Case Study · Kwikset
In August 2025 we told Kwikset to stop funding our own conversion campaigns on two of the three paid platforms. By December, Buy Now clicks had gone from 6,523 a month to 33,747.
Kwikset is the number one lock brand in the United States and Canada, and it never sees its own sales: its website hands every shopper to a retailer such as Home Depot, Lowe’s or Amazon. Sociallyin has run social for both of its divisions. We scored the whole program on the click that makes that hand-off, and across seventeen months of reports it produced 323,213 of them on $675,541 of media.
- Scored on one button
- Budgeted SKU by SKU
- Two divisions, five platforms
01Brands Nobody Can Pronounce
The number one lock brand was losing the entry price point to brands nobody had heard of.
Kwikset has protected people’s homes since 1946. It is the number one lock brand in the United States and Canada, its SmartKey cylinder re-keys a lock in seconds without a locksmith, and it sits inside ASSA ABLOY, the largest lock group in the world.
None of that was showing up in the numbers Kwikset brought into 2025. Schlage’s share gains had put it in the number one spot on Amazon for electronic and mechanical locks combined, up 30% on the year, and up 7.6% in mechanical share on Amazon.com. Underneath both of them, a tier of unbranded imports (Probrico, Knobwell, Goldenwarm, Gobekor) and store private labels was taking the entry price point.
Social had been doing what social does at a hardware brand: handsome doors and brass in good light, in posts that lived and died inside the platform. And Kwikset’s own website is built to pass the shopper to a retailer, so every dollar the brand earns is rung up at somebody else’s register.
The line that explained it came from Kwikset’s own 2025 social brief. Describing the share loss to no-name brands, it said shoppers “don’t understand or potentially care about the difference.” A company that tests its hardware to a certified grade had watched buyers treat it as interchangeable with a lock that arrives in a plain box.
That was the real problem, and it was distance. The shopper was on Instagram, the lock was in aisle 12 at Home Depot, and nothing in the feed was built to walk her the four clicks between the two.
02One Button
We scored the whole program on one button.
The easy move was to sell reach. Kwikset already had reach. What it did not have was a number its sales team could take into a line review with a retail buyer.
So we pointed the program at PriceSpider. Every conversion campaign, and every product post that could carry a link, ended on a Buy Now button that hands the shopper to a retailer with the exact SKU on screen. That click became the only conversion we reported.
Both divisions ran on it. Mechanical covers the Signature Series and Security Series door hardware, sold to homeowners mid-renovation. Electronic covers the Halo and Aura smart locks, sold to a security-minded tech buyer. Different products and different creative, on one scoreboard.
03Two Divisions, Five Platforms
What the program was made of.
In 2025 the two divisions published 1,132 organic posts for 1.52 million organic impressions, with organic Pinterest reported on top of that, and ran paid media on Meta, Pinterest and TikTok. Underneath those totals was a fixed monthly production run per division: 13 graphics, 14 photo assets, 10 Instagram Stories, 17 creator videos and 20 Pinterest repins, across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Pinterest, which Kwikset’s brief asked us to bring into the program that year.
| Part | Description | Qty |
|---|---|---|
| A | Graphics | 13 |
| B | Photo assets | 14 |
| C | Instagram Stories | 10 |
| D | Creator videos | 17 |
| E | Pinterest repins | 20 |
| Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Pinterest | 5 |
Creator videos from the program
Creators
Creators fed the same scoreboard. DIY and home-design creators for Mechanical, smart-home reviewers for Electronic, and the videos that won were cleared for paid use and the best of them ran as ads. In the first quarter of 2026 one mid-sized creator returned about $18,000 of earned media in its first weeks on a $4,000 fee.
Tags
Every post carried a content-type tag so the losers could be cut on evidence. DIY install content led on scale in 2025, with 165,700 impressions and 7,300 engagements, the most of any content type. Product reviews finished last of the four types tracked. We cut toward the first and away from the last.
Inbox
The inbox was a sales function too. Most of what came in was some version of “will this fit my door,” and answering that quickly is part of selling a lock.
Paid was budgeted SKU by SKU. Eight Mechanical products each carried their own budget, their own creative and their own cost per Buy Now click. In 2025 Sora closed at $0.72 a click, Caerus at $0.92, Brentford at $1.46, Mirada and Halifax LED at $1.62, while Gunmetal ran at $5.86, Prava at $6.53 and SmartKey at $13.35. A product could be defunded on its own evidence without touching the account around it.
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KW-01Under $2Sora$0.7233,760 Buy Now clicksQ1 2026 · $0.50
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KW-02Under $2Caerus$0.929,945 Buy Now clicksQ1 2026 · $0.57
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KW-03Under $2Brentford$1.4616,544 Buy Now clicksQ1 2026 · $0.93
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KW-04Under $2Mirada$1.6234,143 Buy Now clicks
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KW-05Under $2Halifax LED$1.6215,166 Buy Now clicks
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KW-06Over $5Gunmetal$5.861,694 Buy Now clicksQ1 2026 · $0.65
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KW-07Over $5Prava$6.531,938 Buy Now clicks
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KW-08Over $5SmartKey$13.351,812 Buy Now clicksQ1 2026 · $0.51
Q1 2026 stamps: cost per Buy Now click in the first-quarter 2026 conversion campaigns, for the five SKUs that ran in both periods.
