The Round Barn Labs team tested a variety of targeting and creative combinations to drive nearly 5,000 new customers at a cost much lower than their previous efforts. This exceeded Nextdoor’s goal by 17% and yielded a Return On Ad Spend of 4:1.
Round Barn Labs is a leading growth marketing agency specializing in paid social, conversion rate optimization, and affiliate/influencer marketing. Nextdoor is a 1.5 billion valued startup located in San Francisco, and the private social network for your neighborhood. In late 2017 they launched Nextdoor Real Estate, an advertising product enabling real estate agents to sponsor their local neighborhood and be a home resource for their community. In early 2018 Nextdoor engaged with Round Barn Labs for paid marketing expertise to test the viability of this product, improve paid marketing, and increase volume.
Nextdoor Real Estate had a very aggressive goal to increase customer acquisition (real estate agent sponsorships) by 50% during the fourth quarter of 2018 and to decrease cost per sponsorship by 10%.
The Round Barn Lab team were able to test video ads as well as retargeting users who watched a certain percentage of their video to drive sponsorships. Overall the video creative was the third most effective creative unit run during Q4 2018. We provided video creative at no additional charge which allowed us to increase awareness, CPC efficiency, and the overall cost per customer (sponsor) acquired.
One of the mottos we live by at Round Barn Labs is ABT, Always Be Testing. In order to keep the creative fresh and to expand our learnings, we ran weekly copy tests that refreshed either the headline or the text. We tested ad copy related to scarcity, holidays, testimonials, location, and gender. We were able to iterate based on this data to improve the creative on a weekly basis ensuring more rapid learnings and growth.
The Nextdoor Real Estate landing page received a lot of traffic and was able to capture users at different levels of commitment, from sign up to claiming their business page to actually sponsoring their ZIP code. This produced a tremendous amount of data that we could turn into a variety of lookalike audiences. As we do with everything, we tested and found that a combination of 1% lookalikes were the top performing non-retargeting audiences throughout the duration of the campaign.
The Round Barn Labs team found retargeting to be extremely effective for converting website visitors into sponsors for a number of reasons. The steps required to sign up on the Nextdoor platform and complete the sponsorship purchase was an arduous one. In addition, the sponsorship program was relatively new and not well known among the real estate community. This left many qualified users either unsure about the product or confused by the checkout process. The Round Barn Labs team utilized a variety of retargeting audiences to test efficiency at varying levels within the funnel. These audiences were added to a CBO (Campaign Bid Optimization) campaign and optimized daily.
The Round Barn Labs team was able to improve efficiency by adding successful audiences into a CBO campaign that would send more budget to the best performing audiences each day. This helped us scale more quickly and get the most out of the daily budget.
Because Nextdoor Real Estate had a cap on what they were willing to pay for a sponsor, the Round Barn Labs team decided to test varied bid caps to identify the dollar amount that would help the team reach their target number. The staggered bid cap tests allowed the team to find a solution that we were could implement for all future audiences.
By frequently testing creative, audiences, and bid strategies Round Barn Labs was able to achieve the following results.
