Targeted advertising on Facebook and Instagram is a powerful tool for businesses to reach their target customers. Targeting is set up through Facebook Ads Manager, where the advertiser selects the interests of the audience, its demographic, and geographic indicators. In the future, advertisements will be shown to users with the selected characteristics.
Regarding tactical clothing and military equipment, Meta has a strict policy regarding the promotion of firearms, gun modification accessories, explosives, etc. Most likely such advertising will be rejected or removed.
However, an advertiser may advertise products that are not directly marketed as part of a bladed weapon, as long as they are targeted at people over 18 (for firearms, Facebook limits the display of said content to people under 21). You must adhere to the advertising policies of the platform we use. Understanding this at the start, we had to carefully study and select those products that allow the social network to launch advertising - tools for mountain hiking, optics, products for hearing protection, portable power stations, clothing, shoes, etc.
How we managed to set up advertising for a store of tactical clothing and military equipment and what results it gave, read in this case.
Our Client is the military ammunition store
Our Client is a store of tactical clothing and military equipment of famous European brands (Mil-Tec, Helikon-Tex, Magnum, etc.). The company has been operating in the Ukrainian market since 2019.
The priority of work is high quality at an affordable price. The store does not offer replicas budget copies or counterfeits of goods.
The main competitive advantages of the store:
- quality (store products are original, brought from Europe);
- reasonable price;
- Fast shipping;
- the possibility of exchanging if the position is not suitable.
The owner of an online store was looking for new ways to develop a business on the Internet and contacted ITForce in March 2023, because he found us on the freelancehunt platform based on reviews. The purpose is to attract potential customers and increase targeted traffic to the website. They have not used SMM promotion service until this time.
Setting up targeted advertising for a tactical ammunition store
The Client's website is located on the prom.ua platform, which had a certain advantage for us in targeting settings. The advertisement was planned to be displayed around the clock on
2 devices:
- cells;
- desktops.
Display regions: the entire territory of Ukraine except the occupied part.
Meta company has some requirements for launching advertising:
- presence of Facebook and Instagram pages (must contain at least 3 publications);
- current advertising account Facebook Ads Manager;
- a feed with products that will be advertised.
Before contacting ITForce, the owner of a tactical ammunition store did not use the advertising capabilities of Facebook and Instagram and did not have business pages on the platforms, which are a prerequisite for launching advertising.
The first thing was the cooperation with was creating Facebook and Instagram business pages and linking them to the client’s account.
The second step is to install Facebook Pixel on the website. Typically, clients install Pixel themselves, but in this project, a specialist installed the code on the website.
The third step was preparing a product feed. The Client provided us with access to the website, so our specialist generated the feed.
Military-themed items have restrictions on display. For example, the ban applies to knives and other bladed weapons. It should be considered that sometimes Meta's policy mistakenly includes multitools in the category of bladed weapons, so a specialist manually tested and checked all products. We turned to support for help if some of them were mistakenly recognized by Meta as weapons to enter all the products into advertising as correctly as possible.
The target audience of the military equipment website
The store’s product range is quite diverse, and the products may be needed by users with different interests and hobbies because the store offers tents, tactical and waterproof clothing, inflatable pillows, compasses, shoes, etc. for purchase. Such a variety of products can be used by military personnel, tourists, fishermen, etc.
The Client noted that the main audience of tactical ammunition store buyers is:
- military personnel and their squads;
- people who love to relax in nature.
We have developed an advertising development strategy and a campaign launch plan. The list of preparatory work before setting up targeted advertising contained the following stages of implementation:
- provision of a list of priority products for promotion is carried out by the Client;
- preparation of advertising banners is assigned to the designer.
Next, the SMM specialist launches advertising campaigns: and creates audiences and ads of different formats.
To test advertisements, we chose 3 advertising goals:
- traffic – to attract interested users to the website;
- sale is the main goal of cooperation;
- message - a campaign that allows you to expand the number of platforms for selling goods (message in Instagram Direct).
Examples of customized ads:
Fig. 1 – Examples of customized ads
Testing has shown that the purpose of the message does not justify itself - users rarely clarify information in Direct. They buy products immediately after clicking on an ad, so moving forward we focused on website purchases and disabled the Message campaign.
Even though the SMM specialist manually checked the products for promotion before launching advertising, we were faced with account blocking. And from time to time we encounter the fact that Facebook’s rules either identify products not quite correctly or completely block the ability to advertise them. In such cases, we work with the technical support of the social network: we send requests for re-verification or unblocking.
