Overview & Problem Statement

Generating leads for solar panel company based in the US

Massive Splash is a media buying and performance marketing agency whose major clients are various insurance companies (home insurance, life insurance, health insurance, car insurance), solar panel manufacturers, and some online gaming (sports betting) companies. in the US. We get paid for the leads generated for the client. Facebook advertising is our medium for lead-generation.  

The goal was to generate leads for our client – a solar panel company in the US at the lowest possible cost per lead.

User & Audience

The American homeowner

Our target audience was American homeowners.  So we used an audience starting from young homeowners (the late 20s) till 65+. Rigorous testing by media buyers had helped us build a target audience list of premium states and zip codes.  That’s the broad targeting we used.

Roles & Responsibilities

Creating the best-selling ad copy

I conducted copy experiments. I worked along with team of 5 media buyers who conducted experiments on pictures, audience demographics and time slots.

Scopes & Constraints

Managing customer expectations and challenges that are beyond our control

The clients designed the offer page that our Facebook ad led to. It wasn’t an ideal design.  On the final thank you page there were various links to mortgage and refinance offers. This often confused the user if they have been misled into signing up for a refinance offer instead. 

Once the user signs up, the volume of calls they received wasn’t in our control.

Factors like these led some users to leave negative comments on the post and some even reported the page as spam.

Facebook in such cases bans or temporarily blocks the ads. This affects ad costs (as low scores on ad quality raise ad costs), performance measurement, testing capabilities, and other resources.

Process & What I Did

A walk through the ideation, testing, and optimization stages

Creating use-cases and writing ad copy variations

1) I researched user needs and created various use-cases

• Environmentally conscious homeowners

• Homeowners looking to save money by cutting down electricity bills

• Homeowners interested in making home improvements for aesthetic purpose or to increase the value of their homes

2) I wrote ad copy variations targeting these use-cases around

• behaviour science principles of  social proof, scarcity, and exclusivity

• renewable energy news making headlines (changes in tax rebates policies for renewables in California, the Texas grid breakdown, and homeowners receiving $1000 electricity bills due to variable-rate plan they have with the electricity companies)

Combining inputs from team to launch test-ad campaigns and measuring performance on established success metrics

3) Then I use inputs from Media Buyers such as the best performing states and audience demographics, and the ad picture doing the highest ROI.

4) I combine 1, 2, and 3 to conduct A/B tests through Facebook ad campaigns

5) Our team (media buyers and I) has brainstormed success metrics and derived (through rigorous testing) benchmarks of each metric. I measure the performance of my ad campaigns to understand which copy is profitable and if the copy is exceeding CTR and CPC benchmarks.

Findings from the testing

A combination of emotion, some key tested phrases on value-addition to homeowners from Solar and pricing, and the persuasion technique of exclusivity have come together to give us the highest performing ad copy, so far.

Outcome & Results

Positive results and a work-in-progress

Improving the ROIs (return on investment) and lowering the CPCs (cost per click) is always a work-in-progress.

The current ad copy improved return on investment and click through rates over the last one.

ROI improved by 15%

Click through rates went up by 0.5%