What we did, and what happened.

Easy Exercising, owned by Andrea and Jessica, have been with me since 2017. They make strong guarantees and stand behind them, but Facebook's ad review doesn't like that kind of claim on a landing page. So instead of sending traffic to their website, we'd always used Facebook lead forms.

It worked. Through February 2021 a request for a call cost about $16.55, and 17% of those people went on to a free trial, which made sense against a customer's lifetime value. But the forms were so quick to fill in that some people didn't value the free trial when it came to following through, or didn't remember filling out the form at all, even with the step that asks them to check their details. For a mostly senior audience, a bit of forgetfulness is normal.

We wondered whether a Messenger conversation, with more back and forth, would help people remember they'd signed up. So we built a simple Messenger flow that asked the same questions as the lead form, one step at a time.

Cost per lead dropped 61% to an average of $6.42. The leads were better too: the conversion rate to free trial went from 17% to 26%. We then set the same thing up on other client accounts.

Cienna Designs wanted to grow from selling only wholesale to selling online direct to customers. At the start they were doing about $4k a week online, on a website that needed a facelift. The messaging needed sharpening, and we had to find the audience from scratch.

Cienna's customers are Australian women over 40 who love boho fashion. They tend to have their go-to brands already and don't like risking clothes from a new online store, because they can't be sure of the fit and quality. The models in Cienna's product photos didn't look much like those customers either.

Still images and carousel ads weren't going to do it. This audience trusts word of mouth from someone like them, so we went with influencer marketing. Natalie Angel (@letmetrybeforeyoubuy) was a natural fit: down to earth, approachable and right in Cienna's audience. She filmed herself trying on and styling the clothes and talked about the feel, the fit and the look.

We turned Natalie's video into ads, and followed up website visitors who didn't buy straight away with email.

$52,633 in sales in seven days, and more than 300 new people in the store's database, who went into an email welcome series. Two years later, whenever those pieces came back into stock, the same ads were still selling them. We went on to work with three more influencers to keep new customers coming. Cienna Designs is still a client today.

We nearly didn't take this one on. Chelsey's Facebook Group is called BooB CamP, and her personal ad account had already been shut down. Any agency that has seen Facebook close ad accounts at random would think twice.

But Chelsey has a lot of ideas and isn't afraid to try them all at once, and her lymphatic massage sequence was helping thousands of women in Australia and around the world. So we said yes.

We studied how her customers talked about their health and how they cheered each other on in BooB CamP. We set up a new ad account with a fresh pixel and a three-stage funnel, built lookalike audiences from Chelsey's email list and tested interest-based targeting.

We also set up email to win back abandoned carts, build anticipation before the BooB CamP live training nights and promote her LymFATics Alive training for holistic health practitioners. The ecommerce campaigns launched on 13 October 2020, alongside the lead ad inviting people to join BooB CamP. In October her revenue was around $15k, and her best month ever had been around $20k.

New customers loved the products, joined BooB CamP and brought their friends. January 2021 revenue was $102,396.42, with a return on ad spend of 5.54. That's 6.8 times growth in three months.

It wasn't all smooth. In early March the ad account was shut down several times in one week. Each time, Facebook apologised and confirmed it was a false flag, but apologies don't bring back the lost sales. To protect sales over the long term we moved part of the budget to Google Shopping, and started building her YouTube channel and SEO. Foundr featured Chelsey's growth on their podcast that March.

For the 2021 Christmas Appeal we'd set up tracking so the Asylum Seekers Centre could see the cost of each donation from Facebook. It came in at $88.93, with a 4.41× return and 103 new donors. Good, but we wanted the cost lower, so more of every dollar could go to the Employment team helping people seeking asylum find work.

For the 2022 Tax Appeal we tested LinkedIn, where we'd only run a couple of campaigns before, using the best-performing ad copy. (Tracking on the separate donor thank-you pages still needed some work.) On Facebook we narrowed the campaigns down to find the best setup, testing new ads and audiences as we went.

