Industry:
Retail
Location:
Pittsburgh, PA
http://ae.com
  • 4x higher ROAS—versus regular Lookalike Audiences
  • 2.5x increased ROAS—from Q4 2016 to Q2 2017
  • 14.5 percentage points increase—share of Broad Audiences revenue over total

Background

American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) has long been a leader and first mover in the digital advertising space, constantly striving to find new ways to improve online campaign performance. As a result, adopting Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads as a key component of their social advertising program was a natural fit. Activating the Marin Software partnership as an advisor and technology provider, Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads delivered continuously strong and improving cost per acquisition, and growth in revenue and return on ad spend.

Challenges

While Dynamic Ads is the strongest performance-focused ad format Facebook currently offers—consistently producing ROI-positive campaigns by delivering feed-based ads aligned with website browsing and purchase behaviors—until recently it’s been a retargeting-only solution.

Because of this, the potential for Dynamic Ads to scale has been limited, as brands stay confined to their in-market audiences of website visitors for pure retargeting. And, there was still the challenge of deploying the same feed-based solution to acquire new customers.

Solution

The Marin Customer Success team worked hand in hand with Facebook to enable early access to Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads for AEO and its apparel sub-brand, Aerie. Broad Audiences for DA enables brands to target non-visitors with Dynamic Ads, helping to supercharge their prospecting program. Facebook uses thousands of signals to anonymously capture behavior patterns and pixel data across the web to identify users most likely to purchase—fueling a custom delivery algorithm to offer the highest likelihood of success.

In addition, the team leveraged proprietary optimization features such as the Marin Budget Allocation (MBA) to ensure proper budget allotment and performance at scale.

Results

Over the span of three quarters starting in Q4 2016, Broad Audiences for Dynamic Ads continuously outperformed other non-dynamic prospecting tactics and ad formats in terms of Revenue on Ad Spend. Performance eventually ramped up enough that it became comparable with retargeting efficacy and ROAS.

By the end of Q2 2017, AEO and Aerie saw extraordinary results, calculated using AEO’s strict attribution logic of one-day, post-click, and no post-view attribution:

  • 4x higher ROAS—versus regular Lookalike Audiences
  • 2.5x increased ROAS—from Q4 2016 to Q2 2017
  • 14.5 percentage points increase—share of Broad Audiences revenue over total

Outcome and Future Vision

Dynamic Ads with Broad Audiences now captures a large portion of AEO’s and Aerie’s performance advertising monthly budgets allocated to Facebook on an ongoing basis.

The team plans to launch other Dynamic Ads initiatives involving Marin Software technology, aiming for even greater performance improvements.