65% Lower Cost Per Purchase

Duckbill wanted to turn paid growth into a learning engine

Duckbill combines AI with trained human assistants to handle personal tasks like requesting refunds, researching doctors, and recovering lost luggage. For much of its early growth, the company had focused on improving its product and unit economics. Though its lean marketing team had experimented with some Meta advertising, those early campaigns hadn’t produced enough insight to establish paid media as a dependable growth channel.

As Duckbill prepared to relaunch its updated app toward the end of 2025, its team saw an opportunity to use paid media for growth as well as business insights. They wanted each campaign to reveal which customer personas responded, which messages created urgency, and what exactly motivated users to sign up. 

Making paid media a reliable source of both growth and insight required a more disciplined testing process. Duckbill partnered with Primer to establish that system.

Results at a glance

• Lowered Meta’s overall cost per purchase by nearly 65% between March and May 2026 
• Increased monthly purchases by more than 22% while slightly reducing total ad spend
• Increased free account sign-ups by ~14% month over month
• Identified which audiences and creative formats were most efficient at driving conversions

Services completed

• Meta and Google Ads campaign management
• Performance tracking and measurement support
• Creative strategy, production, and testing

When Duckbill first spoke with Primer, the company had no dedicated internal paid media expert. Its marketing function was a one-person team.

The company also lacked a reliable tracking setup across its website and ad accounts. This made it difficult to follow users from an ad click through free registration, individual task purchases, and eventual subscription activity.

Primer needed to help Duckbill build both sides of the program: the measurement foundation to evaluate performance and the creative testing process to improve it. The work also had to move quickly to keep up with Duckbill’s early-stage culture of launching ideas, reviewing results, and applying those learnings to the next experiment.

Providing support with campaign strategy and creative development, Primer worked with Duckbill to create a paid media program built around continuous testing and learning. Monthly brainstorms gave Primer’s Creative team an opportunity to bring in new ideas and inspiration, while Primer’s Media translated those concepts into structured creative experiments across Meta and paid search.

Here’s what they found along the way.

Everyday frustrations produced stronger storytelling

Instead of relying on a single broad message about having a personal assistant, Primer tested a variety of angles, including first-person testimonials, app screenshots, and memes. This experimentation allowed the teams to evaluate not only whether an ad converted, but why.

One of Primer’s most important findings was that Duckbill performed best when its creative opened with a recognizable, frustrating problem rather than a broad explanation of the service.

A standout example of this approach was a POV-style parking ticket video. By honing in on a specific high-friction situation, the video helped viewers understand Duckbill’s value in delegating annoying tasks they don’t have time to handle. Uncovering this finding led Primer to create additional concepts focused on similar use cases, like travel-related tasks and other forms of personal admin.

App screens and notifications made Duckbill easier to understand

Primer also found that ads performed more effectively when people could see how Duckbill worked, which was accomplished through phone mockups, app screenshots, and notifications that gave the service a more tangible presence. Instead of asking customers to imagine an abstract AI assistant, these ads demonstrated what delegating a task actually looked like.

This became an important creative principle across both static and video formats. Showing the interface helped make Duckbill’s combination of AI and human assistance easier to understand.

Top-performing ads focused on mental load reduction, not just efficiency

Through Primer’s creative testing, mental load reduction emerged as Duckbill’s most compelling message. The strongest ads focused less on explaining the service and more on what customers experienced:

• the task they had been avoiding
• the frustration of wasting time on it
• the relief of handing it to someone else

This customer-centered framing showed that Duckbill’s value extended beyond convenience. By taking on the planning, coordination, and follow-up behind each task, the service offered customers mental relief.

Testing showed which formats and audiences deserved more investment

Not every experiment succeeded, but those negative findings were equally useful. For instance, Primer tested memes as a way to communicate the frustrations of personal admin tasks in a familiar, shareable format. While some individual memes attracted engagement, the format didn’t convert users consistently.

Paid search produced similarly actionable findings, such as showing that personal-assistant and family-focused keywords drove conversions more efficiently than mom-focused terms. These results gave Duckbill clearer direction about where to focus its media budget and which messages should inform future creative.

From March to April 2026, Primer reduced Duckbill’s Meta cost per purchase by more than 56%, the strongest performance since their partnership began. Performance improved again in May, when cost per purchase decreased by another 19%, meaning cost per purchase fell overall by nearly 65% within three months.

This improvement was seen across other metrics from April to May: 

• 22% increase in monthly purchases
• 14% increase in sign-ups
• 6% increase in click-through rate

Primer achieved these gains while continuing to test creatives at a high volume, helping develop a more precise understanding of what was driving performance.

Primer’s work created a repeatable learning framework for Duckbill and gave it a clearer understanding of how to best communicate its service. With more efficient acquisition and a stronger creative feedback loop in place, Duckbill can now continue expanding paid growth based on evidence rather than assumptions.

Is your team trying to turn paid media into a reliable source of growth and customer insight? Primer can help you build, test, and scale a strategy shaped by real performance data. Reach out to learn how we can support your team.