Gunmetal was one of the three most expensive SKUs of 2025, at $5.86 a Buy Now click, and it was on the plan for the first quarter of 2026. That quarter it drove more Buy Now clicks than any other Mechanical SKU in the conversion campaigns: 26,832, at $0.65 each. Every SKU that ran in both periods got cheaper that quarter: Sora, Caerus and Brentford by about a third, Gunmetal by nearly nine-tenths. SmartKey, the most expensive SKU of 2025 at $13.35, ran at $0.51 on a smaller budget once its campaigns started in mid-February.
04August 2025
The recommendation was to stop spending on two of our own conversion channels.
By August the Mechanical account was working and expensive. The month closed at 6,523 Buy Now clicks at $3.53 each, and by then the account had made one thing plain: TikTok and Pinterest were returning Buy Now clicks at a far higher cost than Meta. When the full year was tallied in January, every dollar spent on Meta in 2025 had bought a Buy Now click for $2.46. On TikTok the figure was $15.99. On Pinterest, $33.70.
We wrote the recommendation to pause both.
That is an uncomfortable email to send. TikTok and Pinterest were in scope and budgeted, with content on the approved plan. Pinterest had come into the program that same year at Kwikset’s request, and would finish the year at nearly three times its impressions target. Recommending that the client stop spending on two of our own deliverables is recommending that our program get smaller.
Kwikset agreed. From mid-August every TikTok conversion campaign and all Pinterest paid was paused and the budget moved into Meta conversion campaigns. TikTok stayed on the plan for follower growth, where it finished the year at 294% of its goal.
- TikTok conversion campaigns · paused mid-August
- Pinterest paid · paused mid-August
- Meta conversion campaigns · budget moved here
- Jun 202512,586
- Jul 20254,445
- Aug 20256,523
- Mid-August · budget moved to Meta
- Sep 202519,074
- Oct 202521,509
- Nov 202525,100
- Dec 202533,747
June, July and August are before the change, which landed in mid-August. Cost per Buy Now click went from $3.53 in August to $1.74 in December. Monthly media went up about two and a half times over the same stretch; Buy Now clicks went up more than five times. The best month before the change was June’s 12,586; December was 2.7 times that on 1.5 times the media. The Electronic division ran the same play on Pinterest in mid-November.
05Seventeen Months of Reports
What 323,213 Buy Now clicks look like up close.
Our traffic, by Kwikset’s own site analytics
| Facebook ER | Instagram ER | FB posts / mo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kwikset | 1.88% | 2.07% | 39 |
| Schlage | 0.2% | 0.1% | 3 |
| Eufy | 0.2% | 0.1% | 71 |
| Yale | 0.005% | 0.003% | 16 |
- 1.88% Facebook engagement rate for Kwikset, against Schlage at 0.2%, Eufy at 0.2% and Yale at 0.005%, with a smaller audience than two of the three.
- 2.07% Instagram engagement rate, against Schlage at 0.1% and Eufy at 0.1%. Eufy had about five times the followers.
- 39 Facebook posts a month, against Schlage’s 3. The brand that had taken the top spot on Amazon was posting three times a month.
Aura Reach launched into a program that already knew what a Buy Now click should cost. It delivered 32,176 of them at $0.53 each on $16,919 of media, the most efficient SKU in the division.
06The Click Before the Checkout
What the metric changed.
Kwikset sells through Home Depot, Lowe’s and Amazon. Its own site passes the shopper to a retailer, so it never sees the transaction and cannot put a pixel on another company’s order confirmation page. For a brand in that seat, awareness spend has nothing to point at.
The fix was choosing a number that sits on the near side of the hand-off and building every decision backward from it. Once the Buy Now click was the score, the hard calls got easy. Pause the platform costing $34 a Buy Now click. Scale the SKU costing 72 cents. Nobody had to argue about whether a post felt on brand.
It also surfaced the finding nobody had asked for. The brief wanted millennial homeowners; our own plan added Gen Z. The conversion data said the people clicking Buy Now were 55 to 64, then 45 to 54, then 65 and over, with 18 to 24 contributing about a thousand clicks in a quarter. So in the first quarter of 2026 we split the account: the main campaigns kept converting the homeowners who were clicking through, and a separate Instagram-only line went after the younger shopper at $1.00 a Buy Now click against $0.67 in the main conversion campaigns. The younger audience got its own budget and its own cost, instead of being averaged into the account.
A brand that sells through somebody else’s checkout still owns the click before it.
Sold through a retailer?
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