Soak & Sleep

The Brief

Help assess the value of existing paid advertising channels in order to confidently scale up paid media spend.

The Approach

Internally at Soak & Sleep there was significant debate over the incremental value of paid advertising, with all revenue judged through the lens of last click reporting; there was no changing this immediately.

As a growth marketer, when you have a business that assesses demand-gen channels through a last-click lens, you’ve got your work cut out for you. To make things harder for ourselves, we decided to construct an experiment to remove any doubt that paid channels could drive incremental value for the brand, so opted to restructure campaigns from a heavy focus on retargeting all traffic and existing customers.

We deployed a new set-up implementing tight all-time customer exclusions (from 2007) and consciously did not engage in any retargeting activity, shifting strategy to purely prospect cold traffic. This is a strange move but given the brief it was necessary. Both to help get stakeholder buy-in and to set up a clear correlation test to understand the impact that prospecting, in the truest sense of the word, might have on new customer acquisition uplift.

Once we shifted strategy, the numbers didn’t lie and even the staunchest last click supporters internally recognised there was immediately a significant increase in new customers acquired. Off the back of the experiment, we were able to quickly scale advertising spend for the business in a manner that all stakeholders were confident in.