The Results
+29%
Margin return for every £1 spent
+10%
Non-brand ROAS
-32%
CPA
The Brief
MuscleFood an eCommerce food retailer that sells high-protein food and lean meats. The brand appointed Target in early 2024 to lead on paid media in the UK & Ireland ahead of ambitious YoY growth targets. Target’s remit was to unlock scale at an agreed level of efficiency. In reality this meant our agency objectives were to maximise contribution margin and improve ROAS, which would in turn help MuscleFood to reach its business goal of growing EBITDA.
Our Response
Following the creation of our first 30/60/90 roadmap, Target prioritised the implementation of stronger conversion tracking and server side tagging, as historically the brand had been relying on GA4 imports into Google Ads. This had been reducing the volume and quality of conversion data that campaigns had been able to optimise against. Following deeper conversations with the MuscleFood performance marketing team, the next action for Target was a full restructure of Google Ads. This saw us move away from the legacy granular approach that we had inherited, to a more consolidated structure that leaned into broad match with smart bidding, also using final keyword URLs to enhance relevancy. In order to maximise profitability, Target worked with the MuscleFood trading team to identify high contribution SKUs, using a SPAG approach (pMax Single Product Asset Groups) in order to maximise the visibility of these high contribution SKUs in Shopping placements. Target are strong believers that best practice is average and this rang true with MuscleFood on Meta Ads. Testing revealed that we needed to buck the best practice trend, with ‘Ugly Ads’ designed with low-fi editing techniques performing incredibly strongly on Meta. Our ASC campaign focusing on high contribution SKUs continued to increase in spend at a sustained ROAS. Target also built out a suite of new daily, weekly and monthly reporting tools including an automated contribution vs. spend tracker and an automated Meta Ads creative reporting tool that allowed stakeholders to more easily analyse performance and trend metrics such as thumb stop, hold rate, ROAS and spend against one another for each creative asset in the account.
The Results
Since deploying our new efficiency-centred approach the business has seen big improvements in profitability - supported also by margin innovation activities by the brand. EBITDA & Contribution are both up, with margin return for every £1 spent increasing by +29% over the past 6 months vs. the 6 months prior. For the first time, MuscleFood has scaled a true non-brand pMax campaign - ensuring that we’re delivering true new customers and incremental new orders. This alongside the account restructure has delivered improved channel metrics - with non-brand ROAS improving by +10% and CPA falling -32% for the last 6 months vs. previous 6 months. Target has also helped MuscleFood to make better use of its marketing data and insights with our custom reporting tools being adopted by marketing, trading and members of the C-Suite to help bring context to performance and drive more informed decision making.
The Next Steps
Next up for MuscleFood, Target will be rolling out Demand Gen campaigns to help drive more upper-middle funnel traffic on Google; as well as a series of lift and creative tests on Meta. We’re also excited to announce that our SEO team has just won the SEO contract for MuscleFood to drive organic search growth - focusing on high contribution SKUs and categories for optimisation first, of course! Stay tuned.
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