Meta Performance Spotlight series: How Queenly is efficiently reaching new audiences and boosting sales using Advantage+ app ads

Performance Spotlight is a series that takes an in-depth look at brands successfully driving better performance and efficiency, with the support of Meta tools, to help grow their business.

Queenly is the leading marketplace and search engine for women’s formalwear. The company helps women of all ages and sizes find the right dress or gown—whether for prom, a wedding, a quinceanera or other special occasion—at the right price.

As a growing brand in the process of raising a series A round, showcasing performance and engagement is crucial. To generate awareness about their marketplace and drive app installs, Queenly leveraged our Advantage+ app ads, and achieved more downloads and sales efficiently. With the season for fancy and formal dresses fast approaching, we spoke to the team at Queenly to learn more about how they’re driving performance with Advantage+ app ads.

What was the inspiration behind starting Queenly?

Our CEO Trisha, who competed professionally in beauty pageants, started Queenly back in 2019 after realizing that there was a big gap in the market for affordable evening gowns online. She started Queenly to provide a sustainable direct to consumer platform to buy and sell dresses for all events women would need a formal dress for. Fast forward to today and we’re a marketplace that has expanded beyond formal dresses and into casual dresses as well.

How do you define performance for your brand?

In the early days of the company, app installs were a key performance indicator given our core products are iOS and android apps. Meta’s app install campaigns played, and continue to play, a key role in helping us achieve efficient cost per install outperforming all the other platforms we’ve tested.

As we grow, our definition of performance has evolved ever so slightly. We’re prioritizing the health of our marketplace and growth of our gross merchandise value and performance for us now includes community engagement through high intent signals such as the “add to wish list” feature on our app as well as “cost per add-to-wish list” - a metric specific to Queenly which we can monitor through our Advantage+ App ad campaigns.

When did you realize the opportunity Advantage+ app ads had for helping your brand find success?

We’re always looking for the most cost-efficient way to run our ad campaigns and boost conversions on our app. We had run manual mobile app ads on Facebook but felt a little bit limited in what we could do with the levers we could pull so we decided to test automated Advantage+ app ads. We were excited to test a different approach and lean into trusting the algorithm even more to see what results it could yield. And it paid off. After a month of testing, we were able to outperform existing campaigns that had been running for years. With Advantage+ app ads, we saw 12% lower cost per add-to-wish list and a 12% increase in conversions compared to usual manual app ads. As a result of the strong performance, we saw with our initial tests, we now run Advantage+ app ads as our business-as-usual campaign.

Are there any insights or learnings you’ve uncovered through your Advantage+ app ad campaigns?

The performance we’ve seen with Advantage+ app ads has broadened our horizon on who our potential customers are. While female shoppers are our primary customers, we’ve found that some of our top buyers are men (brothers, boyfriends, husbands or simply men who like to wear dresses too) and this insight altered what we realized were antiquated ideas of what our customers look like.

As we’ve let the algorithm figure out who our customers are, we’ve seen that it pays attention to what gives us the best results, which is our female customers, but also delivers pockets of efficiency where it sees that opportunity to deliver to male customers as well.

What has the community impact of your performance been?

The biggest community impact of our performance has been the success of our Queenly partners who are smaller local retailers that have physical stores with no online presence. During the pandemic we reached out to small businesses who were staples in their communities but had zero-foot traffic and offered our online marketplace as a solution to help them get through a tough period. Even though the pandemic is behind us, these businesses still sell through Queenly and now have another revenue stream.

Because we’re able to drive installs and conversion on our apps we’re also supporting the growth of our Queenly partners as well.

Any advice for other brands looking to get started with Advantage+ app ads?

As new products and features are released on Meta’s platforms, it’s important to keep testing and learning with an open mind. As the marketing world gets more automated, trusting algorithms can be beneficial in helping you uncover new audiences, efficiencies, and ultimately stronger performance and results. ​​