International growth with Shopping Ads

The challenge

Mountain Warehouse is a UK-based outdoor retailer with an assortment of more than 18,000 products. Their daily challenge when it comes to digital advertising? Achieving international growth goals and translating their large product assortment into high quality ad campaigns. In particular, they aimed to find the right level of granularity for their campaign structures and to flexibly adjust bids on the item-level while factoring in a wide range of business data.

The solution

Our status quo analysis revealed that Mountain Warehouse’s performance varied widely across different devices: desktop emerged as the clear conversion driver. So, the first goal we put on our agenda was to optimize mobile and tablet performance.

To do so, we split their campaign into three device-specific ones. Such “device splits” allow advertisers to achieve a maximum of bidding accuracy and efficiency. They enabled the Mountain Warehouse team to set growth targets per device and facilitated the automated adjustment of bids according to the conversion potential of individual SKUs on each device. This led to a massive improvement in overall ROAS.

Furthermore, we implemented advanced bid strategies (ABS) to exert a maximum of control over various product segments. For each segment of products across the entire assortment, a different bid strategy could now be set and the aggressiveness of the push in auctions defined. Most importantly, in combination with custom labels, business-specific attributes could henceforth be translated into highly accurate bids. Mountain Warehouse, for instance, chose to use advanced bid strategies to push goods on sale and adjust bid strategies based on product margins and product availability. Thus they were able to flexibly advertise products with a high profitability, availability and conversion potential more aggressively to reach their business goals.

The results

Together with the Mountain Warehouse team, we achieved an outperformance of their ROAS and revenue goals – consistently across countries, despite intense international competition.

In the United Kingdom, revenue spiked in April and May 2019, landing at a 91% and 101% year-over-year increase respectively. The ROAS was also significantly higher, noting a 17% increase in June (year-over-year).

In the USA and Canada as their second and third biggest international markets, this trend is reflected as well. In the US, May 2019 was a record month, with a year-over-year increase in revenue of more than 300%. CPCs decreased across all countries, while traffic and conversion rates both increased. This also points to a very high ad relevance amongst our target groups.