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Everybody knows creative is important.
And it’s no secret that diversity and testing in your ad account is vital to unlocking what works best for your brand. 🤝
We asked the Pilothouse Studios team to dive into OluKai’s Facebook Ad Library to take a peek into how the brand utilizes their ad space and what tips and tricks you can use to elevate your own.
We’ve broken their creative library into:
- Frequency
- Formats
- Angle testing
- Creative diversity
- Post-click experience
For each section, we’ll share our analysis, recommendations, and an overall grade. 🔠
Yes, we’re talking about one specific brand, but make sure you’re taking your brand into consideration too!
Grab a cuppa joe, your favorite pair of slippers or fuzzy socks, and get ready to read on.
⏰ Frequency
Grade for frequency, cadence of new ads being published, and signals of velocity and testing: A
It’s not often we see an ad account as robust as OluKai’s. It’s clear that they're consistently tweaking their copy and angles to understand what best resonates with their audience and rake in that sweet, sweet moolah. 👊
Here’s what we discovered (at the time of analysis):
Volume:
- 350+ ads running (US)
- Monthly cadence of newly published ads:
- August: 100+
- September: 80
- Oct: 60+
- Nov: 100+ (so far)
Creative formats:
- Image – 270
- Video – 65
Looking into their library, it’s clear the OluKai team is consistently iterating on their top-performing creatives and CTA’s.
If you don’t have the time, budget, or team behind you to be running hundreds of creatives at once, make sure to keep reading for our suggested 70/20/10 creative split for testing. 👇
🖼 Formats
Grade for ratio of image, video, gifs, and carousel: B
The majority of the ads OluKai runs are static. In fact, just under 14% of their total ads are video.
Looking at their robust library, it’s highly possible that the brand has already tested what kind of content best hooks their audience; however if you’re not past this testing stage, keep in mind that most brands perform best with a good mix! 📸
In the small percentage of video content, we couldn’t help but notice that creator content makes up a very small piece of the pie. Creator content plays an integral part in customer acquisition throughout your funnel, so if you’re not testing it, you should be.
When looking at other leaders in the DTC footwear space, we found that they’re generally fabulous at creating content that:
- Shows the product in its ideal setting and lifestyle
- Shows the product on its ideal customer demographic
- Shows key unique features prominently and abundantly within multiple styles of content
OluKai’s product photography is on point, but we’d recommend more descriptive product breakdowns (alongside an increase of creator content) in the three categories above to really convince scrollers to click ‘buy now’. ✅
Check out these examples from Steve Madden (left) and Vessi (right) that showcase their ‘real life trial’ of their products:
Another thing OluKai is crushing? Their number of creatives per SKU. They do a superb job showcasing many different SKUs and styles of shoes with backgrounds that make the shoe pop out of the image and show the general usage of the product.
Their golf shoes are shown with greens, tees, and grass-themed imagery. ⛳️ This makes the association with your potential customer easier, and if they’re interested, they’re more likely to click through to learn more.
📐 Angle testing
Grade for number of obvious angles running: B-
Like we said a few weeks ago, ‘tis the season of vogue and vogue means angles baby. 🕺 Besides golf and general lifestyle, we’re not seeing many angles in their ad account that could capture new audiences.
Here’s some angles they’ve used:
- Golf specific footwear
- Ideal all-day comfort
- Gifting for the holidays
- Vacation holiday footwear
- Cozy home shoes
And here’s some angles we think could sell:
- Never have sore feet in your footwear
- Lounging goes past your home
- How they feel vs. look
- Comparison with other brands
- Long lasting
- Number of reviews and people loving them
- Why They are a great travel shoe
- What makes them “well made”
We’d also suggest OluKai going more general with their angles. Sure, a lot of people golf, but we think more people would be impacted by direct response or unique selling point messaging! 🌟
One thing OluKai is crushing? Angle testing with their creatives and copy. When peeking into their library, you can clearly see they’re using the same creatives with different copy (or vice versa) to find the angles that are working for them.
If you’re a brand just getting started on your angle testing, ensure you foster a good iteration mindset of creative testing! 🤯
🖍 Creative diversity
Grade for scrappy vs. polished and top-of-funnel vs. bottom-of-funnel content: B-
Like previously mentioned, OluKai’s Ad Library is strong – there’s not many brands we click into and see 350+ creatives running at once. 💪
But we’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again: real user imagery, creator content, and user reviews go a long way. It’s understood that the lack of UGC/CGC may be a result of past testing, but the lack of authentic content in general makes us believe it’s simply been overlooked.
OluKai’s most ‘authentic’ content at the moment looks a little like this:
Looking back to their emails, it’s clear that OluKai is incredibly focused on creating a cohesive funnel experience. Their pre-click, post-click, and emails all give users a similar brand experience and feel.
What works, works! It’s different for every brand, but a continuation of content diversity and testing is still important. The Pilothouse team suggests a 70/20/10 ratio with creative testing:
- 70% of your creatives should be your tried and true converters
- 20% of your creatives should be riskier ads (that still have high confidence)
- 10% of your creatives should be experimental out of the box ads
The goal of your 10% is to focus on unlocking new angles and winners to use down the road. Remember, the creative that’s crushing for you right now might not always have the ROAS it does today. 😢
🧑💻 Post click experience
Grade for landing page usage: B
Although testing may tell you that you don’t need a landing page, they can be a fantastic way to show off and tie together what your ad is telling customers.
The vast majority of ads we clicked brought us to a product page. The pages did do a great job having a video showing the product in use, but generally, a single product image isn’t enough to convince a customer that your product is valuable!
The Pilothouse creative team would suggest running a split test splitting traffic from an ad to a product page (PDP), the home page, and a landing page. 🧪
Example, for their golf creatives:
- The landing page could highlight touch points of why these are the perfect golf shoe (waterproof, meant for walking and standing all day, and clean off easily, plus they look great with your outfit),
- The home page can talk about why the brand rocks,
- And the PDP is the specific shoe.
This specific test indicates to your brand which is most likely to convert on first view. If you can’t tell, we’re advocates for a good landing page. 💁♀️
Want to know what we’re also advocates for? A killer gift guide. We know it’s gifting season, so make like OluKai and use your creatives to drive shoppers to a page filled with your most giftable items.
Their Holiday Gift Guide was the only direct response landing page we came by, so we’d suggest building out a few more. For example, their slippers could be driving to a landing page listing the reasons people need to wear them!
✨ Conclusion
Creative diversity is an integral part of each and every brands success.
Remember to:
- Try the 70/20/10 creative split to unlock new angles for your brand,
- Use creator content and user content to showcase your products in new ways,
- Test what post-click experience yields the highest profits,
- And test, test, test with diversified forms of media.
That’s a wrap on our OluKai brand breakdown! See ya next week. 👋
