Want to maximise your ad budget in 2022? Joshua Wilson, Commercial Director for JAPAC shares why you need to grow your CLV, target the right people and avoid serving ads to bots.
Global retail eCommerce sales have been on a steady increase over the past few years. And, despite the pandemic, they are expected to increase by 12.23% in 2022.
Consumers have plenty of choice when it comes to buying online, so how can you reach your target audiences in the most efficient manner? Here are our top three tips.
1. Maximise your customer lifetime value (CLV)
Every customer has a lifecycle and it can differ between brands, based on the products or services you offer and customer types. By maximising your CLV, you can better plan your marketing budget on how much to invest in new customers and growing loyalists.
There are three main stages in the customer lifecycle – New, Convert and Grow. We recently worked with Miss Selfridge, a British fashion brand, to help them grow their new customers.
Miss Selfridge wanted to understand the true incrementality of display, and a new customer rate of over 40%. To help them achieve this, we spent 50% of the media budget on reaching new customers, leveraging real-time signals and brand uplift of keyword searches to understand where and when new customers are showing interest. We also showed relevant ads such as trade offers and new products.
In the Convert stage, meanwhile, we drove new customer conversions by showing products that they have viewed on the website across all digital marketing channels.
And finally, in the Grow stage, we grew customer lifetime value by reducing the cost per reactivation through post conversion activities aimed at retention and re-sale opportunities.
The overall ROI of the campaign was 4:1, and we delivered a new customer rate of 47% that was checked against Miss Selfridge’s lifetime customer file.
Many brands will measure their media by advertising performance KPIs, such as clicks, which do not represent the true performance of their marketing. Using this lifecycle approach ensures that you are tracking the right metrics to deliver the results you need and maximise your ROI.
2. Target your customers at the right time, at the right place, with the right messaging
The pandemic has helped to leapfrog internet penetration and adoption. Older generations who weren’t so keen on purchasing goods online were forced to learn for survival.
Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong which is battling it’s fifth wave of COVID-19 has the highest average annual online revenue per consumer goods for ecommerce. With every other retailer competing for these digital natives’ attention, how can you maximise your ad spends?
This is where dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) comes in. With tens of thousands of potential ad variants, you can build and serve tailored ads with the right messaging, at the right time, in split seconds.
So if your stock changes? No problem – you simply choose an alternative product to show in your ads. That’s how BWS, an Australian chain of liquor stores owned by Endeavour Group, leveraged DCO.
BWS’ three core pillars are range, convenience and value, and we built a DCO template of a single animation into three frames:
With the ability to connect the DCO ads to BWS’ actual, real time stock levels and prices, BWS was able to serve ads that show locals the products they have viewed, the current price and stock levels, and amount of time until offers expire. This resulted in a de-duped ROI of nearly 3:1, and a positive ROAS was achieved within 10 days.
Many brands are still managing their media campaigns based on siloed media channels, rather than messaging audiences at each touchpoint of the customer lifecycle to progress them to the next stage of their journey.
3. Ensure your ads are serving to real people, not bots
In Q4 2021, Integral Ad Science, a global leader in digital media quality, revealed that Singapore ranked the world’s highest fraud rates on desktop display, and viewability across all platforms saw a decline. On the other hand, Japan, although on the decline, has one of the highest ad fraud rates in the world. What does this mean to your retail brand?
Ad fraud refers to any impressions resulting from a deliberate activity that prevents the proper delivery of ads to real people, at the right time, in the right place — resulting in financial or opportunity loss by the advertiser and or publisher in a particular transaction. It appears in many different forms: bots, pixel stuffing, malicious apps, domain spoofing.
To put this into perspective, the global non-optimised ad fraud rate recorded for desktop display in H1 2021 is at 9.4%. That means for every 1,000 impressions served, 94 impressions were not served to your target audience. Furthermore, the global viewability rate recorded for desktop display in H1 2021 is at 69.5%.
So out of 906 impressions that were served to real people, only 629 impressions were considered viewable (at least 50% of pixels are on screen for at least one second after the ad has rendered). That means 371 impressions were wasted.
How can you reduce the probability of ad fraud in your marketing campaigns? First, look out for companies that adopt the IAB UK Gold Standard which improves digital advertising experience, helps compliance with the GDPR and ePrivacy law, tackles ad fraud and upholds brand safety.
Second, when working with your agencies, ask them how they are doing their part to ensure that your ads are served at a high viewability rate. Forward-looking companies would have already integrated their DSP with market-leading verification tools such as Integral Ad Science (IAS) and Grapeshot to ensure that every impression is delivered to a qualified person within an environment that is safe for all brands.
How can you maximise your retail ad budget?
There are multiple steps that you can take to ensure that you are maximising your retail ad budget. Spend time working out what your customers’ life cycle stages look like and what would be the ideal messaging unique to your brand that can create the hook. And to ensure that your ads reach the right customer at the right place with the right messaging, start using DCO.
Most importantly, take action now to ensure that your ad budget is efficiently spent by working with agencies that have been awarded IAB UK Gold Standard and proactively integrates with market-leading verification tools.
Want to find out how we can help you maximise your retail budget? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to explain more.
About the author
Joshua Wilson started his career in digital marketing in 2013 when he started his own affiliate marketing business promoting brands on social networks and mobile DSPs. From there, he moved into content and worked with brands to help build their online presence and communities.
Joshua started at Crimtan as a client services manager in 2015 working on the APAC business leveraging his knowledge for the market and Japanese language skills. In 2018, Joshua moved to Tokyo to build and open the Crimtan Japan office. Now in the role of Commercial Director, JAPAC, Joshua oversees the operation in the region promoting Crimtan’s local and international capabilities.