Caraway Cracks Upper-Funnel Campaigns on Meta

Platforms like Meta have world-class machine learning capabilities, and their ad serving systems are very good at finding ways to optimize for the goals that a marketer sets. If the goal is to  optimize campaigns for lower funnel conversions or revenue, this often means that they are finding users who are already in-market to purchase. The risk that poses is that there is a limited number of users in-market, and they may be overserved with ads.

At a certain point, it is essential to create demand for the product as well as effectively capitalize on that demand. One way to do this is to diversify into new channels. Before you try a new channel, it is important to keep in mind that Meta still has unmatched scale, and they have a whole suite of upper funnel products to help create demand. The only challenge is that because these campaigns are not explicitly designed to directly affect sales, the effects of upper funnel campaigns are very hard to measure using traditional attribution methods.

Caraway was keen to understand whether spending on upper funnel Meta campaigns could help ‘fill the funnel’ before their important holiday season, and ultimately drive the business metrics that they care about. 

The Caraway team decided to add a new campaign on top of their existing media, optimized toward a shallower KPI of site visits. The campaign was targeted to 50% of the US, and held out from the other half. The Haus app analyzed Caraway’s historical sales data to ensure that region groupings were split in a way where the markets behave in the same way, ensuring an ideal testing environment to introduce a new marketing treatment.

By analyzing the divergence in sales and revenue between the treatment regions and the holdout regions, Caraway observed what in-platform reporting could not show: that these upper funnel campaigns were driving significant and efficient downstream activity. 

Meta upper funnel campaigns were responsible for driving ~4% of Caraway’s new customer revenue during the test period. Put another way, if Caraway was not running this tactic, their overall new customer revenue would have fallen by 4%. 

The incremental ROAS generated from the upper funnel campaign made it as efficient as many of their performance channels specifically designed to drive conversions.