Car Stickers Reaches 275% ROAS on Mobile

Founded in 2000, Car Stickers ships stickers, magnets, shirts, and virtually anything else you can print a design on, nationwide. They are self-founded and fueled by a creative, innovative team in Bend, Oregon. They were first movers in the custom sticker e-commerce space, but the last few years brought on dozens of competitors, flooding social media with flashy promotions and ever-shortening shipping delivery times.

The Car Stickers team historically got great results from search and social campaigns, but the space got so cluttered it felt impossible to stand out. Engagement was going down, but most importantly net new customer reach was virtually non-existent.

"Increasing our social media spend felt like a race to the bottom, especially as Meta KPIs and costs kept shifting."

The Car Stickers team was looking for a new channel with room for real experimentation and a way to garner actionable audience insights along with strong ROI, affordable CPMs, and massive reach. 

When a senior member of their creative team mentioned the targeted ads he’d been seeing on streaming platforms, the team decided to swing for the fences and give the medium a try. They had experience making product videos for their website and a few YouTube campaigns with a local videography studio who helped them develop half a dozen videos to test. Within days, their first CTV campaign was a massive success.

Creative

The first order of business was developing effective, cost-efficient creative. Their foray into video advertising on YouTube had yielded disappointing results, so they reevaluated their strategy. Instead of a polished video describing every product feature under the sun, they got creative, reminding themselves that all they needed was a video viewers would remember.

"Graphic Designer, Jordan Morrow, wrote a few spoof commercial and presented them to the team. When we heard his ideas we thought: we have to try this! The result? Outrageously silly ads starring the company staff."

They brainstormed dozens of silly scenarios with simple props, enlisted their team members as extras and shot and edited everything they needed with the help of local Bend video production team, Reverb Films.

Why Vibe?

Next, they started looking for a CTV vendor to work with. Direct to publisher deals felt too limiting and frankly too pricey. After shopping around several programmatic CTV ad platforms, they chose to work with Vibe.co which provided them with both the ease of a self-serve platform and the advanced insights of a robust Customer Success team.  

Targeting

The Car Stickers team leveraged Vibe.co’s audiences - some built in-house, some from partners like Oracle and Lotame - to fine-tune their prospecting campaign, which they launched alongside a retargeting campaign. They chose to focus on audiences interested in shopping and lifestyle, while customizing their message for more local audiences.

"We had always marketed ourselves as location agnostic, but saw a huge bump in local sales once we mentioned Oregon in relevant markets."

Testing

The Car Stickers team launched three separate creatives per campaign in order to test both their prospecting and retargeting campaign impact, gather valuable insights and optimize their strategies in real-time. The team realized, for example, that channels like Fail Army had the highest VTRs (View Through Rates), probably because their creatives were in perfect alignment with the content the channel carries, while locally relevant ads yielded the most conversions.

They also noticed ads running on mobile had strong KPIs but were not getting much of their budget, so they created multiple strategies to ensure that they could control the budget being allocated to mobile vs TV. The shift had a major impact on their mobile SEO. Similarly, they separated out large aggregators like Pluto and Samsung from other channels to distribute budget evenly across premium inventory. 

Support and Insights

With help from a Vibe TV Expert, the Car Stickers team was able to install traffic, lead, purchase, and retargeting pixels to monitor results all along their acquisition funnel and majorly increase their mobile SEO. Insights on effective time slots, geos, and creative were also helpful, guiding the team’s optimization efforts week after week.

Running concurrent prospecting and retargeting campaigns, optimized over time, allowed the team to find net new customers, develop actionable audience insights, and capitalize on CTV’s notorious halo effect. Car Stickers reported a 60% bump in social engagement, as satisfied customers followed their lead and tagged them in their own silly videos and photos. Next up? 3 new commercials and seasonal hook customization.

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