Driving Smarter Retail Decisions with Paid Social Advertising
How AR Marketing Supported a 13-Week Pricing Test for KJ's Market & IGA.
The Challenge
KJ's Market and IGA launched a 13-week soda pricing test to evaluate promotional strategies across multiple store groups. To produce meaningful results, each pricing strategy needed consistent visibility among shoppers while maintaining comparable reach across every test market.
Managing this initiative required more than simply boosting weekly ads. With 10 distinct audience segments, multiple pricing strategies, and fresh creative every week, the campaign demanded a scalable paid social strategy capable of delivering reliable performance while generating data that could inform future business decisions.
The Strategy
AR Marketing developed and managed a centralized Meta advertising program designed to support the pricing test from launch through its 13-week flight.
The campaign was structured to deliver consistent weekly execution while allowing for precise geographic targeting and ongoing optimization across all participating store groups.
Our approach included:
- Management of 10 distinct audience segments and ad sets each week
- Market-specific targeting across KJ's Market and IGA store groups
- Weekly deployment of refreshed creative aligned with each week's digital ad carousel
- Continuous campaign monitoring and optimization to maximize efficiency
- Strategic budget allocation based on market size and opportunity
- Comprehensive weekly reporting and performance analysis
Rather than simply reporting campaign metrics, AR Marketing provided detailed weekly insights into audience performance, including spend, impressions, reach, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and engagement by market.
These reports allowed the client to identify which pricing strategies, promotions, messaging, and geographic markets were producing the strongest results throughout the test. This ongoing feedback helped support smarter promotional decisions while continually improving campaign performance over the course of the initiative.
The Results
Over the 13-week campaign, paid social advertising delivered consistent visibility and engagement across every store group.
Campaign Performance
- 27,153,017 Impressions
- 518,725 Website Clicks
- $0.38 Average Cost Per Click
- 10 audience segments managed and optimized each week
- 13 consecutive weeks of campaign execution and reporting
These results generated more than 27 million opportunities for shoppers to engage with weekly promotions while driving over 518,000 visits to the retailers' digital weekly ads.
Why Paid Social Matters
Weekly ads are one of the grocery industry's most important marketing tools, but they only drive results if shoppers actually see them.
Organic social media alone cannot consistently deliver the reach needed to support large-scale promotional initiatives. Paid social advertising ensures weekly promotions reach customers where they're already spending their time while providing measurable performance data that can be used to improve future campaigns.
Through this campaign, paid advertising enabled KJ's Market and IGA to:
- Expand the reach of weekly promotions beyond organic audiences
- Support a complex, multi-market pricing initiative with localized targeting
- Drive more than half a million visits to weekly digital ads
- Measure performance across individual audience segments
- Identify which promotions and messaging resonated most with shoppers
- Optimize campaign performance throughout the test rather than waiting until it concluded
The success of this campaign demonstrates the value of pairing weekly promotions with a strategic paid social advertising program. By delivering consistent visibility, reaching shoppers in each test market, and providing detailed performance insights throughout the campaign, AR Marketing helped KJ's Market and IGA turn a 13-week pricing test into a measurable marketing initiative.
The result wasn't just more impressions or clicks—it was a smarter, data-driven approach to advertising that gave the client confidence in both its marketing investment and its promotional strategy moving forward.
