NEW: iContact Case Study

Client WILD BILL SODA

How Wild Bill Soda Pivoted to Ecommerce and Scaled Revenue by 400% through PPC

OVERVIEW

Wild Bill’s is a unique and beloved craft beverage brand with many devoted followers and fans. A proudly veteran-owned and operated business, Wild Bill’s has developed a reputation for great soda and a great mission. The Wild Bill’s typical business model was based around exhibiting at events, primarily conventions, such as Comic Con, where they would set up a wild west mobile saloon with soda on tap as the primary means of acquiring customers and growing the brand.

Once COVID hit in March 2020, it was clear this model was going to have to change for the business to survive. Wild Bill’s made the decision quickly to pivot to ecommerce, engaging OpenMoves in May 2020 to drive online revenue via PPC. Since then, working together we have achieved:

400%

Increase in online sales including Amazon

6x

Ad spend increase,
with CPA + ROAS targets

20%

Growth with new
Amazon channel

5x

Growth with creative
for paid social

video mobile images

THE CHALLENGE

Clearly this was a unique challenge for many reasons. Perhaps the first and most obvious being the general concept of establishing if the core thesis of selling soda D2C online was viable. After all, most soda by far is purchased in person at grocery stores and other retail outlets.

We had a number of creative and brand challenges as well. The Wild Bill’s brand has many different messages and value propositions including the soda itself, the connection to conferences and various communities, the fact of being veteran owned, and more.

From a PPC and media planning perspective, we had to launch all of the active channels basically from zero, including Facebook Ads, Criteo Remarketing, Google Search and Shopping, and Amazon Ads. This entailed all the usual technical and logistics hurdles, as well as the broader strategy challenge of allocating the right media budget to each channel.

Finally, our core challenge was scaling while remaining profitable. Since this project was basically a new venture, we started at a very low baseline with an aggressive goal to grow. However, this needed to be profitable growth all the way through. Keeping CPA on target while growing by 400% was our biggest challenge, and biggest success.

Primary Goals

Grow top line sales significantly

Keep CPA stable and profitable

Develop creative that was both on-brand and driving performance

Launch Amazon PPC strategy keeping ACOS in-line

CLIENT TESTIMONIAL

  • OpenMoves has absolutely been a key partner for us pivoting and scaling our business to ecommerce. When we started with OpenMoves last year, we were really experimental with ecommerce and the future was uncertain. They helped us take our business goal and concept and translate it into a reality. We build our ecommerce strategy with OpenMoves every step of the way and the growth has been very significant. We basically built an ecommerce business from zero.

    Michael Merseburg, CEO, Wild Bill’s Soda
    Michael Merseburg, CEO, Wild Bill’s Soda

The Solution

Achieving High Performance with Data-Driven Creative

For all our PPC clients we take a “Create, Learn and Optimize” approach to rapidly test and roll-out relevant creative that addresses critical campaign challenges. To tackle these challenges we build a creative strategy that starts with an analysis of funnel stages for different audience segments within different product lines. We then create creative concepts and a testing methodology based on our research and hypothesis on the experiments we’d like to run.

Ideate and Test Multiple Concepts

Performance creative relies on experimentation. For Wild Bill we created a variety of concepts that ranged from the straightforward to the wild and unexpected. To maximize our tests we developed ads specifically for top-funnel prospects and mid-funnel consumers for retargeting. Within one to two weeks we were able to effectively test and determine winners within different audience segments and different product lines.

TOP FUNNEL CONCEPTS

X
CPA - 2.6%
X
CPA - 4.8% star

MIDDLE FUNNEL CONCEPTS

X
CPA - 4.1% star
X
CPA - 2.2%

Iterate on Winning Concepts

At this stage, we’re ready to consolidate our campaigns with the best performing creative and begin optimizing the winners. With our honed in concepts we performed quick micro-experiments to test messaging, different cuts and lengths, promotional offers, calls-to-actions, product flavors, and color schemes. By A/B testing one element at a time we’re able to quickly improve performance marketing results and gain valuable insight into what’s working and not working within our different targets.

CHAMPIONS

VARIANTS

Continually Test and Optimize

New campaigns need to be continually improved, refreshed, optimized, and eventually challenged with new ideas and creative concepts. With the insight we gained from the ideation and iteration phase we are able to further scale Wild Bill’s campaigns by fine-tuning our audience segmentation/exclusions optimizing our bidding strategies while developing new seasonal campaigns and testing variants.

OPENMOVES PPC TEAM

  • Creative risk-taking has been a key to our success — the Wild Bill team has given us the trust and freedom to launch fast, build on our wins, and quickly cut under performers. Together we found creative balance, letting the data lead our decisions while creating distinction for the brand. Our team is looking forward to continually testing new ideas, lowering our costs per acquistion and taking Wild Bill to new heights.

    David, Partner & Chief Creative Officer, OpenMoves
    David, Partner & Chief Creative Officer, OpenMoves

Facebook/IG and Amazon Optimization and Scaling

Comprehensive Amazon Optimization. The OpenMoves team supported Wild Bill’s on both organic and paid Amazon strategies. This included listing optimization, review strategy development, As a result, Amazon developed into an important incremental driver of revenue for Wild Bill’s despite the platform’s generally higher costs.

Facebook / IG Scaling Strategies. The team has developed a proprietary methodology for projecting, planning, and developing paths to scale on FB/IG PPC. This includes modeling audience sizes, conversion rates and CPAs and developing account structures that can grow while remaining profitable.

By consistently and incrementally building additive winning audiences without disrupting exiting successful campaigns we were able to grow FB spend dramatically without missing ROAS goals.

Supporting Media Channels and CRO. Paid social has remained the large driver of sales for Wild Bill’s as we’d expected. However, we have seen very efficient results from our programmatic remarketing efforts and low-funnel search and shopping strategies. We have also supported our PPC efforts with conversion rate optimization analysis for Wild Bill’s to ensure that paid traffic converted as efficiently as possible.

Let’s discuss how we can increase your revenue

PARAGON SECURITY

Assisting a top NYC security business with #1 organic rankings and consistent profitable lead generation through PPC.

Recent Posts