How Duolingo is building brand loyalty at positive ROI with their Merch Store
Client
Year
THE CHALLENGE
Evolve the merch store into a channel that both amplifies the Duolingo brand and delivers positive ROI at scale.
Duolingo has one of the most loved brands in the world – and the merch store is a natural extension of that love. Fans already wanted Duo on their desks, hoodies and coffee mugs, but the marketing setup around the store hadn’t fully caught up. Media investment was modest, activity was largely limited to Google Shopping, and the merch store functioned more as an early-stage brand touchpoint than a coordinated growth opportunity.
THE TASK
Unlock Merch Store potential without losing what makes Duolingo special.
We needed to show that the store could handle a significant step-up in media investment while still delivering efficient returns. That meant moving from a single-channel setup to a multi-channel performance ecosystem that could both capture existing demand and create new demand among fans who hadn’t yet considered buying merch.
We also wanted to understand how Duolingo’s audience prefers to shop: do they respond better to classic performance ads with strong calls to action, or to product-led formats that feel more native and more in tune with the brand’s playful personality? And whatever we built had to be practical – a setup Duolingo’s team could continue to scale and manage without unnecessary complexity.
THE STRATEGY
We started from a simple belief: Duolingo’s fandom is a performance asset.
Instead of pushing the merch store into a hard-sell model, we designed a system where that existing brand love could do more of the work. That meant three things:
- Build a lean, multi-channel engine around the store, expanding beyond Shopping into Google Performance Max and adding Meta and TikTok as a complementary channels.
- Keep the account structure simple, so algorithms had strong signals and the team could scale budgets without fragmenting campaigns.
- Make creative variety and product imagery central to the plan, using testing to see whether product-led formats could outperform classic performance ads.
This strategy set the direction. The execution made it real.
THE EXECUTION
We rebuilt the setup around a few simple moves.
On Meta, we ran everything through one Advantage+ always-on campaign with a single ad set, letting the algorithm decide who to show each ad to instead of slicing audiences into tiny segments. On Google, we upgraded from Shopping-only to Performance Max (pMax) so the merch store could show up across Search, Display and YouTube from one consolidated campaign. We scaled media investment significantly (at peak we +70x vs. business as usual levels) to capture holiday gifting demand and to give new channels a chance to learn and optimize efficiency.
Creatively, we kept it just as straightforward. We ran flexible and catalog-style ads using real product images from the website alongside more traditional, CTA-heavy performance ads. Both approaches had room to perform, and we let the data decide which style Duolingo fans responded to.
THE RESULT
We scaled sales revenue +50x while keeping performance strong, turning the merch store into a channel that can now sustain meaningful, ongoing growth.
- Product-led creatives won: Catalog and flexible ads with real product imagery consistently outperformed CTA-heavy ads on both Meta and Google pMax.
- Multi-channel unlocked more value: Moving from Google Shopping-only to a combined Meta + pMax setup increased volume and made better use of Duolingo’s brand strength.
- Simplicity made scaling easy: A single Meta campaign and a consolidated pMax structure allowed investment to grow quickly without adding unnecessary fragmentation. We followed the latest channel best practices and let the creatives do the heavy lifting.