The Solution
Syncing audience and segmentation data automatically to Facebook
With manual uploads happening every two weeks, the audience and segmentation data in Facebook Ads wasn’t as up-to-date as it could be. This left the Growth team without the data they needed to run their campaigns. All their user data, however, was already in BigQuery for analytics in Looker.
When Bleach London started using Census, they set audience and segmentation data to sync automatically from BigQuery to Facebook. Now, instead of waiting up to two weeks for new data, Facebook receives the data every 15 minutes — and more frequently when there’s a change.
“For example, if I want us to send an email campaign to people that bought six months ago to do a win-back campaign, we can send the same audience to our email tool. We can create that segment in Looker, based on our source of truth data, and then we can send it directly to all performance channels and all email.”
Michael Lorenzos, Head of eCommerce Growth
Moving segmentation to a single source of truth
Bleach London saw some problems with relying on their email provider to create segments: the segmentation was based on only data from the email system, not the robust, cross-channel data that lived in their data warehouse. With Census keeping data synced across applications, they established their data warehouse as the single source of truth. When it comes to segmentation, they can now trust that segments are built using all the relevant data.
Migrating to a new email provider
Although Census worked just fine with Bleach London’s existing email provider, they were ready to move to a different email marketing tool. The fact that Census already supported Klaviyo as a destination gave the team peace of mind. Since they’d already established the data warehouse as their single source of truth for segmentation, migration was straightforward. When it came time to migrate, Census integrated seamlessly.
The Outcomes
More relevant product recommendations
By looking at customer purchase data and segmenting their audience, Bleach London is able to provide product recommendations and promotions that are more relevant. One way that their Growth team does that is by targeting campaigns based on the type of hair color a customer has purchased in the past, for example, by not sending promotions for vibrant pink hair colors to blond-only purchasers.
“We knew that by sending to this segment in particular, we are increasing our open rates. We’re increasing our conversion rates. It’s because the segmentation happens on something that feels super intuitive, like if we’re sending an email campaign about pink, it’s not going to go to blond-only customers, for example.”
Michael Lorenzos, Head of Ecommerce Growth
Running win-back campaigns across Facebook and email
When Bleach London runs a win-back campaign, they want their message to reach its audience everywhere. They do this by aligning audience segments across channels — using the same audience data in email marketing as they use for Facebook Ads. That’s easier for them to do now that segment and audience data lives in a single place (their data warehouse) and syncs automatically to marketing tools.
Identifying more seed audiences for lookalike audience testing
Identifying an audience of “lookalikes” (LAL) lets Bleach London market to new customers who resemble their existing audience, expanding their reach. With better data collected from more sources, and synced to their other marketing tools, it’s easier than ever. They’re using that data with Facebook’s campaign budget optimization to scale audience testing, slicing up the customer list in new ways to create and test LALs from customer seed audiences.
Focusing on campaign content, not data requests
With access to self-serve data, marketers can spend their time coming up with novel ways to reach their audience and creating campaigns. With Census, data is more accessible to their team than before – meaning they can self-serve rather than coordinating with a data engineer to get the data they need. Anyone with basic SQL knowledge can create a new model in Census, so there’s no lag time when the Growth team wants to look at new data or try a new segmentation idea.
“We have two Shopify instances— a US and a UK store. We can play around with lookalikes in the US vs. lookalikes in the UK. We can observe different segment behavior between the two and adjust accordingly.”
Michael Lorenzos, Head of eCommerce Growth
Looking ahead
With better data access and quick data syncing, Bleach London is looking ahead to even more possibilities. Their Head of Growth, Michael Lorenzos, plans to run new, creative segmentation experiments. As he says, “The possibilities for segment creation are endless.”
Learn more about Michael Lorenzos by following his Substack on marketing.
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