Pier1

7.54X

return on ad spend

3x

increase in ad spend

THE PROBLEM

Pier 1 had recently gone through bankruptcy and was bought out by a PE firm. Their stores were closed and they became reliant on online channels needing to be both scalable and profitable. Facebook/Instagram have been working well for them, but they were basically tapping out on scale. With the iOS 14.5 update, Pier really needed to diversify their growth channels.

THE Solution

Taking Pier 1’s products and demographics into account, exploring Pinterest, we believe, was the best route.. Many Pinterest users use boards and pins to get furniture ideas and are high intent purchasers. We knew that the Pinterest ad team typically recommends a broad audience and a keyword strategy directed to the homepage (probably because it’s easier for their team to build it out). That wasn’t something that we wanted for Pier 1, instead, we went with a more granular approach. The goal was to target by collection and not drive users to the homepage. We narrowed campaigns by product type, picking out Pier 1’s best performing products (i.e. rugs, chairs, fragrances, home office, etc).

Within each product type, we built out relevant audiences usings interests, keywords and act-a-like audiences (Pinterest’s version of lookalike audiences) for diversity within each campaign. Getting granular helped us weed out underperforming product sets, low intent keywords and helped us scale products that had high conversion.

We followed the same strategy with the creatives,focusing on promoting the best performing products within each collection. We paired products/ads with the actual audience which resulted in high click through rates and conversion. We then added a few retargeting campaigns that were product specific.

THE RESULT

After 2 months we were able to 3x ad spend while increasing return on ad spend to 7.54x. We opened up a brand new channel and are now less reliant on Facebook/Instagram.