Ardan Yarici, a media buyer and the founder of HeidraX, an online marketing agency based in Belgium, shares with us a case study whereby he was able to scale his client’s male skincare e-commerce brand to $800 000 in revenue by promoting it with Facebook and Tiktok ads.
In this article, Ardan shares how he was able to use the combination of Facebook ads and Tiktok ads to scale this brand, including the media buying approaches and techniques required to master these two giant traffic sources.
Campaign summary
Product: A men’s skincare product
Geo: US
Average Order Value: $50
Total ad spend across both ad networks: $190 000
Revenue: $827 000
It should be noted that approximately 10% of Facebook ads were not tracked in the Facebook Ad Manager.
Working with Facebook Ads
Ardan says that with this project, he started off by creating a Facebook ad campaign for the brand. He used a standard campaign format with nothing extraordinary, but the results were extraordinary.
Below is how to set up the Facebook campaign:
- Broad Ad Set 1 | Single Image 1 | Copy 1 | $10/day
- $10/day Ad Set 2 | Broad | Single Image 2 | Copy 1
- Ad Set 3 | Broad | 1:1 video (15 sec) | Copy 1 | $10/day
- Ad Set 4: Broad | 1:1 video (15 sec) 2: Copy 1 | $10/day
- 5 ad sets | Broad | Reels (10 sec) 1 | Copy 1 | $10 per day
- Advertisement Set 6 | Broad | Reels (15 sec) 2 | Copy 1 | $10/day
- Advertisement Set 7 | Broad | Reels (10 sec) 3 | Copy 1 | $10/day
- 8 | Broad | Reels (10 sec) | 4 | Copy 1 | $10 per day
Ardan duplicated this and changed the audience to 1.
The initial results were alright, and he turned off the ad sets that didn’t work within 4 days and immediately replaced the creatives with new ones. Ardan says that this campaign got an average ROAS of 3.5x in the first 3 weeks which was mindblowing in the early stages.
Ad Creatives Used
On the creatives' side, Ardan says that 1:1 Instagram feed videos seemed to not perform in any way. They were barely profitable for about four batches of new creatives, so Ardan completely cut them out. Reels were performing extraordinarily well. So he decided to double down on the creation of reels. In the end, he was testing eight reels at a time while still running single images.
At around $10 000 in ad spend, this campaign was consistently producing a 4.5 ROAS, so it was looking promising. This means that the revenue numbers were around $45 000 from the initial Facebook campaign, and it was still running well thanks to their Instagram Reels Ads.
After a while, he decided to cut off the single images as well, so at this point, he was testing 10 reels at a time.
Tiktok Ads
While all of this was happening, Ardan says that he was actually creating and waiting for content to run on TikTok ads. So the plan to run TikTok ads was already in place before the success of the Reels ads.
As soon as the TikTok ads were up and running, everything exploded.
At first, he kept the Reels and TikToks creatives separate, but he says that this was a bad idea. A few tests later revealed that TikToks and Reels ad creatives work perfectly cross-platform (at least for this campaign). This made things easier for Ardan.
Retargeting
Ardan says that he did nothing special for retargeting. He tested so many things, and the only thing that worked okay was the 3-day windows with the same ads as in the cold campaign. But retargeting doesn’t work effectively with Tiktok ads as it does on Facebook. This is because Tiktok is mainly a top-of-the-funnel traffic source.
Working with TikTok
Ardan shared some knowledge of Tiktok ads. He says that TikTok ads work best if you follow these criteria:
- Native content: If your ads feel native to the platform, they will be favored by both the algorithm and the users. Here's a true story: this happened to one of my clients: a random TikTokker with 400 followers decided to make a TikTok about my client's product and post it on his account. He genuinely appeared to be a satisfied customer, casually explaining what the product does. The video hit 900 000 views in a couple of days, and my client made $40 000 in sales because of that video. They had no prior contact.
- Attention-grabbing: If you are able to grab people's attention on TikTok, you’ll do well. Think of it like this: Attention has become a currency. Attention has become a marketer's most valuable commodity. Let’s say you have spent a lot of time creating ads, and they turned out amazing, but you don’t succeed at grabbing attention in the first seconds. That means your ad is worthless.
Big companies are spending billions to optimize attention-grabbing. They are competing with each other. The ones that can grab the most attention are at the top. The trick is to grab a piece of that pie.
Here’s what Ardan did technically with Tiktok ads.
Content Creation
While working with Tiktok ads, Ardan says that the content pipeline always has to be full—this is essential. One of the biggest mistakes TikTok advertisers make is not having enough creatives in their pipeline. This is of utmost importance. Stop contrasting TikTok and Facebook ads. You can’t profitably run the same campaign for longer than 2 weeks anymore.
Ardan says that he made sure to have at least four content creators ready. He had other creatives made in his office, so in total, 5 streams of creatives were coming in. He used to test about 30 to 40 creatives a month, and now he says that he has increased that amount a bit. It’s more towards 100 – 150 per month now.
"At first, we figure out what types of creatives work best." We start with about 20 completely different types of creatives. We run them as regular ads and see where they go. Every five days, we hire new creatives. Once we find a winning creative, we immediately get it recreated by our partnered influencers so we can get it published as a Spark ad. This strategy has been working very well for us."
Regular ads are ads you set up through the TikTok ads manager, so they're basically the "normal" ads. Spark ads are TikTok posts that can be run as ads through the TikTok ad manager. This way, you can't tell the post is an ad. which is really powerful.
Here are some ad ideas that worked well, Ardan:
- Comment overlay: These are the TikToks that are a reply to a comment. Ardan tested some of them by creating ads with comment overlays asking a question. for example, "How do you keep your keyboard so clean?" and then proceed to show them the keyboard cleaning product.
- "Stuff I Found on the Internet That I Can’t Live Without": Starting off your TikTok this way will definitely increase average watch time. This one works very well.
- Before/after: Depending on your brand, this could work very well. Ardan says that he has been able to scale a bunch of before-and-after TikToks. But it only works well if it's suitable for your brand. So it’s definitely worth a try!
"If you’re struggling to find influencers to partner up with, you can find one on Collabstr." I’m not telling you to use that website to generate new creatives! That’s going to end up being way too expensive.
What I suggest you do is make your own creatives or get them made for way cheaper, and when you find winning creatives, get an influencer to recreate them and upload them as Spark posts." Ardan says.
Conclusion
Ardan was able to scale his clients' e-commerce brand to over $800 000 in sales with a combination of Tiktok and Facebook ads (Reels). He was able to do this while spending just $190 000 on ads on both platforms combined.
Ardan says that when working with Reels and Tiktok ads, creatives are king. Any spare budget you have should go towards creative testing. Don't spend money on audience testing if your creatives don't work.
Always look for influencers to work with when running Spark ads. If this takes too long, start running ads as Spark ads through your own account so you can benefit from the organic side of TikTok.
