Scaling Meta Ads for Ribbon Checkup

When Ribbon Checkup partnered with Flighted, they had seen stagnant performance on Meta for several months with almost no creative testing and an outdated website UX. The challenge was to grow their investment while improving return on ad spend (ROAS). By leveraging a structured media buying strategy, landing page/price testing, and iterative creative testing to understand their customer's concerns ad address them in ad creative, we successfully increased their ad spend by 13% month-over-month while achieving an 89% improvement in ROAS over the same period.

Strategic Scaling & Budget Allocation

We launched with a "shotgun" approach to creative testing - all ad iterations spoke to a different primary value prop of the Ribbon test kit, and each adset that we launched with was grouped by ad format, with 8 unique ad concepts to start. Our creative test campaign was launched with bid caps that were ~25% higher than their target CPA to balance learnings with efficiency - these bid caps were adjusted daily for the first week as we saw how much they spent and what they yielded. After originally scaling in a creative test campaign with broad targeting, once we had enough data on our top performers we scaled those top ad post IDs into an Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) and traditional campaign structures, leveraging Meta's black box targeting to find our audience with proven winning ads.

Creative Testing & Optimization

A significant driver of ROAS improvement was our creative testing strategy. We cycled through multiple ad variations and quickly identified winning creatives that resonated with Ribbon Checkup’s audience. Notably, the "3 Reasons Why" video creative emerged as a top performer, taking a top organic social trend and focusing it around the importance of checking one's liver health, a benefit of the Ribbon test strip that we identified as important among their target consumer, adults over the age of 40​. By prioritizing high-performing creatives and phasing out underperformers, we maintained strong conversion rates while scaling spend.

We diversified our winning messaging across multiple ad formats as well, taking advantage of Meta's prioritization of creative diversity. If an angle worked well as a static ad, we'd repurpose it in a video ad and a carousel ad as a hook to maximize its success.

Audience Expansion & Efficiency Gains

Beyond creative improvements, we refined audience targeting to reach high-intent users more effectively. We utilized lookalike audiences based on past purchasers and high average order value (AOV) customers, while also leveraging engagement-based lookalikes to tap into users who had interacted with previous ads​. Additionally, we tested a ViewContent optimization strategy to generate top-of-funnel interest, ensuring we were keeping First-Time Impression Rate and Frequency as incremental as possible in our conversion ad campaigns. This is what truly allowed us to scale spend so aggressively in a short 30 day period.

Sustainable Growth & Long-Term Strategy

As ad performance stabilized, we adjusted our approach to ensure long-term efficiency. We launched a new landing page with a more modern UX targeting a 25-34 demo, and began testing new price points for one-time purchase vs subscription to maximize first-time subscription opt-in rate. Our efforts led to a subscription conversion rate of 50% on first-time purchasers!

We reduced the number of active ads in our ASC campaign to concentrate spend on the best-performing assets, optimized bid strategies (balancing bid caps with highest volume objective) to prevent CPA creep, and introduced a retargeting strategy to maximize conversion rates among warm audiences and churned subscribers​. These steps ensured Ribbon Checkup’s growth remained sustainable, rather than experiencing short-term spikes followed by inefficiencies.

Conclusion

Through a disciplined approach to budget scaling, creative iteration, and audience optimization, we transformed Ribbon Checkup’s Meta ad performance. By increasing ad spend 13% month-over-month while improving ROAS by 89%, we demonstrated that strategic scaling and efficiency can go hand in hand. Our structured methodology ensured that Ribbon Checkup could continue growing profitably while maintaining strong unit economics.