CASE STUDY

Kind Snacks Kick Up Sales with Trailblazing Optimization

Snapshot

SOLUTION AREA

Marketing

SOLUTION

NCS Optimization

INDUSTRIES

Food and Beverage

CLIENT

Manufacturer

The Objective

Snack bar company KIND Snacks, like other consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers, was hungry for more real-time consumer insights to understand the efficacy of media campaigns. However, its media mix modeling and offline sales studies lacked real-time metrics to understand how its advertising impacted in-store purchases, which is crucial for any programmatic optimization strategy.

The Strategy

KIND Snacks savors its long-standing relationship with NCSolutions (NCS), which conducts frequent Sales Effect studies across several publishers for the brand.

For this project, we applied our Buyer-Driven Bidding insights to Meta environments. Buyer-Driven Bidding enables CPG brands to optimize campaigns in-flight with weekly offline and online product sales. It was exactly what KIND needed for this campaign: real-time sales performance results for optimization.

Throughout the 10-week campaign, we delivered updated purchase insights to Meta Ads Manager weekly. This enabled Tinuiti to know how each campaign, audience, and creative asset performed from a total sales perspective, optimizing along the way to maximize blended (offline and online) ROAS for KIND Snacks.

Tinuiti's multi-cell test, measured by an NCS Sales Effect study, deduced whether weekly optimizations based on Buyer-Driven Bidding insights could drive a greater bottom-line ROAS for KIND Snacks, compared to the business-as-usual strategy of monitoring platform metrics in upper-funnel campaigns. In a trailblazing step, Tinuiti also used Buyer-Driven Bidding to identify the characteristics of the best-buying households to find lookalike households, which they then targeted. The weekly sales data allowed the snack brand to gain a better understanding of advertising performance and optimize programmatic buys on Meta.

The Results

How sweet it was, indeed. Using Buyer-Driven Bidding insights to influence mid-campaign optimizations, this campaign drove an incremental 6% return on investment over KIND's business-as-usual strategy. This was the first time KIND was able to gain insight into total sales performance mid-campaign, allowing Tinuiti and KIND to adjust and test audience and messaging strategies to maximize ROAS.

"KIND and Tinuiti's innovative approach of pairing weekly sales data with in-flight optimization proves just how impactful it is for brands to have total insight into sales performance during the campaign. By understanding which elements were driving success, they were able to make real-time changes to drive higher incremental sales and maximize ROAS."

Kelly Sheehan

VP, Sales

NCSolutions