HOW TO SELL 30,000 BURGERS WITH FACEBOOK ADS

CASE STUDY
BANG BANG BURGERS
"Through successful Facebook
campaigns and targeting
strategies, we were able to
consistently fill the restaurant
with new customers for
months."
There we were. In the opening phase with our backs against the wall.
We couldn't meet our original schedule and exceeded our projected
start-up costs.... No wonder that on opening day, our resources were
all but depleted, and the restaurant was more like a Minimum Viable
Product than a store with set procedures and structure.

With 50 customers per day, we could cover our costs. But how do we
get new customers to stop by our store? Through newspaper articles,
organic social media, and Mouth To Mouth, we were able to get some
traction in the first few weeks. However, we lacked a predictable
reproducible marketing channel that would bring in new customers on
a consistent basis to fill the store.

Since the local search volume for "burger" in Gelsenkirchen is

relatively limited, it quickly became clear that we would not win the
war with Google Adwords and Co. So we went live with our first
Facebook ad in January 2015.

Through targeting strategies and with the help of Facebook Ads, we

were able to generate a constant stream of new customers within a
very short time. This made our startup a mega success, selling over
30,000 burgers in the first 12 months.

We were and still are booked out almost every weekend. With the reach
of our fan page, we were able to outpace many other burger
restaurants in the Ruhr area relatively quickly, even though we still
don't have a website because a.) I was lazy and b.) we can actually
afford it.
 On January 19, 2015, we launched our first Facebook
ad - and it brought us immediate success: At 5 p.m.
sharp - when we opened - a customer came into the
restaurant. When I asked him if he wanted to see the
menu, he said: "No, I don't! I want the exact burger
you posted on Facebook today." Boom - so that's
how quickly you can see a result!
Our very first Facebook ad

However, on our Facebook Page, we hadn't

organically posted a burger at all - The customer
had seen the exact Page Post Engagement Ad we
had launched that same day. Now if that's not a
good start.

Now the question remains, what did the ad look

like and how did we create it?

From an organic post from 04.01.2014 we created a so-

called Page Post Engagement Ad on 19.01.2014. An ad
in the newsfeed that - except for the "Sponsored"
marking - looks like a normal post.

Sure, the burger name and post is funny. Still, it

doesn't look like anything special at first glance.
However, the devil is in the details.
It's actually quite simple: do what people

DESIGN OF THE AD
TARGETING &
think is cool.
But before you start spending money, you
should take a close look at your potential
target group: What do people love about
burger stores ? Which Facebook posts work
best for other burger restaurants? Which
ad format catches the eye of people
interested in burgers?
The target audience plays an important
role, because no one wants to put their
money into a campaign that shows no
results because no one cares. Luckily, to
help, there are a variety of ways to find
out what your potential audience is and
what they are interested in:

Fanpage Karma analyzes fanpages

Quintly compares fanpages
Buzzsumo analyzes industries
Facebook Ads Gallery by AdEspresso
shows already
successfully run Facebook Ads from your
industry

Not only is the target audience important

for a good ad, but also the design. Again,
we are spoiled for choice from many
options: Do we use photos of our store, the
interior, a store filled with customers, do
we introduce the team or do we rather use
a video or a static creative? After a bit of
market research, however, it quickly
became apparent that simple photo posts
with close-ups of the burgers had above-
average interaction and sharing rates
across all burger restaurants.

With that, the decision was made and we

launched. In essence, we haven't done
anything else until today.
Make a post that addresses two target groups.
True to the motto "double is better", we went one better. We not
only focused on one target group, the people in Gelsenkirchen, but
also addressed another target group at the same time. FC Schalke
04 is not only well known in Gelsenkirchen, it is a religion. If our ad
also picks up Schalke fans, we kill two birds with stone and the ad
spreads virally.

But even when it comes to FC Schalke 04, you have to stand out
from the crowd and let your creativity run wild, because Schalke
pizza is of course already available on every corner. So we thought
again around the corner. Dem Ernst Kuzorra his wife their stadium is
a popular pun with the blue and should work quite well. So why not
create a burger with that name?

With this line of thinking, we were able to take full advantage of the
current possibilities of Facebook targeting:
TARGETING
THE

We decided to target only the intersection of the two target groups,

i.e. the 41,000 people in the restaurant's catchment area who are
also Schalke fans. At 970,000, targeting all people who live in
Gelsenkirchen would have been too general and thus would probably
not have produced the desired result for this specific ad. The same
applies to the 2.5 million people interested in FC Schalke 04.
To make sure that we really reach the real Schalke fans who are
very likely to know the Ernst Kuzorra running gag, we included the
following interests:

FC Schalke 04 Fan Community

Royal Blue Planet
FC Schalke 04 II
Knappenschmiede
Rudi Assauer
The intersection of both was the perfect target group for our ad.
The classic problem in push marketing is wastage. The big advantage
of Facebook Ads, compared to many other marketing channels, is the
measurability of wastage.
If you work with split tests from the beginning, you will have first
figures after a short time and little budget expenditure and can react
directly to wastage.
Since ad placement can make a big difference in click-through rates,
we split our campaign from the start as follows:

SPLIT TESTING &

PLACEMENT
Ads on the right side of the page receive much less attention on
Facebook. They are classic disruptors that are displayed to the user
while he is actually doing something else. The interaction rate here
is usually very low. In contrast, an ad in the newsfeed is not even
perceived as such by many users.

