The ThinOptics Beginning
Imagine constantly losing or misplacing your reading glasses. That is where the story of ThinOptics begins. A group of creative minds in Silicon Valley were frustrated with the perennial problem of losing their readers, and solved it with the one object nobody misplaces: the smartphone. The result was a design of ultra-thin glasses that magnetically attach to the back of your phone, so your glasses are always with you.
Their reading glasses target adults over 45 who suffer from presbyopia, a common condition that affects the ability to focus on nearby objects with age. Nearly 90% of adults over 45 in the United States, roughly 128 million people, are affected. After extensive research and development, ThinOptics launched to strong success and set out to reach the critical mass of adoption that would mean market leadership.
Six Figures on Meta, and an Algorithm That Would Not Find the Audience
ThinOptics considered paid advertising on Meta early as part of their go-to-market strategy. A clear value proposition, a unique design, and consumer behavior shifting toward buying products like reading glasses online made it a natural channel.
Despite spending six figures on Meta, the platform's Advantage+ algorithmic tooling was simply not delivering results. That was especially frustrating for a company that knew exactly who its target audience was: adults over 45 in need of reading glasses.
Facing the challenge of growing sales at scale, Director of Digital Marketing Dean Woodward decided to try GoAudience after an old bandmate told him about the platform's ability to find and target an exact audience based on real consumer spending history.
GoAudience's Moment: Precision Instead of Guesswork
Dean and his team adopted GoAudience quickly, understanding from the outset the power of AI in generating optimal audience segments. Within 24 hours they built and exported their first list to their Meta account. The initial audience was not the largest, but it was highly precise, aligning perfectly with the ThinOptics target demographic.
The precision paid off almost immediately. Compared with every other ad set in the account, the GoAudience-targeted sets delivered nearly double the click-through rate and a 12% lower cost of acquisition. Better engagement and lower delivery costs compounded into meaningful savings on every purchase.
Impact and Outcome
- CTR nearly doubled, from 0.80% to 1.41%
- Cost per purchase down 11.6%, from an average of $34.02 to $30.02
- $4 saved per purchase, translating into hundreds of incremental sales
- An overall 10.9x return on ad spend on GoAudience-targeted delivery
ThinOptics' success illustrates the transformative power of precise audience targeting. By leveraging GoAudience, the team overcame the limitations of Meta's algorithmic prospecting and achieved substantial improvements in both engagement and cost efficiency. The increase in CTR, the reduction in cost per purchase, and the resulting ROI underscore what brands can achieve when targeting starts from who their customers actually are.