Baby Monitor Brand Owlet Cut Back On Search - And Sales Didn't Drop | AdExchanger

Owlet sells a wearable smart sock that tracks heart rate, oxygen levels, movement, and sleep, sending alerts to a parent’s phone, along with a Wi‑Fi baby monitor and bundles. The buying window for baby monitoring is typically brief, and many shoppers search for camera-based monitors, while discovery often occurs through word of mouth. After the FDA required the smart sock to be regulated as a medical device in 2021, Owlet had to stop selling until it received medical clearance, and marketing budgets were reduced due to the high cost of clearance. The company shut off Google Search and found that traffic dropped, but much of the lost traffic was not qualified, indicating performance could remain strong with tighter targeting.

"Owlet's target customer isn't in market for very long. The publicly traded baby tech company is best known for its smart "sock," a wearable that wraps around an infant's foot to track heart rate, oxygen levels, movement and sleep, and then sends alerts to a parent's phone. Owlet also sells a Wi-Fi baby monitor and a bundle with both devices."

"The challenge for Owlet is that most people only research baby monitors from the second trimester through the first few months after birth, and they're usually picturing a camera when they do. A lot of discovery also happens through word of mouth, which is powerful but hard to measure. This combination - a short buying window and a product that doesn't fit the typical idea of a baby monitor - forces Liz Teran, Owlet's chief parent officer, to be very specific about how she approaches performance marketing."

"Owlet had been selling its smart sock as a wellness product since it launched in 2015. But in 2021, the FDA decided it should be regulated as a medical device and ordered the company to stop selling the product until it got medical clearance. The next two years were tough. "Getting FDA clearance is expensive," Teran said, "and so the largest part of our budget - marketing - had to be cut.""

"In the past, Owlet would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars across paid search and social, almost as a reflex. But the cuts forced Teran's team to rethink its approach, including shutting off Google Search. It was a decision made under duress, but they learned something surprising and valuable. "We did see quite a big drop in traffic, but it wasn't qualified traffic," Teran said. "In other words, we were still performing well even though we lost a good chunk of what we now understand was not qualified traffic.""

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