Full Power Across the Entire Funnel
Aventon was already seeing strong performance from the traditional retargeting campaign it was running with Criteo. But to meet its aggressive revenue goal, the ebike retailer knew that it would need both upper and lower-funnel campaigns working together in concert. At their agency’s recommendation, Aventon partnered with Criteo on campaigns to build awareness, drive traffic, and continuously fuel their lower-funnel campaigns.
Adele Nasr, Chief Marketing Officer, at Aventon, explained, “Being a B2C brand, it is important to have that upper-funnel tactic running in order to feed the lower funnels. For brands of our size, it would be a missed opportunity as you start seeing some fatigue in lower-funnels without a channel to feed them.”
Building Targeted Awareness with Online Video
Aventon began by launching an online video advertising campaign to build brand awareness.
By leveraging Criteo’s ability to activate first-party commerce data, Aventon could target their video ads to in-market consumers who were more likely to buy. This, coupled with Criteo’s broad reach across video partners and publishers, helped Aventon immediately see an increase in quality traffic.
Because they were also working with Criteo on lower-funnel campaigns, they were able to connect video views to downstream conversions and clearly see how their upper-funnel efforts were fueling lower-funnel results.
This was the end goal for Nasr: “We wanted to leverage economy of scale, if you will, by having both under the same relationship and working together for that full-funnel strategy.”
Driving High-Intent Traffic with Contextual Targeting
Aventon also launched a contextual targeting campaign to drive additional traffic. Criteo is unique in this space, as it is the only solution available today that uses both commerce signals and contextual signals to identify the most impactful placements. “Our agency partner recommended we go even deeper by leveraging Criteo and using our first-party data to target higher intent traffic and ultimately increase sales,” said Nasr.
Criteo’s contextual targeting solution used its First-Party Media Network to analyze where Aventon’s products were displayed most often on the open internet. Then, Criteo calculated an affinity score between each product and every contextual category and domain in its network. This allowed Aventon to target media lookalikes that were most likely to drive traffic to their site.
In addition to its ability to deliver high-quality visits, the fact that contextual targeting works without the use of cookies was also an important factor for Nasr. “Not only is cookie-based advertising soon to be a thing of the past, but we believe that using first-party data to target audiences will yield more relevant and higher intent results,” she explained.
The Benefits of Going the Extra Mile
The beauty of an ebike is that it can take you farther than a human-powered bike. The same is true of a full-funnel strategy with one partner. Aventon found that by uniting their upper and lower-funnel campaigns through Criteo, they benefited from synchronicities across campaigns — all the while feeding their conversion campaigns and enabling full-funnel reporting.
“Criteo’s partnership has been instrumental in reaching our goals by continuing to stay top of mind and directing high intent traffic back onto our site and ultimately converting,” confirmed Nasr. “Criteo has become a top traffic source to our website. We plan to continue the partnership as we continue to scale and recently started CTV with Criteo.”
