Stop Burning Money on Large-Scale Display Ads in The Suit Industry: How to Make Every Impression Count

This will be for the folks who are running a large shop. Big franchises or established well-known brands, that are constantly spending way over five figures a month on online advertising. But don't shy away if you are not there yet; this article will cover some underlying principles that might be useful to you on your sartorial journey.

Maybe you're dealing with luxury suits, where the PPC approaches just doesn't fit the task, or you can't rely on a single brand ambassador to develop a person-driven brand due to the long-term risks, therefore organic content is also not a scalable option.

This leaves you with aspirational/aesthetic lifestyle videos and photo shoots, which inevitably leads to display media buying, to put this content in front of your audience.

Two common approaches

Now, in my experience working with some of the most prestigious brands in the industry, I’ve seen two main approaches to display or banner campaigns:

1. Reach Campaigns: The goal is to get seen by as many people as possible within the budget. (PR/branding school of thought)
2. Conversion/Sales Campaigns: The focus is on generating direct sales. (E-commerce driven approach)

After running conversion display campaigns you might notice that directly measurable profitability is just not there.

It might seem like the logical step is to chase reach then.

After all, if mega-brands like Coca-Cola or Apple do it, why shouldn’t you? But here’s the catch: when your campaigns focus solely on reach, you end up wasting even more money, especially in our industry where we are not selling a simple commodity.

The Issue with Chasing Reach

The problem with reach campaigns is that they often look very good on paper but fail where it really matters—influencing growth in sales.

When the primary goal is to lower top-of-the-funnel (TOF) metrics like CPM, get more impressions, or reach at better costs, the result is usually an illusion of success.

Due to this direction taken by CMOs or owners, agencies and platforms are incentivized to drive down these metrics, but this often comes at the cost of targeting the right audience.

Most digital marketing savvy experts understand that, but “client is always right”. Most likely client won't bother delving in the issue and just pick another agency that will do what the client wants at a lower cost, so might as well make some money on them….

Here’s what happens in reality if you go for the objective of the highest reach:

• Irrelevant Placements: Your ads will show up in places where they have no business being—like mobile apps, popups, low-relevancy websites, or buried at the bottom of pages where viewers aren’t paying attention.
• Low-Value Viewers: Your ads will reach users who are completely uninterested in buying a suit or are unable to afford one, leading to wasted budgets.

On the surface, your campaign might look like it’s doing great—low CPMs, high impressions—but in reality, it’s doing little to drive actual sales.

What to Do Instead?

A successful display campaign doesn’t just cast the widest net; it targets the right fish.

The sneaky move here is to use the targeting and optimization that conversion campaigns offer but evaluate it the same way you would evaluate generic reach campaigns. Here’s how we usually do that:

1.Run your creatives as Conversion Campaigns: Even when your goal is brand awareness or reach, structure your campaigns as if you’re aiming for conversions. This approach forces algorithms to focus on finding the right audience rather than just the largest one at lowest cost.

As a conversion goal pick something that will get enough data to optimize for. For retail stores that would be checking store locations, for ecommerces- “add to cart“ or ”X seconds spent on a website”.

Purchases could be used as a goal too but make sure that you can generate at least 25 sales per week, otherwise, pick a goal lower down the funnel. If your webpage is a generic brochure with no activities to be taken, just optimize for page views.

Long story short, you need to pick something that tells ad platform that this ad viewer has higher intent and value than other ones who didn't do the action, so that platform can have a better guess on whom to show this ad next.

2.Evaluate Performance the same way you would evaluate generic reach campaigns: Compare your current campaign’s performance to previous campaigns that were also optimized for conversions.

Comparing it to reach campaign would be useless as it will always show better TOF numbers. Performance should be evaluated not on overall benchmarks but comparatively to your other camaigns set up the same way.

This will give you all of the insights needed to craft your next campaign even better. Don't look at real conversions as you wouldn't do that in the case of generic media buying, and the profit won't be there.

Only way how you could account for sales made is to deduce the direct profit made from your ad budget, to better evaluate it's overall effectiveness. This way, you can measure success by how effectively you're reaching the right audience and how it responds, not just how cheaply you can get impressions. ROMI over ROAS.

Consider this: Would you rather your luxury menswear ad be seen by a random pool of a million people in a Candy Crush game, or by 100,000 affluent individuals who are genuinely interested in high-end menswear? The answer is clear. Despite the cost per view/click etc being higher, so will be your returns.

Explaining This to Upper Management

Often, the drive to chase reach comes from the pressure to show impressive, always improving numbers to higher-ups. The key is to shift the conversation from sheer numbers to quality.

Explain that while conversion-focused "reach" campaigns will have higher CPMs, they’re more likely to drive real sales, which is what truly matters, and all it takes to prove is a leap of faith from the higher-ups to establish the first benchmark for further improvements.

The best example i previously used to explain this to executives who are not so tech savvy was giving an example of running an ad for custom suits in Yellow Pages compared to the one in golf or yacht magazines.

Almost instantly discussion shifts from chasing the lowest costs to avoiding wasting money on ineffective placements instead.

When media buying was executed this way compared to generic media buying, there was higher growth in in-store visits, average purchase value, and attributed future sales.

Think of it as a branding campaign, but fueled by AI-optimized distribution tools made for performance marketing.

Final Thoughts

If you run a butcher shop, listening to the feedback of vegans would kill your business, so why would we fall for the same trap with media buying?

Run your branding campaigns with a conversion-focused strategy and evaluate their success by comparing them to past campaigns executed in the same way. This will help you optimize top-of-the-funnel metrics based on the feedback from the right audience, being certain that the next campaign will be even better.

It’s not just about being seen by as many people as possible—it’s about being seen by the right people. And if you’re navigating this tricky landscape, I’m here to help. Reach out anytime to discuss how we can be of assistance!

To your success,

Andris