Strong: How I Scaled Their Facebook Ad Account From $0 Spent To Profitably Spending $3,500/Day — Generating Well Over $170,000 In Subscription Revenue In Less Than One Year
What the heck is Strong?
Strong is a super popular workout tracking app with over 3 million users worldwide (and counting). They’ve been featured by CNBC, The Verge, Lifehacker and even by Apple in the iOS app store.
The goal?
When I met with the co-owner of Strong, he told me they were only running Apple Search Ads and Google Ads.
Their Google Ads had 0 conversions and their Apple Search Ads got around 3,249 downloads per month at $1.22 per download.
That said, his goal for me was simple: get as many app installs as I can using Facebook ads— preferably around $1.22 per download.
Well, it’s safe to say I did that— and more. Read on for the results.
The results.
After building out his whole Facebook ads account from scratch, I was raking in over 95,000 downloads a month at an average of $0.42 per download…
That’s 2,950% more downloads per month than his Apple Search Ads— while paying 65.6% less per install. And with a positive ROAS too— month after month.
And did I mention we didn’t have a designer onboard? I created ALL the ad copy and the ad creatives myself.
(Percentages shown are in comparison with previous months stats)
But it doesn’t stop there.
I always looks for way to make my clients more money.
So when they offered a New Years sale, I suggested running retargeting campaigns to boost subscriptions. He agreed and gave me a $1,000 budget.
The result?
$10,520.30 in subscription revenue generated from $939.76 in ad spend. In other words, he 11x’ed his money.
At the end of this campaign, my client said to me: “Wow, are these numbers real? Should we have spent more?”
(Answer: yes, we should have.)
Not including Android purchases, I generated my client over $170,000 in subscription revenue in less than one year.
How I did it.
Strong is actually a really good app. Maybe even the best workout tracker i’ve tried.
But let’s be honest: having a really good app doesn’t cut it these days. There’s hundreds of other fitness trackers out there. And good ones too.
In a saturated market like this, knowing your product’s USP and being able to tell people WHY your product kick’s everyone else’s ass is key. And that leads me to this…
I researched the hell out of Strong, my target market and my competitors.
By using Strong, using our competitor’s apps and reading THOUSANDS of reviews, comments and articles… I probably knew my target market better than they knew themselves.
I knew what people loved about fitness trackers.
I knew what they hated about them.
And I knew what they actually wanted a fitness tracker for.
When you know your customer this intimately… that’s how you can convince them to do what you want them to do.
(Like this one with over 42,000 likes and thousands of comments!)
In short, to create campaigns that convert, research is king. Anyone who disagrees can fight me.
But research alone can only take you so far.
After that, it pays to inject some creativity and outside-the-box thinking. Just like I did for these two ads:
And pay well it did…
These two ad creatives alone brought in 10’s of thousands of app installs and generated well over $50,000 in subscription revenue.
Funny enough, my client didn’t think advertising Strong’s My Fitness Pal integration was worth it because his competitors also offered it.
But I saw an opportunity because nobody ever advertised it. It was a chance to be first to the market.
Case in point… injecting some creativity and being different pays off.
And lastly, you can’t succeed with FB ads (and marketing in general) without A/B testing. A LOT of A/B testing.
Lots of hooks. Lots of ad copy. Lots of creatives.
Here’s a bunch of other creatives I created for the folks over at Strong:
And A bunch of carousel ad assets:
And that doesn’t even scratch the surface on how many creatives I created for this account.
But hey… you gotta do what you gotta do to create profitable campaigns, right?