Rise Marketing Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost with SparkToro

Abstract

Rise Marketing Group is a performance advertising agency. Led by a former Googler, the team focuses on digital advertising and SEO, as well as web development and email marketing. Always on the lookout for new data-driven opportunities to hone their competitive edge, they started using SparkToro for better targeting in Meta advertising. They improved CAC by 50% Here’s how they did it.

Rise applied SparkToro’s audience research insights to better understand their clients’ audiences and their topics of interest online (websites they visited, social accounts they followed, YouTube channels they subscribed-to, etc.). Very quickly, they saw the potential for digital advertising outside of mainstream opportunities.

Cutting CAC in Half

The Rise Marketing team typically runs ads on Google, Meta, Microsoft, and LinkedIn on behalf of their clients. Recently, they worked with a leading publisher to gain more subscriptions — by way of SparkToro’s insights leveraged in digital ads.

First, they used SparkToro to get insights and understand what websites a given cohort visits, which social accounts they follow, what keywords they use or search for, and detailed demographic data. Then they built a unique audience that ended up becoming their best performing segment. While Meta already offers some canned persona targeting and lookalike audiences, the SparkToro insights enabled them to build vastly superior targeting capabilities.

They applied these same principles to their audiences’ most subscribed-to YouTube channels (that’s right, found in SparkToro!) into the audience signals of Google’s Performance Max ad options.

This SparkToro data enabled them to run experiments and test ad different segments based on High Affinity Sites, Social Accounts they follow, and detailed demographic information.

Experimenting with “Hidden Gem" Social Accounts — for instance, people who followed The Wilson Center on social media — was key to detecting a high-intent segment that would have been invisible without SparkToro.

Hidden Gems are social accounts that are lesser-known, but have high affinity-to-follower-size ratios among visitors to the client’s website. Creating a custom audience based on this “niche” interest, enabled a reduction in Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) of 50%, compared to a Meta 1% lookalike segment over the most loyal subscribers.

As the team has explored other audiences, they’ve begun sharing insights with their clients. Moving forward, with a proven unique segment on Meta, they plan on building an audience signal for Google Performance Max based on detailed demographics, keywords their audience uses, websites they visit, YouTube channels they follow, and Hidden Gem insights from SparkToro.

SparkToro’s audience data, applied to ad channels and ad targeting options, can yield dramatic CAC savings and improved advertising results (engagement, CTR, and conversion rates).