Measurement insights driving marketing ROI

We uncovered an interesting insight whilst managing an e-commerce campaign for a sports retailer launching a new clothing range in-market targeted to a core audience of 16-25 year old males over October in the lead-up to Christmas time.

Campaign Approach We launched the campaign using key performance channels inclusive of Paid Search, Social, YouTube, Programmatic Video and Display. Each of these channels incorporated demographic targeting where possible to ensure our investment was focused on our core target audience. It is worth noting that this was not applied to our paid search activity, or to our custom audiences leveraging 1st party data for retargeting in order to maximise optimisation scope. We incorporated a measurement framework optimising to platform engagement, direct revenue driven from the e-commerce channel and post-campaign retailer data.

Findings During the campaign period, we discovered through our Google Analytics reporting that a significant volume of clicks-to-site were generated from a 45+ year old female demographic. This was not expected as the clothing range was designed for young males, creative messaging in-market specifically spoke to this demo, and our paid media strategy used refined targeting to minimise any potential wastage.

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As we investigated the cause behind such high site visitation from this female demographic, we found the traffic was largely generated from organic search using brand terms. This demonstrated a surprising but significant awareness and exposure among this female demographic, despite our marketing efforts speaking to young males.

What our team found especially interesting was that despite this audience driving 30% of all traffic to our product specific landing page during our campaign period, they only accounted for 4.5% of product sales demonstrating that this high traffic to-site did not equate to sales. Instead of accepting this as an anomaly in the digital ecosystem where females were driving a high volume of traffic to-site without converting, we took a step further to understand what action this audience took next and whether they converted elsewhere.

Further Measurement and Insight We sourced sales data from in-store retailers which although limited in detail, clearly demonstrated that a significant percentage of the retail shoppers who had purchased the product were females 45+ (Source: Retailer Loyalty Data). We continued to investigate what caused this unexpected customer base to buy such a high volume of units of this particular product range in-store.

After reviewing various data sources including the brand’s social channels, we uncovered that a female blogger with a highly skewed older female following had created a dedicated post about this new range without any paid sponsorship at the time of launch. With a highly engaged following of 200k+, this blogger had clearly influenced this older group of female customers by posting about how this was the perfect purchase for young-adult sons. The marketing team had been completely unaware of this additional exposure of their new range however this clearly explained the behaviour of this particular segment where they researched online and then made their final purchase decision in-store. This provided a key insight that an audience outside of the core target audience was just as valuable for the brand as their target 16-25 year old male audience

Outcome We unpacked this insight alongside a key recommendation for the brand to undertake a separate Christmas marketing campaign targeting mums in-market for Xmas presents for their sons. We delivered a forecast using a predictive model which demonstrated they could drive sales incrementality by investing 10% of their marketing budget into this approach.

With these insights in hand, the brand’s marketing team moved ahead with developing a small sub-campaign targeting mums with creative which specifically spoke to them. This separate targeting approach drove an impressive 2.7:1 ROAS surpassing our initial forecasts.

This speaks testament to a forward thinking brand which derived great value from applying measurement insights and feeding these back into marketing strategy.

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