Running $280K/Month in E-commerce Social Ads: What Actually Works

Scaling paid social to $280K/month while holding a 6x ROAS is possible, but it's an operation, not a budget increase. Organic content has to come first, creative production has to keep pace with spend, and you can't rush the ramp. Pinterest is the channel most e-commerce brands aren't taking seriously, and that's exactly why it's such a big opportunity.

0:00  

Well, today in our fun little leadership pod, we’re going to talk about how we scaled tile bar from 10k a month in spade paid spend to 280k a month, while retaining a 6x row as the whole way. We’re going to tell you exactly how we did this, what almost broke, and what E comm channel might be completely slept on by most brands. So again, we’re going to talk about the 12 month journey here with tile bar. We’re going to talk about how we scaled ad spend across Pinterest and meta, and we’re going to talk about how we hit a great organic strategy that generated over 250 million organic impressions on Pinterest while scaling the paid spend 28x and again, returning that 6x as spent. So jumping into the first thing, which I want to talk to Joanna about, because obviously you run the teams, is great organic content, and how that builds a foundation of a great paid program.

0:59  

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s important that we talk about this before paid, because it is definitely something that we fed into. Paid was the things that we learned from organic and tile bar was doing really well before they came to us organically. And so that was just something that we took, took and ran with. But yeah, Pinterest organic, I mean, we had hundreds of millions of impressions on Pinterest, Facebook, 15 million impressions. Instagram, 24 million impressions. And I think something you were alluding to in the beginning is a platform that’s slept on typically. And I think when people think social media strategy, the first few platforms that come to mind are Facebook and Instagram, right? But particularly with E commerce brands, you have to think about why people are on those platforms to begin with. So Facebook and Instagram, typically, people are trying to connect with friends or family, watch funny memes, things like that. They’re not necessarily looking for products. That’s not to say you can’t interrupt their interrupt their time on social media and get them to your site and checking out your products. However, Pinterest was something that we had a lot of success with, and it makes a ton of sense, right? Like, people are on Pinterest looking for inspiration, literally, looking for products. Um, typically design inspiration, things like that. And with something like tile, I mean, it just slotted right in there, really naturally. You’re really successful, successful there organically. And it, um, translated onto paid as well.

 2:21  

Yeah, I think the what the other company, which we’ll talk about in another time, was Starfire Direct, which, again, was inherently Pinterest centric. You know, you’re talking about aspirational places in your backyard, and that absolutely performed, very similar to the way tile work performed as well.

2:41  

Yeah, absolutely nobody wants to be advertised to. And so when you can fit something in there seamlessly, that’s that’s when things are going to work. I think Jason always talks about this, but Reddit, for instance, Reddit is very difficult to advertise on. You have to be. I think an organic strategy is the only play. And even then, it is a long term value providing strategy that you have to have on Reddit to have any form of success, and it’s usually not super measurable, at least in our experience with our clients. But Pinterest is a different story. The ads do not stand out as ads and even the content you’re providing value. But you know you’re linking to your website, you’re linking to your products, and people just naturally find themselves checking out.

3:25  

Yeah, yeah. No, you’re you’re on Pinterest for the reasons of getting inspiration again, when I designed the office around me, I went to Pinterest. Jason, I think he’s in the foundational stages of designing that gorgeous backdrop behind him to where you’re on Pinterest for that? Jason,

3:51  

Not yet. Well, Pinterest, think if you’ve learned anything from all of our clients, it’s go to Pinterest for inspiration. Inspirato some of the other interesting things too, to talk about here is, you know, tile bar is, you know, a great company sophisticated, a competitor of bedrosians and floor and decor. So these guys aren’t like the smallest. They’re they’re definitely not the absolute biggest. That’s not Home Depot, but it is one or two steps down. So when you when you’re a company like that, or when you’re a brand building towards a level of success like a tile bar, you also have a lot of collaborators and people that can come out of the woodwork and actually help boost your product. And we certainly saw that here with tile bar. We saw a couple people from the DI DIY Network grab onto this account and actually do some great content with us. You want to talk a little bit about that? Joanna,