Also, in cooperation with increasing the value of the purchase, we identified a segment of goods worth 1000+ UAH for testing.
The advertising budget at the beginning of the project was limited - $500 per month. But, given the positive dynamics already in the first few weeks, it began to grow. We currently have an advertising budget in the works that significantly exceeds the starting budget.
Results of targeted advertising for the tactical ammunition website
The teamwork “client-manager-specialist” formed during cooperation has a very positive effect on the dynamics of the project.
Results of the first month of work
We tested the following audience groups with store-relevant target interests:
- men;
- women;
- all website visitors;
- groups of audiences based on specific interests.
The second stage was testing:
- Lookalike audiences;
- retargeting to users who visited the website.
At first, the Client’s account ran 8 advertising campaigns with different goals and targeted different audiences.
The launched advertising campaigns brought the client:
- 396 additions to the cart;
- 209 completed transactions;
- $5.7 was the purchase price.
There is data on the effectiveness of social networks as individual sales channels:
Fig. 2 – Efficiency of advertising placements for the first month of cooperation
Using the example of some advertising campaigns, we see that in general Facebook brings in more sales, and in some advertising campaigns the price per purchase was lower than Instagram. However, advertising on Audience Network and Messenger is also effective. That is, it is impossible to say that one of the platforms has a higher priority.
As of August 2023, the client's account had approximately 20 advertising campaigns running. It should be noted that users of certain operating systems may not allow data to be shared and therefore advertising indicators have an error, that is, they are not fully reflected.
Data on advertising results for 6+ months of cooperation:
Fig. 3 – Results of targeted advertising for 6 months of cooperation
- 5,667 additions to cart;
- 3008 purchases;
- 7.93 average ROAS value for store advertising;
- $5.95 average purchase price for targeted advertising.
Visitor conversion path data:
Fig. 4 – User Conversion Paths
We see that the first and subsequent interactions of users with advertising, which result in conversion, occur precisely through the advertising channel on Facebook and Instagram. In the final stage, visitors interact with the client’s website through contextual advertising. We can follow an approximate path:
- a user with relevant interests and demographic characteristics sees advertisements for products on social networks;
- clicks on it and goes to our Client's website, where he gets acquainted with the products;
- the next point of contact with the website also occurs through social networks (after interacting with the website in the absence of a purchase, the user enters the audience for retargeting, which becomes the second point of contact and re-motivates the user);
- the last touchpoint that ends the session with conversion is the transition to the website from contextual advertising (i.e., the search query with the required product is killed, and then in the search results the user clicks on advertisements, and not on organic results).
In terms of the number of interactions, conversions on social networks take 2nd place (the target action was carried out through advertising on Facebook or Instagram). In the 3rd position there is the Direct channel (direct events, that is, the website is saved in the browser bookmarks, or the user remembers the name of the resource and directly enters the domain name on time). In addition to the obvious advantages (purchases), it can be argued that targeted advertising additionally helps to increase site awareness.
As of August 2023, we began testing the audience of those users who abandoned the cart 14 days ago (these are site visitors who selected a product, added it to the cart but did not place an order). There are preliminary data:
Fig. 5 – Ad group results Abandoned cart (14 days)
Ad group data Abandoned cart (14 days):
- 154 completed transactions;
- 11.9 ROAS;
- $5.31 purchase price.
The audience of users who abandoned the cart 14 days ago turned out to be effective - 154 additional purchases. We continue to work with this audience and involve them in the process of completing selected purchases.
Comparison of the first and last months of work (we take the period when advertising has already been running for some time):
Fig. 6 – Comparison of the periods of the beginning and last month of cooperation
- +207.84% increase in users;
- +254.84 sessions were carried out by site visitors;
- +316.22% of sessions with interaction (useful actions - clicking on a button, etc.);
- targeted advertising brought 179.86% of conversions;
- 304.24% increase in income.
Over 6 months of work, targeted advertising brought the client 3,008 sales with an average purchase price of $5.95. The Client appreciated the positive dynamics and continues to develop a new traffic and sales channel. The development strategy we have developed brings a significant effect, which is proven by the current case.
Work plan for the following periods:
- analysis of advertising campaigns and their optimization;
- disabling ineffective LCDs;
- creating new campaigns;
- increasing and redistributing the budget between campaigns;
- reviewing products that perform poorly;
- optimization of advertising goals;
- testing new audiences.
We continue to work on optimizing campaigns and scaling results within the agreed budget, which develops in proportion to the increase in revenue from targeted advertising.
