Facebook/Instagram Ads Case Study: How we spent $1M in the Women’s apparel niche

Client

A modern store of women’s clothing and accessories

Region

United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Worldwide

Niche

Woman Apparel

Services

PPC

Traffic sources

• Facebook ads
• Instagram Ads
• TikTok Ads

Task

• Maximize the effectiveness of the advertising budget by reducing advertising costs and increasing ROI;
• Scale up advertising campaigns;
• Launch and scale new regions;
• Achieve ROAS 3.5+
  

Initial overview

In 2023, we began working with a women’s apparel brand struggling with high conversion costs and scaling challenges. Here’s how we transformed their results.

Before we started, the store had a 42% higher cost per conversion and had problems with scaling and proper ad structure. The client had limited success with women’s clothing advertised on Facebook, which needed restructuring to deliver better results.

Because of the lack of an advertising structure, the client was not able to scale.

There are no universal solutions to reducing the cost per conversion; every business is different, and every project needs its own approach and solutions.

Before starting work, we prepared an audit of the Meta advertising account. Then, we prepared a marketing strategy and identified the project’s weaknesses that need to be improved. We also prepared the structure of advertising campaigns for Facebook and Instagram ads to showcase women’s clothing advertising examples effectively.

Audit of the advertising account and campaigns

We identified the key and important issues preventing us from buying ads more cheaply and more effectively, and of course, found a solution on how we could start to scale and grow.Here are some problems that we discovered during audit:

1. The client was only using a catalog with a product feed and no other type of content;

2. Used only a broad audience targeting;

3. Used boring ad copies without a offer;

4. Did not use UTM tags in the ads;

We would like to emphasize the importance of using UTM tags. Many people underestimate their importance, although they are a key tool for collecting accurate data on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. UTM tags allow you to:

• Optimize your marketing spend;
• Track which campaigns and ads are bringing conversions;
• Improve your promotion strategy based on analytics.

5. Low conversion rate from cart to purchase;

6. Low ROAS;

7. Lack of marketing funnel;

8. Lack of unique ad creatives;

9. Lack of campaign structure.

Solving these problems will not only increase the effectiveness of advertising, but also lay the foundation for stable business growth.

Optimization of the advertising account

Once we discovered the problems, we prepared comprehensive marketing solutions that were supposed to turn things around and increase ROAS.

What did we test?

1. We launched 30-day retargeting campaigns to engage our war audience
2. Then we set Lookalike (LAL) audiences from warm sources such as the customer base, website visitors, and audiences who added the product to the cart;
3. We added an Advantage+ campaign from Meta that utilized AI algorithms.

What was the idea?

This approach demonstrated women’s clothes advertisement examples by tailoring content for different segments. That way, we determined what worked better.

We noticed that Lookalike audiences (LAL) by value from a customer base of 1-2% and 4-6% worked more effectively than 3-4% and 8-10%

With the help of the remarketing campaign, we started to bring back the target audience who left the website and did not make a purchase.

In the remarketing campaigns, we used audience segments such as:

Website Visitors for the last 30 days

Those who added to the card for the last 30 days

Useful information:
Facebook ads for women’s clothes work best when leveraging Lookalike audiences and engaging remarketing tactics.

Advantage Audience is a feature introduced by Meta that automatically optimizes ad targeting, helping you find target audiences with high potential for conversions.

Important decision

We also decided to install TikTok Pixel beforehand because we planned to use TikTok ads in the future.

Why did we do this? First of all, collecting data and gathering an audience would help us build a warm customer base and plan a future strategy for women’s clothing advertised on TikTok.

However, it is important to note that we did not use direct advertising in TikTok ads in the first few months of cooperation.

What did we get with that optimization?

• We increased the number of purchases
• We increased the average customer order value
• We brought back some of our target audience who made purchases
• We increased ROAS from 1.90 to 2.97
• We decreased Customer acquisition cost from $55.47 to $21.21

What campaigns have been launched for testing?

