IPSY

IPSY had been running video ads in Instagram Stories with the goal of achieving immediate clicks from the Sign Up button. But since people who look at ads in Stories tend to view the Stories first and shop later, IPSY decided to make changes to the conversion window—the amount of time it expects people will take to convert after clicking on an ad—to more effectively optimize ad delivery.

Advertisers can select the window of time (e.g. one day, seven days) in which they anticipate people will take an action (e.g. a click or a view) after seeing an ad. IPSY decided to add one-day view to its ad delivery optimization window and also extended its click optimization window to seven days. This approach gave people who clicked ads in Instagram Stories more time to think about the purchase and allowed the campaign to reach more potential customers who weren’t likely to click on ads in Instagram Stories.

IPSY followed best practices for mobile viewing when creating its ads in Stories, such as using a vertical format, showing branding within the first few seconds, and keeping the story under 15 seconds. The ecommerce retailer showed the ads to a broad audience and selected automatic placements and campaign budget optimization. These strategies all enhance the ability of Facebook’s algorithm to automatically place ads and budget according to highest performance.

To verify the results of the change in ad delivery, IPSY ran a split test. While including “views” in the conversion window proved essential for improving the performance of ads in Stories, IPSY found that it also improved the performance of ads in other placements across the Facebook family of apps.

According to the split test, the May 21–June 25, 2019 campaign using a one-day view with a seven-day click optimization brought the following results, compared to a similar campaign that used a one-day click-only optimization: