Using YouTube to Boost Sales and Efficiently Acquire New Customers

The Challenge

The holiday season is an especially important time for brands like Fable Home, and the company entered Q4 2021 with distinct growth goals in mind. It wanted to expand its overall reach and customer acquisition efforts while maintaining a 2x return on ad spend (ROAS) target for non-branded campaigns.

Maintaining 2x ROAS can be difficult even without the increased competition that comes with digital advertising during the holiday season. ADM recognized the main challenge would be to make Fable’s bottom-funnel advertising dollars work more efficiently so it could hit its planned ROAS goals while simultaneously expanding and refining top-of-funnel awareness efforts to grow the brand’s customer base.

Our Solution

To help Fable Home hit its targets, ADM turned to YouTube advertising. YouTube ads combine the targeting specificity of Google’s SEM suite with the engaging visual tradition of TV ads. We wanted to test their utility for both identifying new audiences and increasing conversions and revenue.

We began by using prospecting audiences to find more potential customers that would be a good fit for Fable Home’s products. Some of these audiences are Google-generated (like “homeowners” and “cooking enthusiasts”) and based on a wide variety of potential affinities. Because Fable Home is a relatively new brand, we were confident that many users in our prospecting audiences would not yet be familiar with them—creating a strong opportunity to prospect for clear signs of interest.

Once we established the audiences we wanted to target, we built unique YouTube campaigns based on where those audiences fell in the sales funnel. Broader affinity audiences like cooking enthusiasts were categorized as top of funnel. Custom audiences based on previous searches for Fable’s top converting keywords were considered middle-funnel. Our bottom funnel/remarketing audience was previous site visitors who did not complete a purchase.

Campaigns aimed at different funnel audiences received different ad copy. For prospecting audiences like the generic “homeowner” affinity group, our copy was tailored to raise awareness: We wanted to convey that new dinnerware from Fable Home would make the users’ home more special. For retargeting audiences further down in the funnel, the copy focused on things that would move the needle towards purchase intent by highlighting positive reviews and financing options.

Finally, to properly funnel traffic from our prospecting vs. retargeting campaigns, we negated all past purchasers over the last 90 days and previous site visitors from our prospecting campaigns, ensuring those campaigns were entirely focused on brand new audiences.

Client Overview

Fable Home is a direct-to-consumer brand based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. It launched in late 2019 and specializes in high-quality, ethically-made and sustainably-sourced housewares, glassware, textiles, and more. As a brand, it is dedicated to finding balance between profit and purpose, an ethos it demonstrates through its commitment to donate meals for every set of dinnerware it sells.