SWEETGREEN
The team at sweetgreen tested a campaign with Reels-optimized ad creative versus its usual creative assets and saw a 7X incremental lift in sales with the Reels-optimized campaign.
In August 2007, three college friends founded sweetgreen—a US-based fast casual restaurant chain that serves seasonal salads and warm bowls. Customers can order in-store or through the app for pickup, delivery and outpost, as well as use their app to pay for in-store ordering.
lower cost per purchase with Reels-optimized campaign, compared to usual campaign
lower cost per incremental conversion lift with Reels-optimized campaign, compared to usual campaign
incremental lift in sales with Reels-optimized campaign, compared to usual campaign
The team at sweetgreen wanted to to find a way to attract new customers and drive more online purchases.
THE SOLUTION
Optimizing the ad creative
The team at sweetgreen had run ads in Reels in prior campaigns, but wanted to know how to get stronger bottom-line results from creative assets that appear in this vertical, full-screen placement. So it turned to Meta and The Colonie—a Premium Meta Business Partner—for a briefing on sophisticated best practices that could improve its creative approach.
The team received guidance about best practice recommendations, including that Reels-optimized assets should be: 1) Entertaining and use a mix of music, visual effects or storytelling; 2) Easy to understand and rewarding to watch; and 3) Relatable, unvarnished and spontaneous. With this guidance in mind, sweetgreen was inspired to build a variety of video ads and photo ads that had fresh perspectives, unexpected twists and irresistible hooks.
One example of the Reels-optimized assets included a video that tapped into people’s interest in astrology by pairing different sweetgreen salads and warm bowls with specific zodiac signs based on personality characteristics. For example, they suggested that “Fun and Spontaneous” Sagittarius folks would love its Crispy Rice Bowls.
Another example is a video ad that the team built using existing photo shoot outtakes of the brand’s products being staged in nonsensical ways, such as placed on a stereo turntable. It also tapped into meme-style language of the food speaking directly to the viewer: “Yup, it’s me, your sweetgreen order. You’re probably wondering how I got here” to reverse story-tell where the brand’s ingredients come from.
The team then ran a Meta conversion lift study that compared the performance of its older usual campaign assets in one cell, versus the new Reels-optimized campaign assets in the second cell. All other campaign elements were the same across cells. The brand also opted to use the Advantage campaign budget feature to automatically distribute the budget across the best-performing ad sets in real time.
The sweetgreen team determined the results of its November 1–28, 2022 campaign using reporting data in Meta Ads Manager and a Meta conversion lift study, which revealed:
- 14% lower cost per purchase with campaign using Reels-optimized campaign (Meta Ads Manager)
- 95% lower cost per incremental conversion lift with Reels-optimized campaign, compared to usual campaign (Meta conversion lift study)
- 7X incremental lift in sales with Reels-optimized campaign, compared to usual campaign (Meta conversion lift study)