This post is by Judge Graham, President of Sq1, a full-service performance marketing agency.
Currently, U.S. e-commerce sales comprise just 7% of total U.S. retail sales. Today’s marketers realize the importance of connecting their online marketing to offline sales transactions to get a true read on their marketing ROI, and are beginning to address the challenge with programmatic technology. Specifically, programmatic is empowering marketers to reach their customers in new and engaging ways, as well as track, measure, and optimize the results in ways they could only imagine a few years ago. Sq1, together with MediaMath and our client, a national retailer, was able to test and prove a number of best practices to drive offline sales utilizing programmatic.
Challenges & Goals
Sq1 specifically sought to:
• Leverage the retailer’s CRM audiences to drive incremental in-store sales
• Increase viewable inventory, reduce ad fraud, and do so at scale
• Prove that display has the power to drive incremental sales volume at a higher ROI than print FSIs
Solutions
Leveraging MediaMath’s DMP, Sq1 onboarded the client’s CRM records and split them into two groups – a “test” and a “control” – in order to clearly delineate the impact of ad exposure to the “test” group. Sq1 ran the display campaign, targeting CRM audiences within a tight radius of retail locations. To further test the results, we also ran the same campaign with another major publisher through a direct buy.
Results
The test drove staggering results, helping us prove not just to this particular client, but all retail clients, that they need to be leveraging programmatic to scale incremental sales volume at higher ROI than print.
• $5:1 ROI for offline retail sales. This is not just total impression correlation, but the test/control groups proved that these ads influenced consumers to buy.
• 74% higher ROI from MediaMath than the same direct buy campaign
• 38% higher ROI from ad viewability/ad fraud optimization, driving a savings of nearly 13% of total budget!
With such incredible success, the retailer has steadily increased their programmatic budget year over year. As a performance-driven agency, we will continue to test additional CRM-based strategies, integrate multi-touch attribution with media modeling, and continue to prove the scale and value of programmatic marketing.