Major women’s apparel retailer measures and proves incrementality with Commerce Growth

Digitas is the premier integrated agency in the Publicis Groupe, grounded in the belief that today’s marketing problems can no longer be siloed. The agency delivers breakthrough ideas and results for clients through Media-Fueled Creativity: the intersection of Creative, Media, Data, and Technology.

Digitas wanted to help one of their clients—a heritage American brand that specializes in women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories—understand the impact and measure the value of advertising with Criteo by running an incrementality test.

With over 500 in-person stores and a growing ecommerce business, the Apparel & Accessories client turned to Criteo’s Commerce Growth solutions to generate customer growth across their truly omnichannel expression.

Testing the performance impact of Criteo ads

Criteo worked with the client’s agency, Digitas, to design an incrementality test that assigned shoppers to two random groups: Group A or Group B. Criteo continued to deliver ads to Group A in a business-as-usual way. Meanwhile, all marketing efforts were suppressed for Group B. By creating this control group, Criteo was able to identify the performance impact of its ads using its advanced “ghost bids” methodology.

Following a two-week cleansing period that ensured that individuals in Group B did not see any recent ads from the client, Criteo collected and measured a wide range of KPIs, including user count, visits, conversions, and revenue between the two groups over the course of the next three weeks of testing.

Measuring big incrementality results

At the end of the test, the client saw that Criteo drove incremental value to their marketing mix—with an 8.1% observed lift in revenue from Criteo ads vs. without Criteo ads. The brand also saw a 4.2x incremental return on ad spend driven from the group with Criteo ads. Compared to the industry benchmark, the campaign generated a +300% total revenue lift.

Emily Nix, Senior Analyst, Precision Media at Digitas shared, “Criteo’s streamlined approach to measuring incrementality enabled us to see results in a few short weeks with minimal impact to our campaign setup and without a drop in performance. Thanks to their transparent measurement methodology, we were able to prove the true value of display marketing in a performance-oriented setting.”