Crystal Awards Spotlight #3: Two Award Categories, One Client Story

We get really excited when our clients get nominated for awards. 

You can imagine the energy our team had when we found out that one client was getting 2 finalist nods at the Crystal Awards. 

FamilyTreeDNA was an account we supported across a few campaigns, but how it became a success wasn’t as straightforward as you might think. 

But first, the nominations.

Our first entry was in the social media video category. After a single 15-second UGC video outperformed every other post combined, we knew we had something that resonated with our audience. 

The second ran much deeper: a paid marketing campaign that had to claw its way back up from being completely shut off. It was a real Cinderella story, but with ad spend.

We’re excited to break this journey down from the perspective of our paid media specialist, Sara Reinhold.

From Paused to Profitable

The Situation

FamilyTreeDNA’s paid marketing had been fully shut off for roughly two years after a 2022 ownership change. When Optidge re-engaged, there was no active data, no recent conversion history, and no audience signal to build from.

The first relaunch attempt flopped. The lesson there? Past performance doesn’t guarantee anything once too much time passes.

Instead, the team shifted. Sara explained that an honest assessment of their findings helped set the tone for the entire campaign.

“…being upfront about what we knew, what we didn’t at the time, and how we planned to fix it really allowed us to treat early setbacks as learning opportunities.” 

The Strategy: Choosing Time Over Speed

Sara and her team built an open, communicative relationship with the client, which let her make the case for patience instead of just delivering a plan. 

That relationship created room for Optidge to build a system for long-term success. The campaign was simple, but the results were strong.

• A single feed-only Performance Max campaign, on one product, built to get a clean signal before expanding
• A six-month proof test, giving the sensitive, still-retraining campaigns time to stabilize
• Model validated at 1.72x ROAS, clearing the internal target of 1.6x, which is what they needed to know before committing a serious Q4 budget

They not only beat their baseline, but their ROAS was also across search, ads, and their fees. “We basically blew it through the roof, and it was really exciting for everyone involved,” Sara recalled.

The Q4 Push

That six-month result pushed the client to hedge bigger bets. Going into Q4, they scaled the monthly budget to nearly six-fold.

The team was excited, but a bit still approached with strategic caution: “…this time we were able to aggressively allocate budget to areas where we knew worked well”, Sara said of the client’s confidence.

Coupled with data-backed certainty, the team also expanded strategically into other channels like Bing Shopping and DemandGen. And results followed.

• 2.59x Q4 search ROAS
• Client-reported 61% growth year-over-year in a key product segment
• First year-over-year growth since Q4 2021

In the client’s own words: “It’s pretty incredible. We are 61% above where we were last year. This is the first time since Q4 of 2021 that we’re up from the previous year.”

The Video That Wouldn’t Quit

The Concept

A single UGC-style video became Meta’s top-performing creative for the entire calendar year.

It opened with one line, “I wish someone had told me about this sooner”.  The creator framed the service and explained why FamilyTree was different in just a few sentences. It was honest, said the right things, and most of all, it was authentic.

That’s why the creator wasn’t a polished spokesperson. She was cast to look and sound like the viewer’s own cousin, someone believable delivering an honest recommendation, not an ad.

The Discipline

Most teams treat a good ad like it has an expiration date, refreshing it on schedule whether performance calls for it or not. This one stayed put.

• The video ran across cold interest, lookalike, and broad audiences with identical creative, isolating whether performance came from the asset itself or just the audience it happened to reach
• When fatigue did surface, the fix was a minor iteration, not a full replacement
• Every result was checked against Meta’s own reporting, Google Analytics, and the client’s actual order ledger before the team trusted it, especially during six weeks when Meta’s own tracking went dark
• That discipline held for 12 consecutive months

The Outcome

Every video target got beaten, not just cleared. ROAS came in at 4.05x against a 2x goal. Cost per acquisition landed at $38, well under the $45 ceiling. Purchases hit 292 against a target of 250. Click-through rate held at 3.00% against a 2.5% benchmark.

It didn’t stop at the KPIs, either. The video became the template every UGC batch since has been built on, a single decision to leave something alone turning into the account’s default playbook.

What Both Wins Have in Common

No shared tactic connects these two stories. One is a full account rebuild across every channel; the other is a single video almost nobody touched for a year. What connects them is how decisions got made.

Validate Small Before Scaling Big

Every major move on this account started as a calculated risk. The ad proved itself by focusing on one product to prove the system before expanding the catalog. When it scored big, they scaled out to different audience types.

Protect What’s Working

When something is working, the instinct across both wins was to leave it alone rather than tinker. The video held its exact creative pattern for twelve months, and on the search side, 

Sara described the same principle in practice: “Just because it worked in the past doesn’t mean it’s gonna work now,” a caution that cuts both ways, against changing something that’s still earning its keep just as much as against assuming an old win will repeat itself.

Be Patient, Be Precise

Every scaling decision on this account came from the numbers first, then patience.  

Sara pointed to teamwork and alignment as what actually unlocked the account’s performance: “It was the combination of just teamwork and strategy alignment,” with the upper-funnel work directly supporting the lower-funnel results.

Listen to the Full Story

The account’s full turnaround, in more detail than a blog post can hold, is on TDMM Episode 112 with Sara Reinhold. She walks through the week-to-week decisions behind both wins, including what didn’t make it into the awards entry.

Need more? We have more.

We’ve been spotlighting some of our award-winning campaigns by looking at unique problems and how we approached them.

• A fine jewelry brand built on emotional, gift-driven purchases
• A specialty tile retailer competing for organic visibility against national chains
• A DNA testing company clawing back four years of lost growth

Different industries, different needs, one shared discipline underneath.

If that’s the kind of partner your paid media needs, explore our Paid Search and Paid Social Media services, or catch up on Spotlight #1 and Spotlight #2 if you missed them.