Customer Acquisition: Force Factor Drives High CTR With Display Advertising

Force Factor, a sports nutrition brand founded in 2009 by two Harvard University rowers, launched a display advertising campaign in April for its Test X180 Ignite supplement. The campaign has delivered a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 0.86 percent, which is more than eight times above the industry standard. The ad, a 300x250 above-the-fold placement, runs across SportingNews.com, a top 10 U.S. sports site that reaches millions of unique sports fans daily.

"We measure all of our media buys through a strict direct response lens, meaning we look at every impression, every click and every conversion to ensure the media is meeting return on investment goals we set at the beginning of every month," says Patrick Carroll, chief marketing officer at NutraClick, a technology-driven health and wellness products company. Force Factor is NutraClick's flagship brand. "At any given time, we're running between 100 and 150 distinct campaigns for Force Factor across four different products in four different countries."

Display advertising isn't the only tactic Force Factor uses for customer acquisition, although it is its most used. "We use [a mix of] search, social, mobile and email, but the vast majority of our efforts revolve around display advertising banners that we purchase directly from partners like Yahoo, AOL, CNN, ESPN, Google and dozens of other companies," says Carroll. "The banner ads run directly on their websites and/or throughout their networks."

A secret to Force Factor's success is that it makes intraday optimizations to ad creative, landing pages and offers, Carroll says. "[We are] constantly testing to maximize performance," he says. "Sports media — not surprisingly — and news media have always done well for the Force Factor brand. We recently tapped into a new segment of traffic at SportingNews.com that's performed particularly well, yielding over 100 percent ROI."