How Finn profitably scaled Meta ad spend by 200% YoY with AI Audiences

Finn is a modern pet wellness company that provides canine companions with everything they need to live their healthiest, happiest lives. Their diverse line of pet wellness products has received praise from major publications, such as Business Insider and Forbes.

With numerous veterinarian endorsements, Finn quickly built up its Amazon presence, driving 60% of its sales from the eCommerce giant alone. However, after learning shoppers who purchased from its DTC site had significantly higher AOV than other channels, Finn decided to direct new audiences there using its Meta ads. 

While its campaigns saw strong initial traction, iOS 14.5 updates severely impacted Meta's targeting and attribution capabilities. Seemingly overnight, Finn lost its capability to:

• Reliably target high-intent audiences with its ads
• Determine which ads were driving conversions
• Efficiently scale their Meta ad spend without diminishing returns

"As Meta's targeting and attribution capabilities decayed, Proxima helped us drive value by iterating on audiences, and the results have been simply phenomenal." – Randall Stainton, President of Finn

In an effort to regain the traction their ads once had, Finn diversified its audiences via broad, interests, and pixel lookalike targeting. While these efforts bore fruit, Finn’s ad performance still paled in comparison to pre-iOS-14. 

To bring its Meta ads strategy back on track, Finn looked to implement two potent strategies:

1. Invest in continuous creative iteration: Under Broad and ASC targeting, creative iteration was one of Finn’s strongest levers for growth. However, this was an expensive and time-consuming strategy that would require Finn’s team to generate and sift through endless creative reports.

2. Bolster the quality and depth of its audiences: Knowing Meta’s in-platform targeting wouldn’t be sufficient to scale spend profitably, Finn looked to expand the reach and depth of its audiences. This would be a tall order to handle internally as this method requires access to a plethora of first-party data.
    

While searching for a solution to Finn’s dilemma, its President, Randall Stainton, discovered Proxima. After a short 15-minute demo, he knew our vast universe of first-party shopper data and AI Audiences were a perfect fit.

Finn leveraged Proxima's database of 65M+ shopper personas to significantly enhance the targeting capabilities of its Meta ads.

Within 24 hours of onboarding, the Proxima team generated several AI Audiences for Finn to target. It quickly became clear that CPA for Proxima AI Audiences was significantly lower than Finn’s control group, even with Proxima's service fee. As such, Finn opted to run the majority of their campaigns directly to AI Audiences while doubling their ad spend. 

The icing on the cake? Because Proxima's audiences continuously update (based on how and where shoppers spend their money), Finn continues to diversify its campaigns and increase spend capacity before seeing attrition. 

Finn also began exploring Proxima's Intelligence offerings. Using Proxima's Tactical Benchmarks, the team determines whether changes in ad performance are company- or market-related. This improved clarity not only helps Finn optimize campaigns but also helps contextualize performance to shareholders. 

With its audience targeting on autopilot, the Finn team’s bandwidth for creative iteration has grown exponentially. Today, they continue to leverage both audiences and creative iteration to improve ad performance as they scale, a task that wouldn’t have been replicable without Proxima.  

In an era where paid ads on Meta were performing at an all-time low, Finn doubled Meta ad spend YoY without increasing CPA thanks to Proxima. 

Here's a snapshot of the key metrics Finn has seen since the partnership began:

• 200% YoY increase in Meta ad spend
• <1% YoY increase in CPA
• 13% YoY increase in ROAS

With its Meta ads strategy on autopilot, Finn has begun implementing Proxima's technology into its TikTok ads as well. With Proxima’s AI Audiences already showing strong performance, Finn is eager to scale its TikTok ad spend further without efficiency loss.