Advertiser Objectives

Given that major social and search platforms currently prohibit CBD brands from running advertising, this newly established CBD brand came to Healthy Ads, seeking us to help them achieve the following goals;

  1. Increase Sales by reaching new audiences across the USA
  2. Bring back to their website users that were “just browsing” and hadn’t purchased yet
  3. Establish the brand with the target demographic (various audiences)

Initial Budget was $20k over a 2-month period.


Our Solution

So, the campaign strategy was separated into two elements, Branding & Performance.

Branding Element

The branding element was heavily focused on contextual. From previously run CBD campaigns we knew that websites and contextual content around CBD hadn’t been successful, so our focus was entirely on content related to conditions and chronic diseases. Some of the targeting included diabetes, anxiety, depression, seizures and pain to name a few.

The secondary focus from the Branding element was to encourage higher Click Through Rates, so we layered a performance CTR target of 0.2%+ as well as 70% Viewability into all campaign line items. These targeting metrics use machine learning and data science to continually ensure we are hitting these desired client goals.

Our advice to the client was for them to provide us two sets of advertising creative with different messaging. The first set of creative having no restrictions around CBD Messaging. Whilst second set of creatives were toned down and made no mention of CBD but rather used terms like “all natural” and “organic”. This was to help reach as many publisher websites as possible. Websites will low advertiser restrictions would run the preferred creatives, whilst sensitive publishers would run the later.

Performance Element

Our team has worked on a number of campaigns for various CBD Brands, and the one thing we’ve consistently seen was the high number of visits per user before purchase. So, our focus was on persistent Retargeting across all Display and Native across as many sites as possible. Like the Branding element we layered a performance target of 0.3%+ as well as 70% Viewability into all campaign line items.

We suggested the client design specific Retargeting Creative featuring a package of various products together with a Promo Code and Free Delivery. The Aim here was to make the order process as seamless as possible.

The Results

The campaign started out nationally targeted, but after the first 6 days we found that orders in states where CBD was legalized seemed to performed better, so the targeting was changed to these states only. We also found that conversions seemed to be better on Desktop and Tablet compared to Mobile, so we also excluded Mobile Devices. These changes immediately resulted in higher CTR and lower CPA costs.

We leverage machine learning and data science to automatically optimize the campaign together with manual optimization where we removed both publishers and creatives not generating conversions.

  • Delivered a campaign CTR rate of 0.41% for Retargeting and Prospecting CTR Rate of 0.24%
  • Increased the number of Page Views per User by 50%
  • Lowered acquisition costs over the duration of the campaign by 7% compared to clients previously run campaigns.
  • Retargeting line item continues to run today on an ongoing basis.

Advertiser : CBD Brand 

Category : Supplements

Market : USA

Media Types : Display, Mobile & Native 

Execution : Managed Services

Let’s Get Started ! 

Let the Healthy Ads team walk you through all the options available to ensure that your Health, Fitness, Pharmaceutical or Medical campaign has the best possible combination of Premium Guaranteed Inventory, First Party Data and Programmatic elements.