An online store sells learning products for children: activity books, charts, puzzles and build-it-yourself kits, shipped to several countries. Its first managed month landed in a peak gifting season, with a target return of five to ten times the ad spend.
The situation
A catalogue full of good gifts
The store had more than 350 products and a gifting season coming, but no structure to tell which products the ads should lead with or how to bring back the people who had already looked.
What we did
Sales first, everything else in support
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Built the sales campaigns around products
Purchase campaigns were built around individual products. Stickers became the volume driver with 98 orders; a house-building kit returned 17.7 times its spend.
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Retargeting alongside the sales campaigns
Retargeting ran next to the product campaigns from the start, and the return climbed to 7.28 in the peak week.
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Supported with traffic and messages
Small traffic and messages campaigns ran on their own budgets, kept separate from the sales budget.
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Reported against the target band
Weekly reporting, with daily breakdowns, against the 5 to 10 return target, by product and by day.
Return on ad spend, week by week
Standouts
What sold
Five years later the store came back to us for another major season, with a customer base of tens of thousands. That campaign turned the base into value-ranked audiences and ran product-demo videos across three markets.
What made the difference
Gift seasons reward stores that know their winners before the peak. Leading with the products people actually bought brought the month inside the target band in the busiest weeks of the year.
