SHIPT
To boost awareness, consideration and sales during the winter holidays, Shipt ran an Instagram campaign that tested using new ad formats and creative, resulting in a 9.9X return on ad spend.
Shipt is a household goods and grocery delivery service with the mission of simplifying people’s lives. Shipt offers its services through an app that connects members to fresh groceries and everyday essentials, and works with vetted shoppers and retailers in each city to ensure same-day delivery in as soon as one hour.
return on ad spend for overall campaign
lift in account signup leads (conversion lift study)
lift in purchase intent (brand lift study)
lift in completed registrations (conversion lift study)
Shipt wanted to raise brand awareness, boost new membership subscriptions and support overall consumer demand during the winter holiday season.
Best known for delivering groceries, Shipt wanted to show the full breadth of products it brings to customers’ doors. To reach more holiday shoppers and refresh its brand story, Shipt built an ad campaign using Instagram’s full variety of offerings: every ad format, placement, automated solution and applicable audience selection.
Shipt used photo ads in collection format and Instant Experience to curate “Gift Guides” aligned to themes, such as gifts for pet owners, coffee lovers or techies. The main image showed six products from the Gift Guide, with carousel cards underneath showing each product individually. When clicked, the card opened to the specific outside retailer’s landing page where people could purchase.
Another high-performing format was video that showcased celebrity influencers. Shipt followed creative best practices by showing branding elements right away, keeping run-time short and using text overlays for sound-off viewing. The video ads ran in Instagram placements plus Facebook’s In-Stream Reserve placement. Ads in this premium placement appear as breaks within longer-form video content and shows on the Facebook platform, and are often seen by harder-to-reach younger audiences.
Shipt’s strategy focused on showing ads to core audiences of US women aged 25–54, including those interested in the Gift Guide products, and to Custom Audiences who were likely to shop via delivery-based services. It also showed ads to a lookalike audience of people similar to its top current shoppers. The team then retargeted ads to people who viewed the video in the In-Stream Reserve placement, and to people who’d recently visited the brand’s website, abandoned a cart or registered without checking out.
Shipt used the automatic placements feature to allow Facebook to deliver the ads across all Facebook apps and services, according to which placements were most likely to drive the best campaign results at the lowest cost. It also used campaign budget optimization to automatically distribute the budget across the best-performing ad sets in real time.
Shipt determined the results of the November 19–December 27, 2020 campaign using a Facebook brand lift study, a Facebook conversion lift study and a Nielsen Total Ad Ratings (TAR) study, which revealed:
9.9X return on ad spend for overall campaign
20% lift in account signup leads (conversion lift study)
5.6-point lift in purchase intent (brand lift study)
7.4% lift in completed registrations (conversion lift study)
23X more efficient at reaching US women aged 25–54 than TV alone (Nielsen TAR)
