Bamboo worked closely with the Rover team to implement a scalable paid social acquisition strategy and leverage a technology partner, Smartly.io, to help automate and optimize campaigns. The key objectives were to determine which paid social channels and ad placements performed best for Rover, uncover and target key markets of highest quality, and improve user acquisition costs and efficiencies across Facebook and Instagram.

Bamboo initially implemented campaigns on Facebook and Instagram with a mission to determine the best channels, placements, devices, and audiences. Although the Bamboo team had several assumptions about who the highest value users might be (dog-less dog-lovers), and where to best reach them (alone at the dog park), the team approached this task with an open mind and prepared to iterate quickly.

Over the first month, the team garnered insights from lookalike audiences and saw success in targeting specific user groups based on related behavior. They were able to isolate behaviors by device and operating systems, targeting only the most cost-effective and highest quality dog lovers. Bamboo utilized optimization to serve more high-performing creative–determining which ads were best. Through testing and iterating creative, costs went down and conversions went up. 

Smartly.io helped the Bamboo team balance the cost and value through scaling Rover’s campaigns with optimization triggers. Leaning on Smartly.io to determine which audiences and creatives were performing best, the team could then adjust accordingly. The Predictive Budget Allocation tool was leveraged to better distribute budget across campaigns split out by placement. This trigger helped quickly determine which campaigns were providing the most value and immediately implement change to optimize for those ad sets.

Smartly.io’s stop-loss optimization also enabled the team to easily pause ads that were underperforming by automatically stopping ads that are not performing at an acceptable level, based on a single defined metric. Bamboo used stop-loss automation to pause underperforming ads when the CPA reached a certain threshold, ensuring that only the highest performing ads were serving.

The Bamboo team was able to scale Rover’s sitter acquisition program on Facebook and Instagram and greatly improve costs. By allocating resources to only top performing ads, Rover was able to:

• Increase completed sitter registrations 200%, introducing more qualified pet care providers to the most trusted app for pet sitting and dog walking 
• Decrease overall Cost per Acquisition 64%