Discovery Campaigns: Strategic Expansion to Maintain Growth

The Challenge

Subscription Clothing companies like Nadine West face formidable competition in Search Auctions. Subscription services lead to higher lifetime values, driving up acquisition benchmarks, resulting in high CPCs. Auction prices can get even more expensive when competitors ignore sustainable performance benchmarks and aggressively pursue market share from Paid Search. Three years into our successful partnership with Nadine West, ADM identified an increase in competition in Nadine West’s search auctions: a potential threat to the month-over-month growth goals we were pursuing.

Client Background

Founded in 2013, Nadine West is a monthly clothing subscription service that sends personalized outfits to subscribers throughout the United States via direct mail. The company’s primary focus is on affordable style for everyday women, without fees or hidden costs. 

The Solution

In response to heightened Search competition and rising CPAs, ADM proposed a custom Discovery Campaign strategy. Our solution was to test a Discovery campaign which allowed for Gmail, Discovery, and YouTube placements. The approach would potentially impact the top of the funnel, driving more awareness while also utilizing intent-driven ads that incite immediate action to shop. 

ADM selected audiences that were reflective of Nadine West’s target demographic and had shown consistent purchase intent. We supplemented these audiences with those that consistently engaged with Nadine West’s content to ensure we could tap into audiences with potential for scale. Audience strategy consisted of affinity, in-market, custom and retargeting. 

Over the course of 60 days, we scaled the budget, ensuring the ratio of Target CPA to daily budget was aligned with our best practices. We rotated under-performing creative, under-performing copy, tested new audiences, and adjusted Target CPA to work towards our goal without losing scale. Crucially, we ensured retargeting remained <15% of the budget, with the expectation to put the retargeting audience in their own campaign should that audience consume more than 15% of the budget.