PupSocks gives pet owners the chance to show how much they love their pets by custom-printing their faces on socks, mugs, tote bags and more. With such a visually oriented product, the one-year-old online retailer’s growth depends on capturing an audience that loves showing off their pets on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Aiming both to accelerate its growth via paid social advertising and better measure its campaigns’ success on the two social platforms, PupSocks implemented the Pattern89 AI software platform. In the first 10 days of working with Pattern89, PupSocks saw:
- Revenue from paid social ads increase 12%;
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) improve 15%; and
- Reinvigorated underperforming ad sets in smaller campaigns, increasing their ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 31%.
The AI component of the platform is designed specifically to assist in predicting the best media buying decisions, as well as allocating budgets and optimizing campaigns.
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“We’ve got more than 7,000 ads running right now, and that’s split across 1,500 different ad sets across dozens of campaigns. Now we can instantly see insights of which of these ads are performing better than others,” said Zach Zelner, CEO and Co-Founder of PupSocks in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “For example, ‘This target group is not producing at a high level. However, this piece of creative within this ad group is dominating, and we should be allocating all our budget into that instead of two other ads that for some reason doesn’t resonate with this group.’”
Pattern89’s ARGO engine analyzes PupSocks ads across 2,500 different dimensions to predict which ads will perform the best. Through daily algorithmic analysis of their paid social campaigns, the PupSocks media buyers get a task list of which actions should take priority and would have the most impact. Example tasks may include:
- “Invest your budget more heavily in video to drive low CPC (cost per click) for consideration campaigns;”
- “Add top performing emojis to your copy to improve conversion campaign ROAS;” and
- “Move budget investment from Facebook to Instagram to lower awareness CPM” (costs per thousand impressions).
With this data, PupSocks media buyers now have “low-lying fruit” to start their day that can bring an immediate return on select social ads, according to Zelner.
“We run maybe a $7 million per year paid social budget, in which $4 million comes in a 45-day span through the holiday season,” said Zelner. “It becomes a very simple question: When we have the opportunity to increase our ROAS, even incrementally, we go for it. When we ran the Pattern89 pilot, we saw that there were opportunities that were missed by our media buyers.”
PupSocks Expands Paid Social To 4% Of Ad Spend
The retailer has even increased its paid social budget from 3.3% to approximately 4% of ad spend, and while Zelner doesn’t attribute the entire jump specifically to the Pattern89 platform, he indicates that it definitely influenced the retailer’s ability to scale spending in this category. Zelner estimates that this jump could enable as much as a 20% increase in ROAS.
Additionally, the platform allows the retailer’s marketers to focus on more creative and strategic tasks. “Their bandwidth increases dramatically because they’re not locked into monotonous data analysis,” Zelner said. “And that was probably half the job of our media buyers before, and that’s 70% alleviated now.”