4:49  

yeah, anytime you can have some of that, some boosted organics or earned media, it’s always going to be quite successful. And we did have some people in the DIY space do. Collaborative posts, and that just does a multitude of things. You gain access to their audience, which is typically, if you’re doing a collaborative post, there’s obviously some overlap, particularly with your audience demographics. So you’re reaching kind of already a warm audience, and then you’re also getting social proof, right? You have people in the DIY space, maybe leaders in that space, who are advocating for your brand very publicly. So that channel proves to be very successful for us. 100%

5:27  

Yeah, you know, the other thing too, I don’t even it wasn’t even on our list to talk about, but actually just popped into my head that I would like to bring up was tile bar also, at some point, hired a very savvy and sophisticated director of marketing that actually had the vision of taking a ton of the spend that they were pushing into PPC and really investing in in social and I 100% I mean, when she came on, it was kind of like the perfect dance partner to have with them could, because she was ultimately able to advocate big time for us. Inside there, she had a really smart and great vision, and ultimately together, we were able to build this thing together. Because if you don’t have your evangelist inside the company that gets social, that’s it’s going to be a hard road to help 100%

 6:20  

and when you have not just positive return on ad spend, but profitable return on ad spend, I think it makes sense for you to have an evangelist, right, like we’re making you money, so give us more of it, and we will make you more of it. So yeah, I think that’s the genesis of the scaling.

6:40  

Yeah. Well, speaking of scaling, let’s switch over to paid you know, we took a $10,000 a month ad spend and over, I’d say what it was. It was about 13 to 15 months. We scaled that to 280,000 a month, all while returning a positive row as along the way, which equaled about 6x month over month. Um, one something I got, I know we’re all incredibly proud of as a company, not very easy to do. What are some of the, I guess, trap doors that people don’t realize that are in something like that when you’re going to scale ad spend that much?

7:21  

Well, I think this may be a little bit of a tangent, but I think it’s important not to abandon your organic strategy during this time. Like all the things that we have already talked about, we’re feeding into the success of the paid right? So we put a lot of effort. You basically front load your work as it when it relates to creating the content, and then that you use that in ads, right? So the collaborative posts, all the effort, what we were putting into the Pinterest pins, and you know, when you click on a pin, it takes you to this, you know, this large piece of long form content, all of that stuff, then we can utilize in ADS. We can see what’s most been, most successful and organic, and replicate that into a paid campaign in terms of scaling. I think some of the things to consider we’re talking about before this call is like, you know, with that amount of money and that amount of ads, just generally speaking, the work that it takes to go into that, the reporting behind it, keeping track of what ads are performing, how often you’re switching things on and off, how often you’re optimizing the campaigns, how much money you’re injecting into a successful campaign at one time is obviously very important. You got to watch those things very closely. You got to make sure that you’re not scaling too quickly. You’re not abandoning things that would do better over time, if given the chance, things like that. So there’s a lot of considerations.

8:42  

Yeah, you know, I mean, we it’s kind of a rule of thumb that you really don’t scale to spend more than 20% in a couple of weeks period of time. We’ve seen that time and time again, that’ll break everything I was just

8:55  

gonna say, and you need time to see what’s working right. And I think it can be easy to rush into something and say, like, oh, well, this has X amount. Return on Aspen. Let’s pour this in, but you need time to see what’s working. And you pour gas on a fire, not on a pile of wood.

