BYLT BASICS
The apparel brand tested one Advantage+ shopping campaign against all its usual campaigns, splitting its full budget 50/50, and saw a 12% lower cost per purchase from the Advantage+ shopping campaign.
Founded in 2016 by Eric Mear, BYLT Basics is a privately held, direct-to-consumer apparel company that sells elevated basics for men, women and children. BYLT’s products are designed to be high quality, long lasting, great value, and highly versatile for an on-the-go lifestyle.
lower cost per purchase for Advantage+ shopping campaign, compared to all usual campaigns combined
higher return on ad spend for Advantage+ shopping campaign, compared to all usual campaigns combined
As BYLT Basics rapidly scaled its business, it wanted to explore using Advantage+ shopping campaigns to see if they could underpin the company’s growth strategy by generating more efficient purchases and delivering time savings for the team.
THE SOLUTION
Putting campaign automation to the test
BYLT Basics has partnered with Meta for years to rapidly grow its business by advertising on Facebook and Instagram. As the team began testing automation with Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns, it wanted to determine whether the solution could outperform its usual campaign approach by helping to reach more customers at lower costs.
Prior to testing Advantage+ shopping campaigns, the team typically selected different bid strategies, attribution settings and ad formats for each of its campaigns, depending on the audience it wanted to reach. This manual process was time consuming and led to a fragmented account structure that the team wanted to streamline.
Advantage+ shopping campaigns offered a potential solution to the brand’s challenges because they use machine learning to automatically optimize multiple campaign components—including targeting, creative, placements and budget—to find the best opportunities to boost conversions. With Advantage+ shopping campaigns, advertisers can combine audiences for a given market into a single campaign structure, thereby simplifying campaign creation and creative management by requiring fewer inputs, while minimizing audience overlap.
The team tested this new campaign methodology by setting up an A/B test in which an Advantage+ shopping campaign ran in one cell while multiple, manually-set-up campaigns ran in another. By isolating the automated and manual campaigns in this way, BYLT was able to assess the performance gap between the two approaches.
The testing parameters were as follows:
- Cell 1: Its usual campaign setup with six campaigns delivering ads to US adults aged 18-65+ with re-engagement targeting to recent purchasers and website visitors
- Cell 2: Advantage+ shopping campaign with no budget cap
The team used the same set of photo and video ads across both cells. The ads highlighted customer reviews, creator endorsements and a range of content demonstrating product quality and versatility. By not setting a budget cap in Cell 2, the team ensured its Advantage+ shopping campaign had maximum flexibility in reaching the most valuable audiences.
At the conclusion of the August 13–November 20, 2022 test, the team reviewed its results in Ads Manager, which revealed:
- 12% lower cost per purchase for Advantage+ shopping campaign, compared to all usual campaigns combined
- 12% higher return on ad spend for Advantage+ shopping campaign, compared to all usual campaigns combined