog looked like:

Much better, right?

As for the copy, we kept that pretty simple and straightforward and tested some variations between question-based, social proof-based, long vs short, etc. For the variation above, we used a command version of the copy that we’ve been using in a lot of ads with great success. We’ve been using this format for Henge Docks with great success as well.

At the end of the day, this creative approach meant that we were able to run DPAs ads despite that the client only really offered a single product.

And as a result, we were able to market that product to prospects in a unique and compelling way.

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How Do These Ads Fit into The 10X Ecommerce Ad System™?

So far, we’ve elaborated a bit on our unique case of manual product ads. But now let’s take a step back and look at the big picture for a moment.

Where do these manual DPAs fit in with the rest of Orbit’s ’s Facebook advertising?

Typically, DPAs are found to be most effective in Levels 3-5 of The 10x Ecommerce Ad System™. In other words, we don’t usually show these ads to cold traffic (Level 1) or people who have engaged on Facebook but have not yet visited the website (Level 2).

In Orbit’s case however, we used manual DPAs to great effect in Level 1 and Level 2 with massive success:

So you may be wondering:

Why do DPAs typically work so well with these Level 3 and 4 audiences and not Levels 1 and 2?

Keep in mind that DPAs are a very product-focused ad, so they tend to work best when the person has at least some familiarity with the product. And how do we know if the person is familiar with the product?

Because they visited the product page! (Which, again, is Level 3.)

Once a person has reached Level 3 of The 10x Ecommerce Ad System™, we can safely assume that they’re at least somewhat familiar with the product. And when they reach Level 4, they’re not only familiar with the product—they’re definitely interested in it, because they’ve added it to their shopping cart.

When we hit Level 3 and Level 4 audiences with a DPA, we know they’ll instantly recognize the product. This gives us a great opportunity to remind them about the product and its primary benefits. It’s a chance to tell them, again, how great the product is.

And in Big Barker’s case, because of the strategy we used with their manual DPAs, we were able to storytell about common problems people face everyday and remind them of 5-6 important benefits about the product right off the bat.

One last question you might have is:

What about Level 5? Why didn’t we show the manual DPAs to that audience?

Level 5 includes people who have already made a purchase. For some companies, Level 5 is a highly profitable audience for promoting cross-sells, re-orders, and new products.

But since Orbit only had just one core product, anyone in Level 5 would have already bought that product—so it wouldn’t have made sense to promote it to them again.

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What were the results?

Remember that our account-wide goal to achieve a 2.5X ROAS (return on ad spend). And when I say “account-wide,” that means it includes things like retargeting ads—which typically convert better and bring up the overall ROAS in the ad account.

Using this 10x eCommerce Ad System™, we were able to exceed that goal by generating an overall YOY Return on Ad Spend of 3.8X.

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Big Takeaway: A Strategic Approach Can Work Wonders

There are two big things to take away from this case study:

• Once you’ve already taken advantage of the low-hanging fruit in your market, the only way to continue scaling up is through a comprehensive strategic approach.
• Sometimes you have to think outside the box of what normally works to surpass your current limitations.

The strategic approach gives you a framework for success. Without it, even great ads and targeting will only take you so far.

We’ve mastered this approach through the use of The 10X eCommerce Ad System™, which is what enables us to help companies scale their campaigns so reliably.

One of the benefits of working with a dedicated Facebook/Instagram agency like Swipe Right is that you’re working with experts who are intimately familiar with the platform.

We do this stuff all day, every day. We understand the platform and the algorithm. We know what works and what doesn’t. And as a result, we’re able to see and take advantage of opportunities to get creative with ad formats that can be used in a wide range of scenarios.

If you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling in your own Facebook/Instagram campaigns, let’s talk! One of our Facebook ad experts will be happy to dig into your account and find some places where we can help you to grow more profitably.

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