Optimizing for Purchases and App Installs Leads to 69% Decrease in CPA for Woodspoon

Overview

WoodSpoon is a startup in the food delivery space. Based in New York, they are pioneers in offering unique international cuisines homemade by local chefs delivered straight to your door. With an app and website, WoodSpoon came to us looking for Google and Facebook PPC services. 

Goal

Initial conversations led to the collective understanding that our priority across campaigns was to:

• Optimize for app installs 
• Optimize for purchases (orders)
  

Challenges

1. Messaging 
   

People looking to have food delivered to their door are already familiar with and have the giants downloaded to their mobile devices: Uber Eats, Grubhub, Seamless and Postmates to name a few. How could we educate new users on the unique selling points of WoodSpoon? What would convince a potential new user to place an order, let alone download the app? 

2. Creatives 
   

What sells food is pictures of food. But with WoodSpoon’s core proposition being food cooked locally by chefs, that limited access to photography since the chef’s menu could change weekly depending on their availability and offerings. We needed to find a way to leverage the assets they had while bringing WoodSpoon’s branding and core value proposition to the forefront of their ads.  

Strategy 

Before we could develop messaging and performance creative solutions, we needed an overall campaign structure. Optimizing for app installs and orders we began building our strategy. 

Through conversations with the client and our competitor analysis, we leveraged two main interest groups: ethnic cuisines and homemade food, allowing us to focus on the exotic options and homemade food WoodSpoon offers compared to the standard food delivery apps. What follows is a breakdown of the reasoning behind these two strategical decisions: how we leveraged messaging and creatives, and the problems we encountered and improvements we made throughout the process. ‍

Ethnic Cuisine ‍

Initial Reasoning 

Based on conversations with the client and our own research in the homemade food delivery app space, many immigrants, whether you’re an ex-pat from Spain or an Israeli living in New York, have a difficult time locating restaurants that offer authentic dishes native to their home countries. The biggest draw for WoodSpoon is that many of the chefs on the app are cooking and delivering authentic, international dishes straight to your door. 

Whether you’re looking for the sabich you used to get on the street in Tel Aviv or the vegetable paella you had every week in Valencia, searching high and low for a restaurant that can deliver a similar taste, texture, smell, experience and feeling will only be met with disappointment in most places you go. WoodSpoon offers hope in that they offer the hard-to-find cuisines and dishes you can’t find anywhere else: Creole, Indian, Italian, Chinese, Thai, Israeli, you name it, WoodSpoon chefs probably offer it. Highlighting this key affordance became the foundation for one of our campaigns.  ‍

Messaging + Creatives‍

To get the campaigns up and running, we leveraged ad copy to communicate the variety of unique options available on WoodSpoon.

But to boost installs, we needed to find a way to improve the clarity of our messaging and creatives. 

Going back to our initial problem with photography: the chefs cook a variety of dishes based on their weekly availability which means that if their dishes run out, they are no longer available to order. If an ad for sabich straight from the streets of Tel Aviv is running and an Israeli downloads WoodSpoon excited to finally order the sabich they’ve been craving from home, disappointment is inevitable if it’s not available exactly when they want to order it. 

As a solution to this problem, and to improve the overall ethnic cuisine messaging, we introduced the Chef Hours campaign. We identified eight chefs with the most popular and available dishes on WoodSpoon and ran catalog and carousel ads highlighting their culinary background, cooking style and some of the popular (and available) dishes on their menu. ‍

Homemade Food‍

Initial Reasoning‍

Eating homemade food is widely considered and known to be a healthier alternative to restaurant food: you know, more or less, that the ingredients are wholesome, fresh and made in small batches with care and consideration in mind. Homemade food just tastes different. 

But to have homemade food requires you to either make it yourself from scratch or use a service like Hello Fresh or Blue Apron. For people looking for minimal time-spent cooking and cleaning up a dirty kitchen, having homemade food becomes almost impossible. WoodSpoon solves the time and cleanliness issue, which is the message we decided to highlight in creatives.‍

Messaging + Creatives‍

With homemade food campaigns performing reasonably well, we decided to test a subgroup: working moms. Mom’s want their kids to have healthy, nutritious homemade food but may not always have time to cook that for them. There’s nothing wrong with ordering pizza or take-out here and there, but for moms that really lack the time and energy to prepare dinner every night on a weekly basis, WoodSpoon offers a solution. Homemade, nutritious food delivered straight to your door - no cooking or cleaning necessary. 

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Results

Since we took over the account, we’ve seen an overall decrease in CPI (cost per install) by 69%. We initially structured campaigns to optimize for app installs and registrations, qualifying the audience. We’ve now shifted towards pushing volume across Facebook and Google, with more budget directed towards Google to increase installs. 

We’re currently developing additional performance creatives to test in our two main interest groups (ethnic cuisines and homemade food): some of our upcoming plans involve targeting traveling foodies, young parents and rolling out interactive and testimonial ads. 

KPIs to Date

• 69% decrease in CPI
• 430,000 impressions
• 153,000 reach
• 18 creatives delivered