Seeing Success with Paid Social Ads

‘I can see clearly now the ads are live’… 🎶

Sorry, that was bad, but our client, Dipple & Conway, are vision and hearing specialists, so we reckon the pun kind of works. Plus, this case study really has us in the mood to sing. These guys pride themselves on providing the best customer care and exceptional levels of service to every single person who walks through their store doors.

The goal

Let’s talk about client pain points. Not enough people knew about their luxury service, their wealth of vision and hearing knowledge, and the excellent Dipple & Conway Vision Care Plan.

We quickly realised that to address these problem areas, we needed to get the Dipple & Conway brand in front of the right audiences, and we needed to do it visually; they’re a fashion retailer, after all, selling beautiful, luxury glasses alongside their exceptional vision and hearing services. They were already with us for digital marketing (we’ve been bringing home top organic traffic results for them with SEO management for 6 years now), but they needed an additional oomph to target more specific audiences for specific services.

The goal was as clear as your eyesight in a brand new pair of Dipple and Conway specs… extend their online reach to people who would be genuinely interested in what they have to offer. We needed a quick, effective, and visual way to encourage more visitors to the site, secure more members for their Vision Care Plan (VCP), amplify their new audiology services, and get more hearing and eye tests booked.

So, which online marketing method would be best suited to achieving this goal? We knew just the thing.

What we did

Paid social ad campaigns. Let’s talk about them.

First of all, what is a paid social ad? It’s a way for businesses to promote their brand, products and/or services on social media, targeted to specific audiences to bring fast results when done well. Simple (in theory), yet incredibly effective. We love a good ad campaign.

There are a few industry-specific terms we’re going to use in this study, so here’s a handy jargon buster before we start:
Ad campaign: the overall ad – contains the ad set and the ad creatives.
Ad set: the ad’s audience – typically made up of the location, age group, gender group, and interests.
Ad creatives: the ad’s visuals that you actually see on your socials.

A quick example:
The campaign – A shop has launched its newest trainers.
The ad set – Men and women in York aged between 21 and 40 with an interest in sports and sportswear.
The ad creative – An Instagram carousel of promotional graphics and videos showcasing athletes in the new trainers.

When creating the campaigns, ad sets and ad creatives for Dipple & Conway, it was first important to ensure the CTAs were relevant. While they do operate three brick-and-mortar retail stores, their website is not e-commerce, meaning users can’t buy glasses there. Their ads need to be clear to avoid leading people to believe they can click through and make a purchase. This is all about ensuring the user experience and journey make sense.

How did we do this? Alex, our social media exec, simplified and focused Dipple’s existing paid social ads. He efficiently shrunk their ad strategy right down to save costs, increase niche focuses, and simplify without compromising on reach. Marketing to everyone will get you nowhere – cast the net too wide and you’ll end up catching fish you don’t want or need. Let’s take a looksie…

Conversions through ads 1,900%

Site visitors through ads 743%

Ad reach 149%

The campaigns

Alex narrowed everything down into two campaigns: 1, the Vision Care Plan campaign. 2, the Audiology campaign. He then reworked their ad set to create a unified ‘audience’ for each campaign, refining their demographic to be better suited to the brand.

How does one of these ‘audiences’ come to be? For Instagram and Facebook, it’s all down to Meta. Meta uses data collection to profile users and put them all into little groups based on their social media habits, engagement, and so on.

Here’s an example: If you like several posts about the theatre, chances are very likely that you’ll be automatically placed in an audience of theatre goers, and will see promotional ads for musicals and plays. These promotions will also be relevant to your location, because Meta collects that data too!

It’s all automatic, done deep in the algorithm, providing us with endless audiences to choose from when creating targeted ad campaigns.

By doing this for Dipple & Conway, we could ensure that these ads were getting in front of exactly the right people. Paid social ads are pretty cool like that: you can decide who sees them, increasing the chance of genuine interest, engagement and, ultimately, the conversions you want. There’s no point putting an ad for tennis dresses in front of a group of people who have never expressed interest in tennis through their social activity and engagement behaviour!

Here’s a hot tip from Alex: it’s smart to have a strong, consistent campaign always running, paired with a campaign alongside it that can be changed freely that runs on a more trial and error basis. Why? Because it provides two very interesting and useful datasets. It gives you (or us) the power to track what people like and what they react best to, whilst being able to rely on the consistency of campaign A. This makes future campaigns easier to create in line with what the audience wants!

For Dipple & Conway, the Vision Care Plan campaign is the star, always ticking over and only changing if the client says so. Because this campaign never changes, we can get reliable results from it to track the behaviour of those interested in the VCP. The client’s main goal was to increase the number of sign-ups to this plan, so we put a lot of work into pushing this campaign, building its momentum, and keeping it in people’s sights.

The audiology campaign is our evolving campaign. This one is not about sales; it’s all about sharing knowledge and encouraging free hearing test sign-ups. We switch this one up whenever the website has new audiology-based blog posts or articles to share, or if the client would like more hearing tests booked. Tracking the engagement data from this campaign is interesting, because it allows us to see what works and what doesn’t each month whenever we change elements. This helps with future refining. Lovely stuff!

Learning from real data is proven to get better results, rather than just taking a stab in the dark – marketing shouldn’t be done on instinct, else you may as well just put all your money in a slot machine.

The outcome

Want to see some numbers? We’re not all talk when we mention real data and results. Let us share with you some figures from tracking our paid social ads year-on-year for Dipple & Conway.

‘Reach’ is the number of users that see a piece of content (in this case, an ad creative). The Vision Care Plan ad had a reach of 20,841 users in one month in 2023, which grew to 51,973 users in that same month in 2024. That’s a 149% change for the percentage fans.

Finally, in 2023, ads brought 1,560 visitors to the website via click-throughs. In 2024, once the campaigns were refined, that increased to 13,143 visitors. A 743% jump, folks!

We couldn’t be more proud of these results, and neither can the client! The proof? Dipple & Conway doubled their paid social ads budget because they could see how much their initial investment was paying off in bookings and reach. Not only this, but they also increased the size of their digital marketing retainer with exec Ellie, trusting that our digital marketing processes work and bring the results they’re looking for.

Think paid social ads might be a marketing route you’d like to walk down? Give us a call on 01603 859007 and let’s talk it through and see if your brand could benefit.