Paid social — audience strategy

Ciaté London

Making cold traffic pay for itself by predicting who is worth acquiring

+30%

ROAS vs benchmark campaign

Takeaway

Cold traffic does not have to be a loss-leader. Tell the algorithm what a good customer is worth and it will go and find more of them.

Brief

Generate incremental sales from Meta Ads cold traffic, cost-efficiently, and grow the retargeting pool while doing it.

Starting point

For most brands cold traffic is a loss-leader: the sales come later, from retargeting. Ciaté needed prospecting that paid its own way rather than being written off as the cost of filling the funnel.

Insight

Lifetime value measured to date punishes your newest customers for being new. That’s recency bias.

A customer who joined last month looks worthless next to one who joined three years ago. Feed that to Meta and it learns to find more old customers. Predicting lifetime value instead of measuring it corrects the recency bias and changes who the algorithm goes after.

Interventions

  • Ingested customer transaction history from Shopify into a data warehouse
  • Assigned every customer a predicted lifetime value using machine learning — based on what was bought, at what price, and estimated household income from third-party enrichment
  • Uploaded email addresses with their CLV score to Meta as a value-based custom audience
  • Built a value-based lookalike audience from it, and pointed cold prospecting at that

Evidence

1 · Ingest

Transaction history

Every order pulled from Shopify into a data warehouse, customer by customer.

2 · Compute

Predicted lifetime value

Machine learning scores each customer on what they bought, at what price, and estimated household income from third-party enrichment.

3 · Target

Value-based lookalike

Emails and CLV scores go to Meta, which finds the prospects who look like the most valuable customers.

The pipeline. Predicted value, not value to date — which is what corrects the recency bias.

Smart audience Benchmark campaign
Return on ad spend+30%
0.92
0.71
Average order value+68%
£40
£24
Purchase value+28%
£759
£595

Smart audience against the benchmark campaign, on the three measures that were tracked.

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