Additionally, we launched Dynamic Remarketing to audiences that have viewed or added to the cart but haven’t bought during the next 14 days.

Besides, we added cold audiences by relevant interests as well as added audiences with specific behaviors. And also tested some women’s clothing advertisement samples that resonated well with the target audience.

What happened next?

After 3 months of active work, we were able to scale the ad campaigns from $3,000 to $26,849.15 and grow revenue to $109,299.64. During this time we were able to implement such solutions:

1. Improved the structure of advertising campaigns;

2. Used TOF/MOF/BOF marketing funnels;

3. Created and used attractive static and video creatives;

4. Determined what combinations work best for the project;

5. Added new campaigns to the top of the funnel (TOF);

6. Started scaling ad campaigns;

7. Cost optimization: campaigns that successfully completed the learning phase and collected sufficient data reduced advertising costs and increased ROI.

How have we scaled our advertising campaigns?

1. We identified which audiences had potential for growth from all the tests that we made;
2. We scaled the best ad campaigns every day by +20% to the daily budget, sometimes we tried a strategy of sharp scaling by 100-200%, but this strategy didn’t always work, and we focused on slower scaling;
3. We used auto-rules to automate the scaling process.

6 months of active work

Well, here we are past the 6-month mark of working together. In that time, we’ve fully explored the project, dug deep into marketing, dug deep into the unit economics of the product, and were able to scale to a $144,000 advertising budget from $3,000

What did we do next?

1. We realized an effective advertising campaign using Instagram ads for Black Friday;
2. We made the final Christmas sale;
3. $625,425.20 revenue in 6 months;
4. Kept ROAS at 3.5+
5. Launched TikTok ads for testing;
6. Tested different creative strategies;
7. Increased Instagram followers to 30,000;
8. Launched AI tools 

It’s time to open up and scale to other regions

Since we have no restrictions to use a different region, and we have already been able to show results in the United States for a client, we thought why don’t we go beyond the US.

We decided to implement the Free Worldwide Shipping offer to attract the attention of international customers. This approach allowed us to highlight our products and simplify the buying decision.

We chose Tier 1 countries such as:

• Canada
• United Kingdom
• France
  
• Prepared a marketing strategy
• Prepared advertising structure
• We prepared an additional offer — 20% on the first purchase so that the client could get acquainted with our brand
  
• What about the advertising campaigns?
• Everything was standard here:
• For TOF we used Broad targeting, Interests, Behaviors, and Lookalike audiences, but excluded the United States;
• For MOF, we used our Facebook page followers and Instagram accounts;
• For BOF we used just Worldwide targeting but excluded the United States.

Our best result was in the UK, where we were able to achieve a ROAS of 3.31.

Then we tried just using WorldWide targeting and a slow scaling strategy, and we got great results at all levels of the WorldWide targeting campaign.

Did we use an Instagram shop?

Using Instagram shop in this project was one of the best decisions because most of our income we were able to get thanks to the use of Instagram shop

Why use the Instagram shop?

• Instagram Shop provides an easy transition from browsing to buying. Shoppers can explore products, find out their prices, and place an order right in the app, without having to navigate to third-party sites;

• Instagram Shop allows you to integrate your product catalog with the platform’s promotional tools. You can promote individual items, use dynamic ads, or create targeted campaigns to boost sales.

Instagram Shop is a powerful tool to increase sales, engage with your audience, and build brand awareness. You can start using it to get closer to your customers and give them a convenient path from interest to purchase.

It’s a must-have for women’s clothing advertised on Instagram. If you have an E-commerce project that needs to scale or improve results then contact our digital marketing agency, we will be happy to help, leave a request for a free consultation.

Let’s talk about TikTok ads for the women’s clothing niche

We started to scale and decided to add another traffic source such as TikTok ads since our online store was powered by Shopify, it helped us to handle any internal integrations in a short period of time, and as we previously wrote already, we installed TikTok Pixel to collect warm audiences and use it in remarketing campaigns.

What did we do?

