Ritual maximizes ROI on TikTok via series of incrementality tests

Ritual is a health and wellness brand aiming to bring a new level of transparency to the health and wellness industry. A Certified B Corporation, they have pioneered a new standard of high-quality multivitamins and supplements that are backed by science and Made TraceableTM with the first visible supply chain of its kind. Together with leading scientists, researchers and advisors, Ritual has developed products based on thousands of independent research studies, and now has one of the leading prenatal multivitamins in the U.S. Ritual is available on Amazon.com, with the Climate Friendly Pledge Badge, and nationwide at Whole Foods Market and Target.

Ritual understood that their audience was on TikTok but they were skeptical of the incrementality of the ad product. They wanted to understand if TikTok was incremental to their business and if there was a way to improve effectiveness.

Ritual started by designing a 2 cell test in the Haus app to get an initial read on incrementality of their existing TikTok strategy.

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The results showed that TikTok drove no lift to the business and the Ritual team was shocked. At various points in their history, they had seen signs of success with this channel so they were determined to learn how to make it work for their audience. Instead of simply turning off the channel, they decided to change the way they bought TikTok ads.  Ritual made 3 major adjustments before re-testing:

1. They changed optimization settings on their campaigns
2. They re-tested during a period of greater demand
3. They refreshed creative to align with the heightened demand 

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With these adjustments in place, Ritual re-ran a similar test with a larger holdout:

In making these adjustments to their buying strategy, they were able to take TikTok from no lift to an 8% lift at a highly efficient CPIA. This gave Ritual the confidence to rely on TikTok ads as a key lever during certain periods of the year to drive incremental subscriptions . They also learned that the TikTok platform was overstating performance by about 10% for this period, which they now take into consideration when reporting on this channel internally. These learnings saved Ritual millions in annual spend that would have otherwise been wasted on a tactic that was not driving lift to their business. 

The Ritual team wants to test further into the channel to learn how they can best use TikTok advertising as an always-on channel to drive incremental growth.