The cost per donation fell 39% to $59.78. With an average donation of $335, that's a 6.2× return on ad spend from Facebook. The appeal beat its fundraising goal by 23%.

Our advice for next time: compare appeals at different times of year (the end of the financial year gives a hard deadline the Christmas Appeal doesn't), and scale slowly, either by raising one campaign's budget by no more than 20% a day or by splitting the budget across segments.

The calendars are a lovely idea, but hard to explain in the first few seconds of an ad, and products people can't recognise quickly are harder to sell online. They didn't have much ad copy or creative, hadn't had much luck with Facebook ads, and weren't ready for a long-term agency. So they started with our All-in-one Business Marketing Kit.

Lots of testing: copy angles and lengths, creative formats, audiences and landing pages. The winner was a two-minute video from the founder, Sarah, explaining how the calendars work, who the artists are and what's inside for each month, with long explanatory copy linking straight to the product page. We tested it in broad, lookalike and interest audiences, and interest bundles won clearly.

In September, a 3.35× return on ad spend at the top of the funnel as reported by Facebook. Against total revenue for the month, the blended return was 7.8×, and after the iOS changes we estimate the real return was a lot higher than Facebook reported. Revenue was up 138% on the year before and orders up 114%, with 156 orders that month. By mid October they'd sold more than half their 2022 calendars, before Black Friday and Christmas.

Live in Flow relied on live retreats and workshops, so 2020 hit hard when events had to be cancelled one after another. Instead of cutting back, they decided to back themselves, and asked us to help them build a business that wouldn't swing so much every time Australia went into lockdown.

They already had an online membership and online programs. We started with the messaging, getting clear on who they help and what changes for people, handling the pain points gently. People usually start best at a retreat or half-day workshop, but we couldn't depend on that alone. So while Facebook ads promoted the live events, we also sent traffic to blog posts we'd written for them, to build trust and grow the email list. The new messaging then went into emails inviting subscribers to the monthly membership, live meditation events and online programs.

In June 2021 alone: a 6.7× return on ad spend, 240 purchases, and total sales up 4,519% on June 2020.

Funsquare was started by parents with a background in logistics, who saw room for an Australian-made product that gives kids screen-free play and parents a few minutes for a cuppa. Their sofas are made to be climbed on, rearranged into castles and moats, and forgiving of spilt food and drink. They launched paid campaigns with us in February.

They had plenty of joyful photos and videos of kids playing, so we expected those to win. Facebook surprised us. The ad that sold the most, and kept beating the play videos, was a simple product image with text listing the practical benefits parents care about. So we ran with it.

A 10.63× return on ad spend in the first month, and sales up 69%. Then the good problem: the team had to keep an eye on stock levels, and they introduced new colours and accessories soon after.

A note from the time: after Apple's iOS changes, Facebook couldn't attribute sales as well, so we went back to judging results on sales in the store's own back end and in Google Analytics.

The client hadn't spent much on marketing before, and there were only ten weeks between launch and the first day of racing. The ads also had to get past two beliefs: that yacht racing is expensive, and that you need to be a highly skilled sailor to crew a racing yacht. In fact the skipper is good at getting beginners up to speed within two days.

We opened with a bold line, in capitals: "YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A ROCKSTAR". We built audiences for specific kinds of customer, used strong social proof from past crew, and ran video, image and collection ads to people who didn't know the boat yet. People who engaged were shown a second ad asking them to sign up, and a third offered a discount as the booking deadline got close.

A 10.9× return on ad spend for Hamilton Island Race Week, and line honours on day 2 of racing.

The range was fairly new to the market and new to structured advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Posting on Instagram had brought moderate growth, but the owner knew a clear strategy was needed.

We launched with The Friendly Grocer collection and used rapid testing to find a competitive add-to-cart cost, so we could tell within hours which ad sets were working and swap out the rest. We kept split testing a mix of creative formats, compared lookalike and interest audiences, then retargeted with dynamic product ads that showed people the exact piece they'd looked at, with copy written for that item. Two campaign layers were enough to start scaling the budget.

A 412% return on ad spend (4.12×), and purchases up 111%.