• We utilized our standard TOF/MOF/BOF funnel
• Loaded a loyal customer base
• Created Look-a-like (LAL) audiences from 1 — 10%
• Developed a creative strategy
• Created unique offers for clients
• Prepared video creatives 

Useful information:

It’s no secret that to run TikTok ads you need to use unique UGC content (User-generated content) roughly speaking this is any content that is created and published by internet users, not professional authors, journalists, or marketers.

But it is also important to note that UGC content does not always have a good conversion rate, for this you need to create and test the type of content that is suitable for your project. If you compare it to Facebook ads or Instagram ads, you can use regular static images that can produce results.

Our approach involved creating unique offers and leveraging video creatives to focus on an example of successful advertising of a women’s clothing brand.

What campaigns have been launched for testing?

Our advertising structure for TikTok ads was quite simple, viz:

1. We ran the ad campaign without any restrictions on broad targeting
2. We ran Look-a-like (LAL) from the customer database under CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)
3. We launched a few relevant interests

Our main idea was just to test a new traffic source like TikTok ads and check our potential there.

What did you get?

We started getting sales

ROAS was not high, around 2.85 (average)

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) was quite high, around $71

Overall, we can conclude that we successfully launched TikTok ads, but we were not able to scale much and bring CAC down to $25-30.

While TikTok ads yielded a ROAS of 2.85, the platform provided valuable insights into user behavior and helped us expand our audience base. This analysis became part of our case study on advertising a women’s clothing brand.

Have we used Email Marketing?

Yes, we used Email Marketing for this project, but it was not our team that was responsible for the implementation, we just helped with hypothesis building. We can open the curtain and say that Email Marketing brought a high share of profit for this project.

If you are still thinking about whether to use Email Marketing in your projects, then definitely yes, start as soon as possible.

What analytics tools did we use?

To scale and analyze traffic from Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and TikTok ads we used tools like:

• Meta ads manager
• TikTok ads manager
• Shopify analytics
• Google Analytics 4
• Triple Whale

For example, Triple Whale helped us to estimate traffic from Instagram ads and understand what share of sales is brought by Instagram ads and what share is brought by TikTok ads, based on this data we could build more correct hypotheses and scale ad campaigns that really work.

Let’s sum up the results achieved in 12 months of active work.

• We spent $737,724 through Instagram ads;
• Maintained an average ROAS of 3.67;
• Generated $2,710,574 in revenue;
• The average CPA $24.28;
• Reached over 4,838,400 target audiences. 

Thanks to testing various strategies and approaches to optimizing advertising campaigns in Meta, we achieved results that exceeded all the client’s expectations.

It is especially important to note the well-coordinated work of the entire project team.

Each member made every effort to ensure that each product was delivered to the customer, the website worked smoothly 24/7, and we, in turn, provided effective digital marketing and competent management of paid advertising and attracting a quality audience for the successful development of the project.

Let’s sum up the results achieved in 16 months of active work.

• We spent $1,038,243.93 through Instagram ads;
• Maintained an average ROAS of 3.67;
• Generated revenue of $3,911,107.79;
• The average price per purchase $23.31;
• Reached over 5,622,784 target audiences. 

These results underline the effectiveness of a structured approach and allow the best ads for women clothing through creative and data-driven strategies.

By continuously testing and refining, we provide a comprehensive case study of women’s clothing advertising.

What solutions have been effective for this project?

• AI tools Implementation
• Email marketing
• Scaling Campaigns
• Using WorldWide targeting 

What’s next?

In the future, we plan to scale our advertising investments by expanding to new regions and getting good results in new countries.

Launching new traffic sources such as Bing ads and Pinterest ads, Google ads.

Do you want your project to be successful?

Do you want to repeat the success? If you don’t know who you can rely on — we are a team of Digital performance marketing agency Deelixy, ready to take responsibility and make results for your project.

We are not afraid to work with small and large budgets because our main task is to scale the project and bring profit.

Ready to scale your e-commerce business? Contact us for a free consultation

Book a free call with our team now!