Looka designs a winning ad strategy with Microsoft Advertising

Looka Inc. aims to make high-quality branding and logo designs more accessible for everyone, including small businesses, one-person side hustles, or those pursuing passion projects. As an AI-powered graphic design company, Looka automates design processes so that customers don’t have to be designers or spend considerable time creating eye-catching brand identities. Since the company’s launch in 2016, more than 11 million entrepreneurs and small businesses have used Looka’s user-friendly website to create logos.

Examples of logos designed by Looka

The biggest challenge for Looka is building awareness among people launching their own businesses that they can get affordable logo and branding help from the site. When the global pandemic and layoffs that followed motivated a wave of people to open freelance businesses to replace or supplement their incomes, demand increased for logo and branding services. As a result, Looka increased its efforts to create awareness while maintaining a sustainable return on its advertising spending.

Looka has relied heavily on online search ads so that its target audience of busy entrepreneurs sees the company’s name when they seek out how to design a logo. The company eventually added new keywords to its strategy as well.

“A logo is one of those things that our customers don’t realize they need until they actually need it,” says Matthew Sison, Growth Manager with Looka. “When customers are building their website and get prompted to upload a logo, that’s when they realize that they don’t have one yet. So, they quickly search ‘make a logo.’ We want to be there when that search happens.”

Sison adds that Looka frequently tests different advertising approaches on a small scale. When the company tried new tools from Microsoft Advertising, though, Looka saw its return on spending soar by 200 percent.

Example of a Looka banner ad

Looka established its online advertising strategy on several platforms, including search ads with Microsoft Advertising. After test campaigns went well, the company increased its advertising presence within Microsoft Bing. Sison says Looka found that those ads tend to reach different audiences who aren’t reached by other ad services.

When Sison learned about Multimedia Ads from Microsoft Advertising, he liked that the ads combine the company’s own assets like images, headlines, and descriptions with machine-learning technology. The result is large visual ads that grab attention.

“When I saw them, I said, ‘these look perfect for us.’ We're a logo branding company. It's in our best interest to show the brands and logos that our customers have created,” Sison says. The company quickly started test campaigns with that advertising format.

Example of Looka ad imagery

The results Looka has seen since using Multimedia Ads from Microsoft Advertising paint a stunning picture. Since fall 2021, Multimedia Ads accounted for 25 percent of revenue generated by Looka’s customer acquisition campaigns. Overall, the return on ad spending on Multimedia Ads has been a stunning 200 percent higher than the return on spending with text and search ads. Those results have encouraged Looka to create more banners and other visual assets to use in its search-focused advertising campaigns.

“For a logo design and branding company like Looka—where visuals are a key selling point—Multimedia Ads from Microsoft have proven to be an effective addition to our acquisition portfolio,” Sison says. “Not only do they take up more real estate in the search results page, which allows us to showcase our customers' beautiful logos, but they drive fantastic business results.”