Case Study: Closet Drop
What I Did
In 2018 Great Useful Stuff asked me to create an ad campain to promote their best-selling closet organization bins on Facebook. I designed a visually stunning set of video ads that took full advantage of Facebook's platform.
The data in this case study is based on comparisons between two different ads sets tested consecutively on the same cold lookalike audience (i.e. people who were new to the products, but are similar to the client's existing customers, according to Facebook's algorithms). One ad set used the client's best-performing to-date product photo and lifestyle images. The other ad set was built using my video assets. Both ad sets were algorithmically optimizing for website content views (# of products viewed).
I call this campaign "Closet Drop":
The Client’s Previous Top-Performing Image Ads vs. New Video Ads
Click-Through Rate:
CTR measures the % of people who, after having the ad appear in their Facebook UI, then clicked a link to visit my client's website. This chart shows that my video ads resulted in a much higher CTR than the older top-performing image ads.
Products Viewed:
Once people visit the website, they are presented with a set of products. If a visitor clicks on a product, that is considered a "product view". This chart shows that my video ads resulted in a much higher average number of products viewed per visitor.
Post Engagement:
If a user on Facebook interacts with an ad, it is considered an instance of "post engagement". This chart shows that, combined, users were far more likely to engage with my video ads compared to the older top-performing image ads.
Results Like These Come From Careful Planning
A good video ad campaign must:
"Stop the scroll"
Keep them watching
Teach them about the product
Get them to click
Selling closet organization bins can be a challenge — how can you stand out in a busy news feed and "stop the scroll", while still entertaining and educating people about what the products are?
For this campaign, I decided to illustrate how these bins make closet organization easy by showing messes floating and folding themselves up as they entered the bins. While the final result may look easy to create, the videos took over three weeks of experimentation before the right look was achieved.
Original and fun visuals are only the first step to getting results like these — I also had to use my deep knowledge of the Facebook ads platform to design seven different video assets. When combined my videos created an ad campaign that vastly out-performed top image ads, and introduced thousands of potential new customers to my client's products.
How I got these results, and why I designed seven different videos for the campaign
Working With Facebook’s Algorithm
Facebook has a very powerful machine-learning algorithm driving its whole ads platform. Understanding how it works, and giving it what it needs to best optimize, is critical to getting good results with Facebook video marketing.
Whenever I design a video marketing campaign, I take into account the many ad types and delivery locations that will work for the audience — and I make sure we have the right video assets to reach them.
For this campaign, I prepared seven highly-optimized variations, allowing my client to take full advantage of the Facebook algorithm’s machine-learning and performance capabilities.
Aspect Ratios
To make sure the primary ad looked as good as possible, I created and filmed two variations of the same ad: one for a 1:1 aspect ratio, and another for a 1:1.77 aspect ratio.
By giving the Facebook algorithm these options, it was able to learn on its own which placements worked best with which aspect ratio.
Try to spot all the differences between the two versions:
Music & Length
I also designed the ad so that it could be broken into two shorter 15-second versions that each used a different song.
These shorter versions opened up more ad placement opportunities for my client, such as pre-roll ads, and gave the algorithm more options to choose from in both cold & retargeting campaigns. Keeping the ads at 15 seconds also allowed us to take advantage of automatic auto-looping.
The Facebook algorithm learned which types of customers preferred which variants, giving it more opportunities to give us the results we wanted.
Carousel & Instagram
Additionally, I created three variants designed to take better advantage of both Instagram and Facebook Carousel ad formats.
These variants allowed my client to achieve the high engagement seen with Carousel style ads, and gave the algorithm a powerful set of choices when showing ads on Instagram.
Final Data Sets
| Images | Videos | |
| CTR | 3.15% | 13.07% |
| Unique CTR | 5.41% | 12.51% |
| Average Products Viewed | 1/3 | 2 |
| Post Engagement Rate | 0.05% | 38.5% |
| N | 7,972 | 16,412 |