Natural Cycles Hits CPA Goals with Vibe.co

Natural Cycles, a mobile app designed to help women track fertility to plan for pregnancy and contraception, was launched in Europe over a decade ago.  It only recently  launched in the US market, however, and is rapidly expanding its reach thanks to aggressive targeting and channel diversification.

The only FDA-cleared app of its kind, Natural Cycles follows an annual subscription model which until recently required users to wait for their free basal body thermometer through the mail before using the app. All that changed when they integrated with fitness tracking devices like Oura Ring (in 2022) and Apple Watch (in 2023), quickly accelerating adoption and prompting their US-based team to explore a more diverse channel mix. 

Although the Natural Cycles brand had been around for a while, their US team looked at its foray into Streaming TV advertising as a fresh start with ambitious goals: achieving quick wins with a “pulse” strategy focused on their busiest months, gathering meaningful insights to benchmark and develop a full-funnel strategy, and onboard a new platform they could efficiently manage in-house. 

At $120/year subscription, Natural Cycles had a much longer consideration phase than most apps, and their advertising playbook reflects that difference. Eric Collins, their new VP of Growth, comes from a performance background and expects core KPIs like CPA and CPM to remain solid, while also recognizing the value of multi-touch attribution and CTV’s halo effect on other digital channels. While looking for a complement to Natural Cycle’s social and search campaigns, Mr. Collins decided to test Vibe’s platform, impressed by its vast channel inventory and agile platform: 

"“We had worked with another Streaming TV ad platform before, but Vibe was so flexible and easy to use that we were able to run meaningful tests with them without spending weeks getting to understand a new channel.”"

The first KPI they started benchmarking, while keeping others open to testing, was cost per acquisition (CPA), setting aggressive goals from the start. Vibe.co provided the flexibility and precision of other digital channels (like Google and Meta), but the power and reach of traditional television advertising on premium inventory. Ultimately, Vibe’s CPAs were competitive with what they saw in social media channels like Meta and encouraged the Natural Cycles team to integrate CTV marketing into their evergreen marketing strategy.  

In order to measurably reach their campaign goals while gathering actionable insights, the Natural Cycles team launched two parallel campaigns - one focused on Awareness, the other on Web Traffic - and ran four different ad sets per campaign. 

Awareness and Web Traffic

It was important to segment campaigns and ad sets, since tests and optimizations run differently for both modules. Because all Vibe.co campaigns are associated with specific goals, its proprietary bidder can optimize spend to meet discrete goals. For Natural Cycle’s awareness campaign, for example, the bidder evenly split their budget across targeted channels with a low frequency cap to ensure maximum reach and even pacing.  For web traffic campaigns, on the other hand, bidding favored low-cost, high yield channels with much higher frequency caps. 

Targeting

By far the most successful referral “channel” for Natural Cycles is word of mouth. The team capitalized on that insight by targeting major metropolitan areas like Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Austin, Atlanta, Denver, and Phoenix, leading to great results for both campaign types. They then layered different interest and demographic dimensions for testing. By adding gender, household income, and lifestyle targets (vegan, wellness and fitness enthusiasts), they were able gain deep audience insights without sacrificing campaign effectiveness. 

"“We learned so much about CTV targeting options and pixel tracking with Vibe. Their support team truly exceeded our expectations.”"

Testing

Once promising results started trickling in, Natural Cycles conducted a geography-based CPA incrementality test that yielded stellar results and cemented their commitment to CTV as a long-term acquisition channel.

To do so, they compared the impact of targeted advertising in specific regions against control regions. They ran their campaign in selected target areas (Chicago, Dallas, Orlando, Salt Lake City) while withholding it from all other US markets. They then analyzed the uplift in new users acquired in the test markets compared to the control to determine the effectiveness of their CTV campaigns with Vibe.co, yielding a total lift of 11% in new users over the course of the test.

More granular ad set test results were also useful, guiding the team’s next steps in video creative development, crafting compelling CTAs, audience refinement, and budget segmentation.

Results started coming in hot and kept that winning streak going all campaign-long. Vibe’s user-friendly reporting interface allowed the Natural Cycles team to make informed decisions based on real-time data, while smart targeting segmentation kept page view cost, CPAs, and CPMs below target. 

A few months into the campaign, ad sets across the board were hitting a 3X ROAS and $0.03 average CPV to a massive audience, so the team decided to monitor a more elusive metric - the CPA. They developed a location-based incremental test resulting in a $215 average CPA, on par with their last-click results from Meta!

They closed their busy new-year season with higher revenue and lower cost, and plan to continue developing campaigns with Vibe according to a “pulse” approach focused on key busy seasons: January, Spring, and Back to School, but developed as a full funnel approach with new creatives, targeting strategies, and budgets aligned with the insights from their previous campaigns.

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