ThredUp
ThredUp tests their way to efficient new customer growth on Pinterest
Goal
When shopping secondhand shops, it’s best to go in with patience and a treasure-hunt mindset. That’s exactly what online resale platform ThredUp brought to Pinterest when they set out to drive efficient growth in new customer acquisition.
ThredUp sells women’s and kids’ fashion, a natural interest alignment with Pinterest’s largest audience. That made the platform an ideal testing ground for developing a strategy that would maintain or improve their cost per incremental acquisition (CPIA) as they scaled up their spend.
Strategy
The ThredUp, Haus and Pinterest teams took a test-and-learn approach to new customer acquisition, running a series of structured, sequential incrementality experiments on the Haus platform over the course of a year. First, ThredUp anchored their strategy with a holdout test to establish a baseline for Pinterest’s impact on incremental new customer acquisition.
Once they proved that Pinterest drove efficient new customer growth at 40% below ThredUp’s CPIA goal, the team explored scaling up media spend.1 When their initial increase caused a dip in efficiency, ThredUp, Haus and Pinterest worked together to analyze, adapt and refine their game plan. The realignment led to running a multi-cell test to understand the optimal objective split. The test favored a 80% Catalog sales, 20% Conversion objective split that kept growth strong and efficient.1
Next, ThredUp participated in the Haus Partner Benefits Program to scale up their spend by 2x at the 80/20 objective split, finding that results held strong and drove CPIA below benchmark.1
Additionally, throughout testing ThredUp saw an average CPIA improvement of 26% during the 1-2 week post-treatment windows, highlighting the need for longer testing windows on Pinterest due to longer-term impact on shopper behavior.1
“
Through a disciplined test-and-learn approach on Pinterest, we validated performance, scaled our investment and drove a 130% increase in new customers year-over-year in Q2. Optimizing our mix, sharpening creative and including longer measurement windows proved to be the main levers for efficient, scalable acquisition.”
Justin Schultz
Head of Growth Marketing, ThredUp
Results
Over the course of the year, ThredUp nearly tripled their Pinterest investment, learning from multiple tests and ultimately driving scalable new-customer growth at a CPIA 45% below their goal.¹
The longer, one- to two-week post-campaign measurement windows more accurately gauged Pinterest’s planning-driven conversion curve, revealing an average 26% improvement in CPIA.¹
45%
more efficient CPIA than goal in holdout test at 2x original spend1
26%
average improvement in CPIA with extended measurement windows1
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