How to take simple images from the product catalogue to the next level and perform 1.5 times better
Dynamic Ads have proven to be a highly performing ad format for e-commerce clients. However, the creative part of such ads depends entirely on the images and product cards in a business’s product feed. In most cases, these images are rather simplistic (e.g. a plain image of a product on a white background) and don’t look that eye-catching or attractive.
Sometimes, the product itself may not even be centred in the image.
Brands want to attract social media users to buy what they have to offer, so don’t settle for plain product images – you can easily utilise your brand too. Aitarget has run multiple tests with Dynamic Ads for different e-commerce clients and concluded that Dynamic Ads without branding deliver worse results than Dynamic Ads with brand identity elements.
TSUM is an Aitarget client and one of the biggest online retailers in Russia, combining an extensive e-commerce presence with retail, specialising in luxury fashion brands. TSUM and Aitarget collaborated to test whether branded Dynamic Ads performed better than unbranded ones, eventually increasing Facebook ad campaign ROAS. The Aitarget Tool was used to process the TSUM catalogue and launch ads with brand identity in a few clicks.
Overlaying, over and over
The Summer Sale is a hot period for marketing campaigns for fashion brands, including those sold by TSUM. Campaigns are usually widely supported across different media, with Facebook and especially Instagram being main performance marketing channels for TSUM that drive results within their key performance indicators.
For this campaign, TSUM wanted to focus on the most profitable product categories. The main challenge for Aitarget was to create a strategy to increase the conversion rate among potential customers. We came up with the idea that personalisation and branding could increase user engagement and deliver a unique selling proposition for TSUM. Given TSUM has a strong brand identity, we decided to use it for the product catalogue cards in ads.
Aitarget studied TSUM’s brand identity and together with luxury brand retailer we developed a template for their Dynamic Ads. The template used centred and cropped product images and overlays with the crossed out old price, sale price, product brand, and TSUM logo.
Once designed, this template was extended across all products in the TSUM catalogue, using Aitarget’s E-Commerce Tool. This allowed us to easily and automatically create more than 15,000 branded cards without any effort from the client’s own team. Moreover, these cards were dynamically updated every two hours based on product feed data changes.
Putting branding to the test
To test whether the template creative with branded overlays brought better results than non-customised product cards on plain white backgrounds, Aitarget and TSUM ran Facebook Conversion Lift (self-served). The test lasted from 29 July to 11 August 2019.
Two near-identical ad campaigns were created for TSUM, each with the “Catalogue Sales” goal. The only difference between the campaigns was the creative used. In the first we used Carousels with standard product cards. In the second one we used Carousels with the same products, but using image cards with our dynamic, branded overlays.
The audience was divided in two, and the algorithm observed which campaign (with or without overlays) provided the best user experience with the ads, and the larger number of website and mobile app conversions. There was no splitting of the audience by interests. As for placements, we used only Facebook and Instagram feeds.
During the test, we limited our choice to the top five best-selling categories from the TSUM catalogue (dresses, sneakers, shoes, bags, coats) to retarget users who’d added products from these categories to their cart, but didn’t convert to purchase, in the past seven days. Best categories were defined by analysing the results from previous ad campaigns.
Better branding and lower costs
The results of our test showed that the campaign with overlays created from the Aitarget Tool brought more conversions than the plain cards, with a 50% greater return on ad spend, an 80% decrease in cost per click, and 2.5 times decreased CPM.
Head of Performance marketing, E-commerce Department, TSUM:
“At the moment, we are working on personalisation, not only for a type of advertising campaign, but also for certain seasonal activities and offers. I believe that one of the best solutions available to everyone for standing out from competitors is to think outside of the box when it comes to creatives. The only issue is how much you have in terms of resources to create an efficient version. For us, Aitarget became the ones to do this. We generate the creatives ourselves with the help of our internal team and Aitarget helps roll out and test creatives on Facebook and Instagram, providing a tool to integrate our ideas into the platform.”
