This brand had an outstanding start to 2023!

Not only did they dominate the Valentine's Day period, but they also shattered their highest revenue day twice! We confidently increased their daily ad spend on Google Ads from $550 to $8800 before having to scale back due to inventory issues.

Let's dig in and see what happened ↓

Before diving into the details, it's important to note two things:

1. The founders of the brand are the true heroes behind the successful Valentine's Day strategy and building a fantastic brand. They deserve credit for this successful case study.

2. Branded conversions only accounted for 13% of the total conversions from January 1st to February 14th.

Campaign and strategy

‍Here's what we did to achieve such amazing results.

Time periods such as Valentine's Day generate a lot of "quick" demand that dies out fast. Therefore, we could not afford to waste time for campaigns to ramp up when demand peaked, so we had to think differently about how to attack the period.

So before our peak period we made sure to add Valentine's Day-specific assets at the start of January and spread them across Performance Max, Search, and YouTube to ensure that the ramp-up period was complete by the time demands peaked. This helped us maintain a lower than last year CAC across all campaign formats.

To maximize conversion rates from our search ads we made sure to build and send traffic to Valentine's Day-specific landing pages with 0 friction from people landing on the site to when they convert. We made the decision to disable email pop-ups or anything else that could create friction. When people come from Google, they are in a buying mode and generally don't want to deal with email pop-up boxes in those instances was our hypnosis.

From the keywords side of the scale up, we started early with bidding on Valentine's Day terms early in January to ensure that we also capture people in the research phase and be top-of-mind when they are ready to buy.

We optimized the Shopping Feed with relevant attributes and search terms, which resulted in a substantial lift in shopping impressions during the period. We were showing on more searches and got more eyeballs on the products.

In mid-January, we began to lower our tROAS in 3-6 day windows and removed them completely just before February to make our Performance Max and Search campaigns go all out and capture all the demand.

The Results? Well let’s just say that we outperformed their previous valentine’s day by 48%, and still operated above the ROAS target giving and with a healthy POAS (profit on ad spend) of 3,09x

Performance Max did amazingly well in this account (not a giving thing for all brands) so they were the heavy lifters in the results achieved

The Search side of the account also performed amazingly where we segmented a small position of the spend towards valentines specific terms + added valentine’s day specific ads + extensions to all “evergreen” campaigns

Conclusion - Black Friday gets a lot of attention as the “biggest sales day ever”, and while that is true for most brands, you don’t want to sleep in seasonal events like valentine’s day if your product would fit as a perfect gift.

The key takeaway from this is to think holistically and think about customer experience first from pre-click to post-click and landing page experience, as it’s things like that, that often get forgotten in the process and leave customers in doubt when they land on site.We are extremely pleased with how the strategy unfolded and can only imagine what would have happened if we did not run into inventory issues the weekend before Valentine's Day.