As ecommerce continues to grow rapidly for bicycle company, Dynacraft it became evident that it needed to enhance visibility to its customers, particularly in its children’s bicycle category, particularly ahead of the 2018 holiday season.
“We needed to work through the clutter,” said Patricia Gates, Director of Business Development at Dynacraft. “We were looking to increase visibility among in-market shoppers and secure above-the-fold placements in search and browse while achieving a 400% ROAS (return on ad spend).”
Dynacraft worked with advertising platform Criteo to launch a campaign using Criteo’s Sponsored Products in late summer 2018. This helped the brand drive incremental sales during a slower retail season and garnering valuable consumer insights ahead of peak holiday.
The company used a data strategy based on Dynacraft’s core consumer and product line combined with Criteo’s category insights. The campaign was optimized to deliver a customized experience for shoppers during the holiday season.
Gates said the work with Criteo helped bring Dynacraft to the top of the search engine results pages.
Dynacraft saw a 5x increase in units sold each day vs. the average, more than a 60% increase in share of category product detail page views, a 70% impression share of voice in the “bicycles” category and a 55% impression share of voice in the “riding toys” category.
“We were able to understand which SKUs were our best performers from the very start since we had access to engagement metrics and could directly connect ads to actual sales,” said Gates. “Our ROAS continually improved as a campaign progressed, netting 650% in November, 800% in December and 1,000% on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, far exceeding our expectations.”
Gates said the success of the Sponsored Products campaign was evident immediately. From the beginning of the partnership, it was already driving incremental sales, especially noticeable for SKUs having issues gaining traction onsite organically.
“The most impressive success came during the Q4 holiday season when we experienced the most competition in the children’s bicycle category,” said Gates. “Our ROAS reached up to 1,000% with a 70% impression share of voice in bicycles, which surpassed our goals and made our most important season a complete success.”
Jessica Breslav, Managing Director of Mid-Market Americas for Criteo, said the campaign helped Dynacraft ensure its products were seen first by shoppers and included in their consideration set.
Another added benefit was that organic visibility was positively influenced as well. Retailer algorithms begin to move the organic listings up the page as paid activity contributes to overall clickthrough and sales data for a particular SKU.
“We were able to identify that the problem wasn’t our products or brand, but being noticed in a saturated category,” said Gates. “We found that if we can get into a shopper’s consideration set, we had a very high chance of converting.”
Breslav said that personalization played a key role here as well. Criteo focused on merging its category insights with Dynacraft’s core product line and consumers to develop a custom strategy that would overcome its challenges and drive the balance of scale and performance it was looking for.
“As an example, we continuously optimized the SKU set based on shopper affinity signals in order to come up with the winning lineup for the holidays,” said Breslav. “We were then able to layer the right ad with the right person by relying on our intent-based targeting algorithm and then deliver it at the right time by leveraging our knowledge of seasonality and the category across the network.”
Dynacraft has already begun to identify and strategize for opportunities related to upcoming product launches and the off season.