Inside Pear: Putting media strategies to the test

Every day at Pear, brands ask us questions about how to approach their media strategy, like:

“If I only have <$10K, should I put it toward lookalikes or move people further down the funnel?”

“Should I spend on ads to non-nationwide chains?”

“Does the destination matter – landing page, D2C link, Pear Connect, or PDP?”

“How do metrics compare across ad platforms like Snap, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest?”

There’s no shortage of great marketing playbooks out there. But we wanted proof – real numbers that show what’s actually possible with retail ecommerce.

So we launched Shelf Scouts.

Shelf Scouts is our internal brand alias where we run campaigns ourselves, testing the exact questions CPG marketers bring to us every day.

Our first test: Building a retailer audience

Our first experiment aimed to answer the question: How much does it actually cost to build a custom 1,000-person audience for the top retailers shoppers select on Pear Connect campaigns?

Here’s what we found:

• Spend: $2,225 on a Pear Connect awareness campaign met the audience threshold across the top 3 retailers
• Results: Food Lion (1,857 visits), Earth Fare (1,552 visits), Amazon (1,238 visits)
• Efficiency: CPM $7.68, CTR 4.47%, CPC $0.17, 12,562 clicks
  
  

Now, when brands ask us what it really takes to build a qualified audience, we can show them exactly what we spent, what we got, and how they replicate the process.

What’s Next

Next up: running a lookalike against this group to see how performance stacks up.

Have a question you’d like us to test? Drop us a comment – the Shelf Scouts are on it.