Torrid

The objective

Boosting Casting Call applications

Torrid's ambition to bring stylish, mid and plus-size clothing to the forefront has redefined the norms of fashion, addressing the growing demand for inclusivity in the industry. This summer, Torrid hosted its Casting Call online and across hundreds of mall and store locations in the U.S. and Canada in search of new model talent sizes 10-30 to represent the brand.

The brand sought to increase Casting Call applications, drive e-commerce and store sales, and evaluate success through lift in brand health metrics, incremental conversions, and return on ad spend (ROI).

The solution

Launching a full-funnel strategy with Unified Lift

Alongside their advertising agency, Ovative, Torrid implemented a full-funnel strategy on TikTok with a 15/85 split between performance and brand campaign spend. On the backend, TikTok's Measurement team launched a Unified Lift Study that enabled Torrid to understand not only brand perception but also how incremental sales were influenced by TikTok ads.

Unified Lift is a combination of TikTok's Brand Lift Study (BLS) and Conversion Lift Study (CLS) solutions. It measures how your brand's full-funnel media activations influence the consumer journey to help you refine optimization decisions to maximize business outcomes.

For the BLS portion of the study, TikTok created two randomized groups from a portion of Torrid's target audience: an exposed group that saw the promoted content and a control group that didn't. TikTok's measurement team then used a combination of polling and statistical techniques to measure the difference in key performance indicators, such as Ad Recall and Favorability, between the two groups, which was then attributed to the brand's advertising.

On the CLS side, the brand's web conversion data was passed to TikTok and mapped with users in the test and control groups. Then, conversion behavior was compared across groups to determine if a TikTok ad caused the conversion.

The studies ran together over four weeks, using Traffic, Video Views, and Reach campaigns to promote the Casting Call with In-Feed & Video Shopping Ads to drive awareness and application submissions. They focused on fashion-based interest targeting and geo-targeting to ensure relevant audiences engaged with the content.

With a focus on driving e-commerce sales, Torrid launched Video Shopping Ads (VSA) for the first time, optimizing for web purchases. VSA features like Carousel and retargeting audiences helped drive efficient in-platform sales and revenue.

The results

Lifting ad recall and driving incremental site actions

According to internal performance data and the Unified Lift study, Torrid's strategy drove strong results for the brand.

An impressive +27% lift in Ad Recall recorded by the Brand Lift Study showed that Torrid's campaign resonated with the target audience. Brand Favorability was also high with a +4.2% lift, proving that Torrid's TikTok ads positively shifted user perception of the brand.

The Conversion Lift Study showed a significant 31.8% lift in total application submission clicks for the Casting Call and a +7% lift in purchases, which Torrid would have missed out on if they did not employ TikTok Ads.

To further prove conversion lift, Torrid's agency, Ovative, used its proprietary MarTech platform, EMRge™, to show TikTok drove an incremental e-commerce ROAS that was 24x higher than last-click attribution models during the same period and 10% higher than other non-social, digital channels. This also showed that last-click reporting significantly undervalues TikTok conversions.

In total, Torrid's campaign reached more than 4.7 million people, and proved TikTok’s ability to deliver brand and conversion results with a full-funnel strategy. Moving forward, Torrid will continue to run Brand Lift and Conversion Lift Studies.