Background
Wunderkarten is a leading web-to-print shop for fashionable photo cards in Europe. Their offerings include more than 31,000 beautifully customizable invitations, birth announcements, and much more. Since their founding in 2009, they’ve sold over 31 million cards across Europe. Their exclusive designs and innovative quality control ensure that celebrators get just the right card to make a special message stand out. In addition to markets in Germany, Wunderkarten also has a presence in Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the UK.
With the assistance of Marin Software, the deployment of Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads notably increased our audience reach. Layering the budget allocation algorithm on top was an effective way of distributing our ad spend dollars across multiple markets and campaigns where they were generating the best results day to day. Marin’s Search Intent technology gave us the ability to leverage data from our search campaigns and also gave us an additional catalogue of audiences to use. The real bonus was that it saved us time, too!
The Challenge
The Wunderkarten team launched paid ads on Facebook to drive new customer acquisition. They started finding new customers by targeting lookalike audiences based on seed audiences created from website analytics and internal CRM files.
These audiences expanded their reach, but the team found it difficult to define enough high-performing lookalike audiences to meet their ambitious acquisition goals. When they found a lookalike that did very well, it tended to fatigue very quickly, and audience performance would quickly drop off.
The challenge was two-fold:
- They needed a better way to create higher-intent audiences. The lookalike audiences didn’t have the same level of intent, resulting in a higher cost per conversion.
- They needed an always-on, evergreen approach to broader prospecting that wouldn’t require the team to continuously, manually pause-insert new creative-reactivate to prevent from exhausting those audiences.
Solution
Marin Search Intent improved on initial lookalike strategies by segmenting the seed audiences based on the user’s search query. This created multiple seed audiences with demonstrated intent for specific product categories.
Wunderkarten could then use Marin to target high-intent audiences with the matching creative and text relevant to that segment. This technique was especially effective for aligning the peak season for wedding invitations with the right audiences.
In terms of the evergreen/wider approach, Broad Audiences allotted the team a larger pool to prospect against, and the tethered Dynamic Ads ensured that people were seeing the most relevant, highest-performing products particular to their audience constituency. The products shown would be personalized for each user, and also continuously updated to elude ad fatigue.
Marin’s nimble and intuitive workflow to create and manage Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads solved the wider reach challenge and the need for consistent, fresh prospect messaging. At the start, Marin worked with the Wunderkarten team to prepare their product feed and build the Broad Audience campaigns—providing granular analysis to understand the high value, top-performing targeting, geographic, and demographic segments.
Once it got to the point of budget allocation, Wunderkarten was able to deploy Marin’s Budget Allocation Algorithm to much success (hands-off, real-time, automated success, at that). This tool shifted budget across ad sets in real-time, leading to impressive efficiency gains and time savings.
Results
The Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads campaigns crushed the lookalike audiences they used previously. Revenue was up 244% and conversion increased by 183. Since deploying Broad Audience for Dynamic Ads, the Wunderkarten team have saved significant amounts of time on optimization, campaign management, and budgeting decisions by executing this new strategy on Marin Social.