However, since our campaign goal was interaction, we decided to

leave out the right-hand side and focus only on the newsfeed. We
split our audience into desktop newsfeed and mobile newsfeed and
additionally divided them by interests.
The campaign structure was as follows:

Instead of starting with a

single ad and a €20 daily
budget, we created ten
different ad groups, each with
a €2 daily budget. Each of
these ad groups contained
only one ad with the same
Ernst Kuzorra post. From the
second day, we started to
turn off the poor performing
ads and scale up the good
performing ads.
 SCALING UP VS
SCALING OUT
There are two approaches to the so-called scaling of
Facebook ads:

Scaling Up: Scaling up is the process of increasing the

budget of existing ads so that they reach everyone in the
target audience faster.

Scaling Out: Scaling Out is the process of finding a new

target group for a proven ad. You usually create new
campaigns with the same ad, but new target groups.

In our first Facebook Ads campaign, we limited ourselves to

scaling up, but didn't spend more than 20€ per day in total.
Within the ad groups, however, we adjusted the budget daily
based on performance. For ad groups that were performing
well, the budget was increased. For poorly performing ads,
the budget was lowered or the ad group was turned off to
minimize wastage.
True to the principle of "never change a winning
team", we kept the basic principle of our first
campaign throughout the months.

At the beginning of each month, we posted a monthly

burger. After a few days we made the organic post
the ad with a daily budget of about 10-20€. This way
we were able to create a constant flow of customers.
We hijacked a specific target group each time. Since
each monthly burger had reference to a specific
topic, the target group differed in terms of interests.
For the Greek burger, we targeted Greek interests
while for the Spanish burger, we targeted Spaniards
in the area.

Over time, our ads got better and better. We

optimized our processes - and now shot extra photos
in Facebook's preferred sizes.

However, a few basic settings in our Facebook

campaigns always remained the same:

We always excluded the right side.

We always split by mobile vs desktop newsfeed and
interests.
We excluded fans of our own page from the ad to
reach only new customers.
• We chose daily budgets instead of runtime budget.
• We didn't choose a manual CPC, instead we let
Facebook optimize the campaign for interactions.

The goal of the ads was to generate interactions

from new customers. We visibly noticed that these
customers then also came to the restaurant
relatively quickly: "We saw your monthly burger on
Facebook".

After some time, we were able to filter out from our

previous ads that interactions on the mobile
newsfeed were always more favorable than on the
desktop. Therefore, we decided to only run ads for
the mobile newsfeed in order to achieve our set goal
with our invested money.

Since no marketing channel was as cost effective and

controllable, we were able to bring other marketing
channels down to a minimum relatively quickly.
In August, however, we wanted to do it again....

THE DR. SCHEPPERMANN AD

The monthly Dr. Scheppermann was to break all records.
The ads performed so well in the first few days that we decided to
significantly increase our budget. Over a period of two months, we
spent a total of €2,181 on this one burger - more than on all
previous campaigns combined.

On August 5, 2015, we achieved our absolute reach record with the

Burger - and at a very manageable cost. We reached 42,688 people
for a daily spend of €110.93. That corresponds to a CPM of €2.60.
This doesn't even include the organic reach we get, for example,
from one person sharing the ad.
THE OPTIMAL AD
Successful Facebook Ads campaigns are a combination of a good ad
and good targeting. Since we wanted to place the ad only on the
mobile newsfeed, we already optimized the post for mobile viewing
in advance:

We did a few things differently to create the best ad for us. The
core differences from our previous ads were:

1) We put several hours of work into the main photo. We

deliberately avoided the help of Photoshop and co and had the
photo created in-store with a photographer and our team from the
kitchen.

In contrast to our first photos, we really limited ourselves to the

essentials: We photographed the burger without garnishes and as
large and detailed as possible. The only thing that had to be
adjusted afterwards were the edges of the photo, so that the
burger could be seen optimally in the display.

2) For the side dishes and other dishes in the monthly special, we
used the additional image previews in the Gallery Post. Again, we
chose the images and order deliberately, rather than randomly.
We optimized each image to invite the viewer to keep clicking.

3) The last image in the post shows the full range of the month's
program and still has text that is hard to read on mobile. The +7
will also have invited viewers to click.

