Case Study: How Socioh Improved Carve Design's DPA ROAS by 98.6%

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Jennifer Hinton and Thayer Sylvester love the outdoors.

With Carve Designs they sought to create fashionable, functional clothing for active women. Women who care about the environment and value sustainability. Women who are bold and adventurous. 

Women like them.

Founded in 2003, the brand which uses 95% recycled, upcycled, and sustainable materials, has grown from a small surf apparel company to an 8-figure beach lifestyle brand.

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In 2022, Megan Porteous joined the brand as head of digital marketing, bringing with her an in-depth knowledge of advertising and a wealth of experience from her time with brands like Arc’teryx, Oakley, and REEF. 

In her efforts to further scale Carve Designs’ growth, Megan decided to explore Socioh for the brand’s dynamic ads.

The Problem

Carve Designs did not come to Socioh with a specific problem.

The brand and its ads were performing well. 

But when they heard that Socioh’s Branded Catalogs had skyrocketed the ROI of dynamic catalog ads for similar brands, they were intrigued.

After a demo with Socioh, Carve Designs decided to take the plunge and give Socioh’s Branded Catalogs a try.

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Within the first 6 weeks, the brand saw a substantial improvement in the performance of their dynamic ads (DPA and DABA campaigns). Blended ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) improved by  53.1%, while CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) simultaneously decreased by 37.4%. 

Even more importantly, the brand was able to identify their best-performing creative which led to an improvement in ROAS of 98.6% with a corresponding drop in CAC of 63%.

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The Journey

Like most brands, Carve Designs was using a standard product feed for their dynamic catalog ads. This feed automatically pulled the first image from their store and used it for the brand’s dynamic ads (DPAs and DABA).

But here’s the problem with the standard product feed — the advertiser has virtually no control over the creative.

‍This is a massive lost opportunity in terms of messaging and brand recognition.

And while Meta does offer some options for catalog creatives like frames and stickers, these are extremely limited in terms of how much control you have over the style, messaging, and design.

With Socioh’s Branded Catalogs, though, Carve Designs was able to add relevant messaging, multiple images, on-brand design, and advanced automation directly onto their product feed — giving them unprecedented control over the look and feel of their catalog ads.

Could we get a quote from Megan to add here?

I’m going to take you over the various iterations we worked on together, the intention behind each iteration, and the results we saw. 

Pre-Socioh Catalog Ads

This is the standard catalog Carve Designs was using before they started with Socioh.

Unfortunately, Meta doesn’t fit vertical product images very well in its carousel format. 

The unattractive white space on either side of the image severely detracted from the visual impact of the brand’s stunning lifestyle photographs. (Their other option was to crop their vertical images to fit the square dimensions of the carousel ads. Again, not an attractive look.)

Iteration 1: 2-image template

Our first fix was to design a 2-image template that showed off the product from different angles and add the brand logo to help with brand recognition.

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This simple change improved ROAS by 37% while CAC decreased by 53% (the performance of each template is compared to the pre-Socioh standard feed used by the brand).

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Iteration 2: Rotating Value Propositions

We were off to a good start, but Carve Designs is more than just another beach brand. It stands for certain values. 

And these values are important to its customers.

What if we were to include these values or USPs in their ads?

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Carve’s design team worked with Socioh to implement a new 2-image template that ‘rotates’ through 3 selected value propositions - ‘Sustainably Made’, ‘By Women, For Women’, and ‘Effortless, On-The-Go Styles’.

We also darkened the background color so the ads would stand out better in the light-colored Facebook feed, and increased the border to add definition to the 2 product shots.

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This design saw an increase in ROAS of almost 100% and a drop in CAC of 63% when compared to the pre-Socioh standard feed used by the brand.

Iteration 3: Customer Reviews

Carve Designs has a very loyal customer base and some extremely compelling customer reviews.

Our 3rd design iteration for the brand mapped actual customer testimonials from their reviews platform (Yotpo) to each product in their catalog. 

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While this design still outperformed the pre-Socioh catalog, it was not as successful as the previous iteration.

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For most brands, reviews perform well but, as the data shows, this wasn’t the best template for Carve Designs. 

The probable reasons for this are:
a) For apparel, fit is important. Being able to see an additional image in the 2-image template was a big selling point.
b) Carve Designs has beautiful lifestyle images. The visual impact of 2 images was far greater than that of 1 image with text. 
c) People don’t want to read. For products that claim specific benefits like skincare or vitamins, reviews are still very important, but for visual products like clothing, more product shots often beat customer testimonials.

After this last design, iteration 2 (2-image with rotating values) emerged as the clear winner. 

We then moved all of Carve Design’s existing dynamic ads to this catalog and the brand has seen consistently improved performance in all catalog ads for the past 3 months.

What about the catalog learnings?

We were able to change designs and test variations without losing any campaign learnings by using Socioh’s Smart Switch feature.

One of the biggest challenges with dynamic ads is that any edits to running ads can send your campaigns back into the learning phase.

With the Smart Switch, however, you can schedule any design/messaging change to your dynamic ads, without losing campaign optimizations!

So you can change your dynamic ad creative any time you want to promote a sale, combat creative fatigue, test messaging, highlight seasonal products, assess new designs, and much more.
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Learn more about how the Smart Switch works.