Prior experience, not Traffiy client work
I delivered this as part of my previous employment at a European digital agency. It was that agency’s client under its own contract, not a Traffiy engagement.
Retail · United Arab Emirates · 2022 · Senior Paid Marketing Strategist
Prospecting from mapped physical locations instead of broad interests.
A Dubai based retailer.
8.6
ROAS within 7 days
9.6%
Click through rate
$10
Cost per result
My role
Senior Paid Marketing Strategist
2022, at a European digital agency
The situation
A client based in Dubai with enough budget behind them to fund a real test rather than a cautious one. I wanted to find out whether tightly drawn physical location targeting could carry top of funnel prospecting on Meta, which is normally the territory of broad interest targeting.
The constraint
Top of funnel is the hardest place to prove anything. It is measured on awareness, it is where efficiency usually disappears, and any apparent lift can be quietly borrowed from retargeting if the audiences are not kept apart. To make the answer trustworthy I had to exclude existing visitors completely and accept that the test would be judged on cold traffic alone.
What I did
- Designed the test so it could not flatter itself. Anyone who had already been to the site was locked out before it launched, which left only people who had never heard of the brand, so whatever came back would have to have come from them.
- Let it start wide as an awareness campaign and narrow from there, rather than starting narrow and calling the result proof.
- Built the audiences out of mapped physical places rather than cities or radii, pinning exact spots instead of drawing circles around them.
- Assembled the address set with scraping and automation tooling and pushed it up in bulk, because putting that many exact places in by hand was never going to happen.
The outcome
Within seven days the test returned 8.6 ROAS, among the highest the client had seen from social ads, at a ten dollar cost per result which was among the lowest they had recorded. Click through rate was 9.6 percent and add to cart 15 percent, and the ads collected 3,266 engagements. The funnel narrowed in under fourteen days.
What I took from it
Precision in cold prospecting is usually treated as a contradiction in terms. It is really a tooling problem. Once gathering exact places at volume became cheap, the targeting stopped being the compromise it normally is.
All work on this page was delivered during previous employment at another agency, as part of that agency’s teams and under its client relationships. It is not Traffiy client work. Brands are described rather than named, and every figure comes from an article published at the time.
Every figure above is quoted from the article published about this project at the time, and is recorded against its archived source. Happy to share the reference on request.