Francisco’s business was hit hard when the COVID-19 pandemic first began. As consumers stopped buying from his store, he had to lay off several of his employees. He was able to quickly pivot and began selling face masks and only focused on selling this product. Francisco started running ads for the new masks and as these were in such high demand, his business took off again! He was able to grow exponentially from selling face masks alone and hired back the employees he previously had laid off.

However, that momentum and growth did not continue forever. As the year progressed, sales slowed down. In December, which is normally the best month in terms of sales and return on ad spend for ecommerce businesses, Francisco was only getting a 2X return on his ad spend. His average order value had drastically decreased because at that point most people already owned a face mask and the demand was low. This meant his customers were usually only buying one $10-$20 mask at a time. His cost per purchase had also increased to $20-$30.

In order to create a sustainable strategy that would lead to long term success, a greater AOV, and lower CPP, our strategy needed to move away from focusing solely on face masks. It’s not uncommon for ecommerce businesses to focus on a hot ticket item, but in this case where his hot ticket was face masks, there was a great deal of uncertainty about the longevity of its success. We simply don’t know what the world will be like in a year or two from now, and there may be no demand at all for this product.

So, we focused on creating a sustainable strategy that incorporated more of Francisco’s products so that his business was still generating profit apart from his hot ticket item. We dove into our research to identify his best selling products apart from the face masks based on his historical data to determine which products we should run ads to.

Once those were identified, we got brand new creative and copy that communicated being proud of your heritage and to wear your heritage with pride as we knew this would resonate well with his Mexican-American audience. We did a great deal of research into our targeting as well to identify specific locations in the United States with greater Mexican-American populations that we could target to increase our conversions.

As we began implementing this strategy, the new iOS updates began rolling out and made attribution extremely difficult. It changed from 28 days to 7 days, which impacted how ads were delivered, their performance, etc. It was daunting and required some quick pivoting on our end to get accurate results, but it did not hinder our success for a second!

One thing Team Hirsh prides itself on is our ability to pivot on the fly and not get bogged down by challenges as they are thrown our way. When we realized our initial strategy wasn’t producing the results we needed, we instantaneously shifted our focus and got to work on crafting another strategy for Francisco. When the iOS updates came out and caused attribution within Facebook to lose accuracy, we pivoted to figure out an alternative solution to track results correctly. Our team is able to do this in the blink of any eye. It’s not as easy for individual entrepreneurs to make pivots as quickly on their own, and our support was a great asset to Francisco when these challenges came.