Increasing Modern Mammals' ROAS by 40% At Launch
Boosting Modern Mammals' ROAS by 40%
Modern Mammals offers a hair-washing product specifically designed for men, aiming to reduce the damage caused by traditional shampoos. Their products focus on light, daily rinsing that moisturizes and cleans without stripping natural oils, resulting in healthier hair and scalp.
The Opportunity
Modern Mammals recently partnered with acclaimed comedian Pete Holmes and sought to maximize the value of this partnership by scaling their paid media efforts with Flighted. They had a product that people loved but needed a more deliberate approach to their performance marketing program.
The Strategy
Taking Modern Mammals’ acquisition strategy to the next level required focus in four key areas: optimizing the Meta ad account structure, unlocking new growth through landing page testing, diverse creative, and pushing spend towards incrementality.
Ad Account Structure Optimization
Initially, Modern Mammals tested all their creative in Advantage+ Campaigns, with a large number of fragmented ad sets using ad set budget optimization. Over a six-week period, the Flighted team made several changes to avoid pushing too much budget into the learning phase at once:
Restructuring the ad account to a more stable “test” and “scale” structure, testing all creative in a Creative Test campaign and scaling only the best performers to Advantage+ Campaigns
Switching creative testing and audience testing campaigns to campaign budget optimization, allowing Meta more flexibility to adjust budgets to the most efficient creative concepts and audiences
Relaunching the catalog campaign, removing the lowest Average Order Value (AOV) sample pack item and adding a Cost Cap for more efficiency, making it one of the top-performing campaigns in the account
Whitelisting the top-performing historic video ads directly from creator handles in a dedicated whitelisting campaign
Testing a dedicated landing page for a higher AOV product, allowing for segmented messaging
Landing Page Testing
Initially, Modern Mammals ran ads to three different landing pages at different price points, causing instability within their Meta ads delivery. Analyzing revenue per session by landing page revealed that their homepage was the most efficient for running ads. They first moved all new ad launches to this landing page to standardize performance. From there, they tested a new Flighted-designed landing page directing to their highest revenue per session-yielding product, the "Bottle and Bar Bundle." This landing page focused on explaining why their shampoo alternative was better than traditional shampoo and was packed with social proof.
The Flighted LP allowed for a more segmented approach to the paid traffic user experience
Unlocking Growth Through Diverse Creative
A creative audit revealed that Modern Mammals lacked several key creative formats and wasn't testing messaging with enough regularity. The Flighted team built a messaging matrix of potential pain points that their customer base might experience from using traditional shampoo. They then incorporated this messaging into a wide array of ad formats to see what would resonate in the market.
An example of a new static ad tested in the account
Pushing Spend Towards Incrementality
As a subscription-heavy business, Modern Mammals discovered that a high percentage of repeat purchases were inadvertently attributed back to Meta through their view-through attribution window. This issue hurt Meta’s ability to optimize for new customers and skewed the in-platform data. By switching the optimization window and viewing results through a more conservative 7-day click window, they gained a clearer picture of which campaigns, audiences, and creatives drove the most top-of-funnel value. This led to an increase in the First-Time Impression Ratio and a reduction in Frequency across prospecting campaigns.
Another component of pushing towards incrementality was investing in upper-funnel marketing channels, which are more complex to profitably crack than Meta. Launching YouTube and rigorously optimizing audiences and creative on the platform provided a halo effect across all other marketing channels, including Google Search. The team leveraged post-purchase survey data to project the channel’s true Customer Acquisition Cost (CPA) in the absence of easily attributable on-platform conversion numbers.
The Results
By optimizing their Meta ad account structure, investing in more diverse creative, testing landing pages, and pushing spend towards incrementality, the Flighted team achieved significant success for Modern Mammals. They managed to grow ad spend month-over-month by 39% while also improving the Meta return on ad spend (ROAS) by 40%. This was a significant achievement when considering the significant volume Modern Mammals was already doing through ads.
