Rugbystuff is a retailer of team sports merchandise. As a small business selling to a niche audience, the brand is heavily dependent on a full-funnel strategy to keep its competitive advantage. 

While a large part of its revenue comes from repeat purchasers, the store also relies on reaching new customers within the UK to fuel its growth. 

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The Problem 

Post iOS14, the store couldn’t get sales from BOF (bottom-of-funnel) ads that had worked really well in the past. Their ROAS (return on ad spend) plummeted to less than a fifth of what it was before iOS14. 

Some of the problems that dogged their campaigns, especially in the first quarter of 2022 were:

• No delivery/High frequency: Some of the BOF campaigns targeting cart abandoners stopped delivering, or delivered at really high frequencies. 
• Reduced reach: In many cases, the BOF campaign’s unique reach was now barely 10%~30% of the unique traffic volume over the same period of time before iOS14.
• Poor attribution: Meta seems to be favoring broad campaigns when distributing budget. But it’s not just that. Even sales that are that are coming from lower down the funnel (BOF/MOF) are being incorrectly attributed to these broad TOF campaigns, further skewing the numbers.

The Solution

Given the loss in data post iOS14, the worst effects of which have manifested in 2022, we recommended that the brand shift to a new campaign structure: 

• Consolidation at BOF level: Instead of narrow BOF campaigns that wouldn’t deliver or deliver at wastefully high frequencies, the campaigns were consolidated at the BOF level, with one retargeting campaign now targeting 30-day product viewers (VC 30) audiences with a DPA creative. 

Working with many agencies and 100s of smaller accounts, Socioh’s team benefits from looking at a number of data points, with concrete examples of what is working and what isn’t. This means that though Socioh is a DIY tool, we are able to review accounts and offer recommendations that can help when requested.

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• Creative testing: In addition, a wider retargeting campaign was set up using the brand’s top creatives. This was done to ensure creative testing, and to reach more people in the same budget at the BOF/MOF stage. ‍
• Higher Budgets for Prospecting: We also allocated higher budgets to prospecting, including broad, interest-based, and lookalike audiences, to give Facebook more elbow room to optimize on reaching new users.With the new campaign setup, the brand saw results almost immediately:
  

To maintain its results, the brand is updating its BOF DPA catalog creative regularly*. In addition, the brand is testing relevant image and video creatives through the funnel, while continuing to use Catalogs to give Facebook the maximum intent data it possibly can.

*Learn how to edit your catalog creatives without losing campaign optimizations with Socioh’s Branded Catalogs here.