Case Study: Facebook and Instagram video ads – Do they work?

Facebook and Instagram marketing

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.

We decided to run a Facebook and Instagram video campaign to promote the Olivia Rose Youtube channel and to create greater awareness of the brand. The Youtube channel has been growing organically for almost 2 years purely off the back of good video tutorials. The only issue was the channel seemed to be growing slowly at an organic rate and we wanted to see if we could improve the visibility and awareness of the channel to the right audience. In this case study, we will share:

  • What our objectives were.
  • How we set up the campaign.
  • The results.
  • Our learnings.

I had read an interesting post where the blog author shared his Facebook page building strategy for niche topics. Olivia Rose provides afro hair tutorials for English and French speakers. We decided to do a trial to see what success we would have with the niche.

Our objectives.

The aim of the campaign was to generate traffic to the Olivia Rose Youtube channel and to convert new viewers into subscribers. The business model for this particular campaign would impact the amount of video views that was seen on the channel. Since the videos are being monetised through Google’s Adsense program, increased video views should increase the advertising revenue.

How was the campaign setup?

A short advertising video trailer was created. Olivia Rose created the video below which highlighted the niche areas of her hair tutorial.

Apprenez à prendre soin de vos cheveux afro avec les tutoriels d’Olivia Rose.

Posted by OliviaRose on Sunday, 10 January 2016

Apprenez à prendre soin de vos cheveux afro avec les tutoriels d’Olivia Rose.

A video posted by Olivia Rose (@oli_viarose) on

You can see that the video is high in quality and renders up to 720p (HD). The video is specifically targeted to French speaking women that have afros. The video length is optimised for Facebook and for Instagram (Facebook allows video content up to 30 minutes, where as Instagram allows video content up to 30 seconds).

The video also contained a text snippet of 90 characters to pitch your video content to your prospective audience. Additionally, we added a call to action, which allowed the audience to click through and watch more on the Olivia Rose YouTube channel.

Marketing was segmented into different audiences.

In our first campaign, we decided to target French-speaking women that had an afro in countries outside of France. One of the advantages that we had was the analytics data from the Olivia Rose channel, so we knew which country demographics to target. We named the campaign DOM TOM.

A summary of how we targeted our audience is below.

  • The target audience was only female.
  • The target audience was aged between 13-40 years old.
  • The target audience was in French-speaking countries outside of France such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Martin and Reunion.

Since we knew these countries ethnic diversity was primarily of African descent, we didn’t need to specify further details through interests or demographics.

We decided to trial the campaign on a Sunday to see what kind of response we would get. If successful, we would run another campaign from Thursday to Monday.

The campaign would be run on desktop, mobile and Instagram. We didn’t promote the right-hand ads on Facebook.

After reviewing the performance from the first campaign, we extended the campaign to English-speaking countries, which included:

  • English speaking African countries.
  • English-speaking Caribbean countries.
  • The United Kingdom.
  • The United States and Canada.

The results.

Facebook video marketing

*Note – The cost is in Australian dollars.

Facebook marketing Like statistics

Facebook video performance

Facebook marketing statistics

Facebook statistics

Facebook statistics

The campaign was run until the 25th of January.

Some of the key takeaway statistics were:

New Instagram followers – 1,758

New YouTube subscribers – 1,784

New Facebook Fans – 15,647

New blog subscribers – 6

In terms of exposure and building the audience, the campaign has worked well. The increase in subscriptions will have a long-term impact on the advertising revenue that Olivia Rose will generate for her channel.

What did we learn?

We found this campaign to be extremely cost effective if the video content that was produced was strong. The more engagement the content received, the more organic shares it would generate and the video would start to go viral. It proved to be an effective lead-generation tool in this particular campaign and allowed Olivia Rose to reach a wider audience for her channel, as well as improving her advertising revenue.

If you have conducted any Facebook or Instagram video advertisements, we would love to hear your story. Thanks for reading.

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