4) Since we leave nothing to chance, it is intentional that the ad

text stops right at the burger side dishes.
 TARGETING VIA
SCALING OUT
Again, we followed the same approach as our other
campaigns: we again worked with the scaling out principle.
All seven different campaigns contained the same article, but
were played out to very different target groups:

Our fan page had now grown to 10,000 fans. Now we took it
upon ourselves to not only reach new customers with
different target groups in the campaigns, but also to run a
campaign for the first time that would only appeal to our
own fans.
 DAY
On day one, our fans clicked on the ad with a CTR (click-
through rate all) of 14.8%. Now we had a benchmark to
measure the other campaigns against:
Fb Ad Campaign Performance Day 1.
Unlike this campaign, all the others were targeted at new
customers.

On the first day, we paid an average of 2 cents per click and

achieved a CTR of 12%-13% on new customers - almost as
good metrics as our own fans.
If the values of a campaign had deviated greatly from the
benchmark, we would have stopped it immediately. However,
this was not the case on the first day - a sign that targeting
was not that bad. Now we started scaling up.

From day 2, we looked at the previous

day's performance every morning.
At the campaign level, everything looked

DAY good so far after day 1. All CTRs were

above 12% on average.

However, at the ad group level, we saw

significantly higher differences in
performance.
SCALING UP

While some audiences responded to the ad

with up to 24% CTR, people in the
"Johann Lafer Grand Chef Relais
Châteaux" audience (in Gelsenkirchen and
the surrounding area) clicked only 4%.
The "Kochprofis" fans in our catchment
area also clicked relatively poorly in
proportion. So we switched off these and
all other ad groups with a CTR worse than
7%.
For all ad groups that were left after
that, we doubled the daily budget.
We continued this process daily for all
campaigns.
The Fans campaign had by far the

DAY
smallest audience size with
10,000 people.

After just three days, the

frequency was 1.77.

Each person had already seen the

ad an average of 1.77 times.
Additionally, many of the fans had
also already seen the post
organically in their Timeline. So
we assumed that each of our fans
must have seen the post about
twice.

The likelihood of anyone liking it

now was vanishingly small. So it's
no wonder that the ad
performance dropped quickly.

By the third day, the campaign

directed at our fans was no longer
the best. The CTR was only in the
midfield and the CPC was at the
lower end at 4 cents:

In theory, we could have kept the

campaign running based on the
day's performance, however, we
decided not to overdose our own
fans with our ads and to take it
down a notch so they wouldn't get
annoyed. Thus, we stopped the
campaign on
August 4.
10 D A Y S "NEVER CHANGE A RUNNING SYSTEM"

For the next 10 days, we didn't change

anything in our process. We turned off
ad groups with a CTR below 7% - while
keeping an eye on frequency.
So slowly the wheat was separated from
the chaff, because on day 10 the
celebrity chefs campaign didn't make it
over the hill anymore.
However, since the other numbers had
now also dropped significantly, we
relaxed our shutdown rule and only
stopped the ad groups with a CTR of less
than 6%.

"BURGER FANS UNITED!"

After 20 days, only the Lookalike
campaign and the Fans of Other Burger
Restaurants campaign were left.
20
DAYS

28 D A Y S On day 28, the Competition campaign

had also passed its zenith. The Lookalike
campaign clearly emerged as the winner
and thus won the marathon. Therefore,
we let it run for another 30 days with a
daily budget of 10€.
 60
DAYS
By day 60, the Lookalike Audience was able to maintain a CTR of
over 6% every day. One engagement with the ad cost us on
average 0,059€.

On September 29th, the cost per engagement rose again to 8

cents. Since we had new posts and ads running in the meantime,
which gave a more pleasing picture due to more favorable
interactions, and the new monthly burger was already around the
corner, we also turned off the last campaign of the Dr.
Scheppermann burger.

LEARNINGS FROM
SEVEN CAMPAIGNS
Since all seven campaigns advertised
the same ad, it was possible to
compare the data and derive
interesting learnings:

The Usain Bolt among Facebook's

targeting options is its own fans.
However, the performance of fan
campaigns flattens out very quickly
because audience size is inherently
limited.

Over a medium period of time,

targeting with interests was more
successful. The advantage of interest
targeting is that the performance is
completely independent of the current
fan base. However, with the right
targeting, you can get very close to the
performance of fan campaigns.
In the long run, the Lookalike Audience
outperformed the other ads. But again,
you depend on the number of fans. We
had the luxury of being able to draw on
a large fanbase as a database for the
Lookalike Audience.
 KEY LEAR
NINGS
Here's the summary in a handy checklist format:

Make a cool, modern and creative post that appeals to two

audiences.
Create a page post engagement ad from the organic post.
Take a good look at the market before you put money into
it.
Make the ad as click-worthy as possible. A single photo can
make all the difference.
Use the intersection of both target groups when targeting.
Disable the right side if you want to generate interactions.
Split directly by mobile vs desktop.
Start with 1-5 € daily budget per ad group.
Use your own fans as ad performance benchmark.
Sort out the poor performing ad groups daily.
Scale up the good performing ads.
In the short term, own fans perform best, in the medium
term mostly interests and in the long term lookalike
audiences.