Case studies / eCommerce
Full-funnel paid media · D2CNobody was searching for it. We had to build the demand first.
Hestan Cue is an induction cooktop paired with a guided-recipe app: a $500 product in a category most buyers don't know exists. You can't run bottom-of-funnel ads for something nobody is looking for, so we built the funnel from the top down.
A smart cooking system creating demand in a new category.
Hestan Cue combines an induction cooktop with a guided recipe app that automatically adjusts cooking temperature step by step. At a $500 price point, it’s a premium smart kitchen product that requires education before purchase.
The challenge was simple: there was no established search demand for the category. Hestan Cue needed a full-funnel ecommerce marketing strategy that could introduce the product, build demand, and turn new audiences into customers.
You can't harvest demand that doesn't exist yet.
Most ecommerce paid media assumes someone is already searching for what you sell. A contractor typing "cut resistant gloves ANSI A4" knows exactly what they want. But nobody wakes up wanting a smart cooking system: the category has to be explained before it can be sold, and no amount of bottom-of-funnel bidding reaches a person who has never heard of the product.
Works when people already know what they want.
Shopping and high-intent search capture buyers at the moment of decision. It is efficient, it is measurable, and for an established product category it is usually where the money should go first.
- Search volume Already there
- Buyer education needed Minimal
- Funnel required Bottom only
- Ceiling Existing demand
Required when the category is the pitch.
Display and YouTube introduce the idea. Meta catalog and conversion campaigns carry it. Retargeting closes buyers who needed weeks to decide. Search and Shopping still convert, but only because something upstream taught the buyer what to search for.
- Funnel required Top to bottom
- Ad sets tested 132
- Cost per order $172
- Return on ad spend 290%
A genuinely new product is a genuinely hard sell.
Hestan Cue pairs induction cookware with an app that guides a home cook through a recipe step by step, adjusting temperature as it goes. It is an interesting product. It is also one that requires a paragraph of explanation before anyone understands why they'd want it.
That creates four problems for paid media at once.
-
The category has no search volume
People search for what they know exists. "Smart cooking system" is a term the industry uses, not one buyers type. The high intent queries that make ecommerce PPC efficient were largely not being made.
-
$500 is a considered purchase
Nobody buys a $500 cooking system on first exposure. The decision takes days or weeks, spans devices, and involves comparison, which means single-touch attribution understates everything happening upstream.
-
The value has to be demonstrated, not described
A static image cannot convey guided cooking. The product needs to be seen working, which pushes the burden onto video and creative rather than keyword targeting.
-
Demand is sharply seasonal
Premium cookware is a gift. A disproportionate share of the year's revenue arrives in a short holiday window, and the account has to double its spend without losing efficiency.
Four stages, each feeding the next.
The bottom of the funnel gets the credit in the reporting. The top of it is what made the bottom possible.
Introduce the category: Display and YouTube
Awareness campaigns showing the product in use, because guided cooking has to be watched to be understood. This stage converts poorly by design, its job is to create the audience the rest of the funnel spends against.
People who had never heard of the product now had.
Carry the interest: Meta catalog and conversion
Facebook and Instagram campaigns using dynamic product catalog and conversion objectives, moving people from "that looks interesting" toward a specific product at a specific price.
Interest turned into product consideration.
Capture the decision: Shopping and Search
Google Shopping as the primary revenue engine, with exact and phrase match search campaigns on product and problem-solving terms, plus brand campaigns defending the name that upstream activity was now generating searches for.
Six Google campaigns across shopping, search, and brand.
Close the slow decisions: cross-platform retargeting
A $500 considered purchase is rarely made on the first visit. Retargeting across Google and Meta kept the product present through a decision cycle measured in weeks rather than minutes.
Retargeting became one of the strongest conversion sources in the account.
132 ad sets, to find out what the product actually is.
When a category is established, creative testing refines a message everyone already understands. When it isn't, testing is how you find out which explanation makes the product make sense: and there is no way to know that in advance.
Is it a cooking gadget? A way to cook restaurant food at home? A gift for someone who likes cooking? A solution for someone who doesn't? Each of those is a different audience, a different creative, and a different price justification. We ran 132 ad sets across creative, audience, and messaging variations to find out.
Most of them lost. That's the point: the ones that worked couldn't have been reasoned to from a brief, and the account's efficiency came from finding them rather than from bidding cleverly.
The numbers, with the working shown.
At roughly $15,000 a month in media spend and a 290% return, the account generated around $43,500 in monthly revenue. At an average order value near $500, that's about 87 orders a month, which puts acquisition cost at roughly $172 per order, or 34% of order value.
For a product category with no established search demand, at a price point requiring genuine consideration, spending a third of order value to acquire a customer is a workable position, particularly for a D2C brand where the first purchase opens a relationship rather than closing one.
- Monthly media spend ~$15,000
- Return on ad spend 290%
- Implied monthly revenue ~$43,500
- Average order value ~$500
- Orders per month ~87
- Cost per order ~$172
Then we doubled it.
Premium cookware is a gift category, so a disproportionate share of annual revenue arrives in a short holiday window. Spend rose to roughly $30,000 a month at peak, and the return held.
That is the part worth noticing. Most accounts degrade when budget doubles: you exhaust the efficient audiences and start paying more for worse traffic. Holding 290% at twice the spend means the funnel had genuine headroom above it, which is what the top-of-funnel work had been building all along.
If your product needs explaining, read this part.
Check whether the demand exists
Before budgeting for search, find out whether anyone searches for what you sell. If the volume isn't there, a bottom-of-funnel budget will spend itself on your brand name and little else.
Judge top-of-funnel by what it feeds
Display and YouTube convert badly on their own and get cut for it. Measured against the retargeting and branded search they generate weeks later, they look entirely different.
Test more than feels reasonable
For a new category, the winning message cannot be reasoned to in advance. 132 ad sets sounds excessive until you accept that most of them exist to eliminate an explanation that doesn't work.
What went into it.
Six of our services, on one account.
Does anyone actually search for what you sell?
It's the question that decides whether your budget belongs at the top of the funnel or the bottom, and most brands have never checked. Give us read access to your ad accounts and we'll tell you where the demand is, and where you're paying to create it. Findings are yours to keep either way.
Read-only access · No obligation · You keep your accounts