Pestie is a leading pest control startup providing homeowners access to professional-grade extermination tools. Since its founding in 2019, Pestie has revolutionized the DIY pest control industry, empowering its legions of customers to eliminate household pests without the hassle of door-to-door salespeople, invasive contracts, and unreliable technicians.

Pestie had just entered a period of hyper-growth — and wanted to capitalize on this momentum to drive more eCommerce sales while the iron was hot. To do this, the brand’s Media Buyer, Tanner Duncan, began looking for new ways to put his considerable ad budget to good use. With Meta as his weapon of choice, Tanner zeroed in on experimenting with audience targeting as a way to expand Pestie’s reach and drive conversions with impactful ads. 

In his years as a growth marketer, Tanner had heard every argument about the declining appetite for old-school audience targeting and the recent push toward Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC), broad targeting, and iterative creative testing. But, knowing from experience how risky it can be to fall for “best practice bias” and how productive it can be to keep testing, he looked to diversify and accelerate Pestie’s Meta strategy with lookalike audiences.

Fortunately, Tanner had already found success with a tool that harnessed a wealth of consumer insights to generate data-enriched lookalike audiences on Meta. Naturally, that tool was Proxima.

Proxima helped Pestie curate an audience targeting strategy on Meta that profitably withstood millions of dollars of ad spend.

Thanks to its colossal Shopper Universe of over 70 million shoppers and $17B in purchases across thousands of Shopify stores, Proxima built high-performing AI Audiences whose traits emulated Pestie’s best customers. 

Here’s how we approached audience building for Pestie:

1. The Proxima team ran a comprehensive customer base analysis to understand the core shopping trends of Pestie’s most loyal customers.
2. We then mapped those customers to our Shopper Universe to gain additional insights beyond Pestie’s storefront – such as where else their customers shop, what type of products they buy, AOV, repeat purchase rate, which ads they engage with, and more.
3. Our algorithm then identified tens of thousands of consumers with similar traits and purchasing behaviors across the Shopper Universe to construct boosted seed audiences.
4. We then built lookalikes based on the seeds, which were uploaded to Pestie's ad account via the Meta API.

We rinsed and repeated this process to isolate specific metrics (such as certain categories or AOVs) and construct unique, data-enriched audiences.

As they tested each audience, Tanner and the Pestie team thrived on lively collaboration with Proxima’s paid media experts. Whether they wanted to know how to structure Pestie’s campaigns, what creative to pair with each ad, or how to optimize tests according to performance metrics, the Proxima team was with them every step of the way.

Of course, as much as Pestie enjoys the partnership, the long-term performance and scalability of Proxima’s audiences certainly haven’t hurt either. In the most telling example, Pestie spent nearly $6 Million on a single Meta campaign over a two-year timespan with as high as $30k per day in ad spend — while maintaining efficiency and CAC. And this early scaling effort proved to be the rule, not the exception, as several of Pestie’s original AI Audiences are still running two years later with no signs of stagnating.

Pestie’s foresight to invest in audience experimentation proved vital in driving lasting incremental reach and efficiently scaling Meta ad spend. Today, Proxima’s audiences remain some of the most profitable in the brand’s marketing mix — sustaining nearly $6 Million in incremental spend over 2 years, with as high as $30k in daily spend.

Take a look at what Pestie has achieved since our partnership began:

• 69.7% increase in average daily Meta spend
• 86.9% increase in daily new orders
• 0.2% decrease in CAC

With their Meta strategy on lock, the Pestie team can’t wait to take a front-row seat to what future iterations Proxima has in store. Tanner is especially excited to see how Proxima’s foray into creative intelligence, tactical benchmarks, and deep customer analysis can take the brand’s new customer acquisition and retention efforts to the next level.