Plated
Plated Turns Aspirational Foodies Into Subscribers With Taboola
Strategic Content Recommendation Analyzed through A/B Testing
- 75% Decrease In Acquisition Cost
- 1B Impressions Generated
- 12% Increase in New Member Sign-Ups
Company
Plated is a New York-based startup that assembles and delivers meal “boxes” in which ingredients are locally sourced.
Challenge
Expand customer reach outside of the usual acquisition channels.
Solution
Leverage Taboola’s technology to conduct A/B testing and analyze content iterations for optimizations.
Results
Significant drop in CPA and increase in highquality conversions.
Introduction
Digital upstart, Plated, delivers high-quality ingredients and a simple recipe to customers’ doorsteps, equipping them to make a chef-designed meal in the comfort of their own homes. The team was experimenting across all kinds of customer acquisition channels (e.g. Facebook, Adwords, display ads) when they discovered that “organic” content (e.g. press coverage) often drove the most interested and knowledgeable consumers to their site. Looking to further expand into the content marketing space, and impressed with the flexibility and long-term vision of Taboola’s account managers, the teams partnered together to promote Plated’s unique story on premium publishers around the web and reach their target audience when they’re in “content consumption” mode.
Creative Optimizations Lower Customer Acquisition Costs by 75% on Taboola
Taboola’s A/B testing empowered Plated to analyze hundreds of different content iterations, showcasing a variety of headlines, thumbnails, and content sources. This trial revealed specific keywords that resonated most with Plated’s target audience, as well as stylized, close-up product shots that performed best across both desktop and mobile platforms. Armed with these creative “best practices,” the team optimized towards a variety of goals, such as increasing click-throughrate (CTR) and lowering cost-per-click (CPC), before focusing on driving conversions. Rigorous testing and optimization around this goal resulted in a 75% drop in CPA.
Reaching 1B Monthly Impressions, 12% Boost in Customer Sign-Ups
Plated’s highly-targeted campaigns continue to scale on Taboola’s platform, generating over 1 billion impressions in January 2015 alone (and expected to soon reach over 2 billion monthly impressions). This scale and increased focus on conversions, has led to a 12% jump in new customer sign-ups, and over 3.5 million total clicks, since Plated began promoting its story on Taboola’s network.
Taboola was the perfect partner for Plated as we entered the world of content marketing, giving us the flexibility to test and optimize toward different goals as our priorities changed, and ultimately generating entirely new strategies to help drive sales.
- Matt Kerestesy, Director of Paid Media, Plated