 9:11  

Well, they, I mean, they just, they didn’t put all their eggs in one basket either. That’s always like a red flag, like, if, if a client’s coming to us looking to be saved, that usually doesn’t end well, because they they’re just so desperate for everything to work so quickly. And that’s just not how it works. Usually, you know, when they have their budgets spread across a variety of different channels and have a healthy budget like that, that’s going to work? Well, yeah,

9:38  

not not only their budget, but their horsepower. When you said, you know, they didn’t come to us to be saved. That is a very common occurrence. They come to us and they kind of plot the budget on the table and tell us to take it and run with it. And I think they were true partners. And I think that it is because they were, you know, previously successful. They wanted to scale. So it’s just such. An ideal scenario where you know you have a partner, an advocate, and someone who’s working alongside you, instead of just lumping things on your plate and hoping, crossing their fingers,

 10:10  

yeah, yeah, yeah. So the big thing too, when you’re when you’re scaling up, you’re spending more money month over month. That means you’re burning through creatives a lot faster. So ultimately, to your point, you made earlier, the work that goes into this gets exponential. It grows exponentially, right? And you go through creatives. I mean, you know, if you’re spending 10k a month, those creators might last, you know, two, three months maybe before you’re seeing fatigue on that, when you’re spending $280,000 a month, those creators are probably last. Creators are probably lasting a week, maybe two. And that is a big component of work, and that’s a big component of success, making sure that if you’re going to scale, and you’re going to continue to scale, and see that positive ROAs, you have to have that creative horsepower behind you in order to push those push that behind the spend.

11:02  

Yeah. And I think something as well that people fail to consider when they think about scaling from, what we did, from 10,000 to 280,000 in monthly budget. Like, something else that changes as well as like, you have to consider your market penetration and like, if you’re going to see fluctuations in ads, it’s no longer you’re not just considering what’s happening with a $10,000 ad spend and how your ads are performing? It’s like, okay, we’re spending 280,000 what’s happening in the market, you know, like, what, what DIY shows are coming out this week, things like that, like things all fueled that larger ad spend that we had to take into consideration. And you have to when you’re scaling that, that largely,

 

11:40  

yeah, great. So the things I think to think about for this, this little soiree we found today, is, don’t sleep on Pinterest, right?

 11:52  

Definitely not, especially if you’re an E commerce brand, especially if you’re something you know, esthetic, useful, honestly, really, anything, there’s a space free on Pinterest, 100%

 12:02  

organic fuels the paid. You can’t put lipstick in a pig. You gotta you get that’s the same,

12:12  

right? No, it really is true. If it were, if it were, you could start a business tomorrow and run ads because of your audience targeting. Everyone would do it, we’d all be millionaires. It is all it’s the business as a whole, and that includes organic to a large degree.

12:27  

So if you’re in a position where you’re scaling your business, creatives at the top making sure that you have enough creative juice behind you to push out that ad spend and support your ad spend. And there are some great platforms out there that aren’t meta. Pinterest, don’t sleep on it.

• Scaling paid social isn’t a slider you push up — going from $10K to $280K/month over 13–15 months while maintaining 6x ROAS required a disciplined, phased approach where organic content and paid strategy worked in lockstep the entire way.
• Pinterest is the most slept-on platform in e-commerce. People go to Pinterest specifically looking for inspiration and products — ads don’t feel like ads, and the purchase intent is already there. TileBar’s Pinterest strategy generated hundreds of millions of organic impressions before a single paid dollar was spent.
• Organic fuels paid — not the other way around. The creative that performs best in ads is almost always the content that already proved itself organically. Don’t launch paid campaigns in a vacuum; let your organic results tell you what’s worth amplifying.
• Never scale ad spend more than 20% over a two-week period. Scaling too fast breaks performance every time. You need the data to breathe and show you what’s actually working before you pour more money in.
• Creative fatigue accelerates with spend. At $10K/month, a creative might last 2–3 months. At $280K/month, you’re burning through creatives in a week or two. If you’re scaling, your content production capacity has to scale with it — or your ROAS will crater.
• You need an internal evangelist. The client relationship that made this possible included a director of marketing on TileBar’s side who deeply understood social and could advocate internally for the strategy. Without that advocate inside the company, scaling this fast doesn’t happen.
• At high spend levels, you’re no longer just optimizing ads — you’re watching the market. What DIY content is trending? What’s happening seasonally? External factors that don’t matter at $10K/month start mattering a lot at $280K/month.