How Sarenza drove fresh traffic while optimizing on spend

“The number 1 for online shoes.” This is the slogan behind Sarenza, the eCommerce company that has grown from a French startup into one of the most powerful online stores in Europe. Their business model is simple and has proved to be successful: provide as much choice as possible, alongside outstanding customer service.

Today, Sarenza is present in 29 countries, offers more than 600 brands in 50,000 styles, and provides efficient delivery in 24 hours with free returns.

Since 2019, Sarenza has expanded to go beyond shoes, providing a range of clothing brands for their customers. In line with this growth, Sarenza has fixed their objectives on growing sustainable business while focusing on the company’s profitability.

“Obtaining this double objective means that we need to be able to find fresh traffic in the most cost-effective way possible,” says Rob Winston, Digital Display Manager for France & international markets. Rob is focused on driving business across the entire customer journey, from generating traffic through to final sale.

“We believe that our display partners can be the initiators of the sale for us,” says Rob.

Finding new, in-market shoe shoppers

Sarenza has a longstanding partnership with Criteo, relying on its AI technology to deliver the right display ad to the right person, at the right time in their buying cycle. In addition to conversion-focused campaigns, they believed that Criteo would be an efficient solution to help drive qualified traffic to their site and attract engaged visitors that would interact with their product pages.

Sarenza used Criteo to find new, potential customers with always-on campaigns to achieve traffic objectives throughout the year. These campaigns are created using the Criteo Shopper Graph, a unique commerce dataset which is built from trillions of customer journeys that equate to over $800B annual ecommerce transactions.

Sarenza used Criteo’s Commerce Audience built by selecting from over 140 product-browsing and purchase categories to focus on people who were showing an active interest in shoes.

They also used Criteo’s Similar Audience, a powerful lookalike AI technology to find new people that look like their existing website visitors.

Flexible ad formats showcased Sarenza’s brand, while also presenting the ideal products, and Dynamic Creative Optimization technology tailored ads on the fly.

“Criteo’s ad formats provide a unique mix of branding images and dynamic, personalized product recommendations which have been very efficient for us,” says Rob. “We do not have to spend time updating static banners and text as we do with other vendors.”

Delivering quality traffic, efficiently

Sarenza achieved its traffic objectives while optimizing their budget. The cost per click was highly competitive — almost half the price compared to other vendors. The cost per visit was also competitive and aligned to their expectations between €0.18 and €0.31.

Sarenza also found that their campaign targeting individuals who were in-market for shoes drove qualified visitors to the site who were more likely to engage with their product pages and take an action on the site. “In terms of what we want from an ad display, this campaign is doing all the right things: bringing fresh traffic to the site while initiating future sales.”

“The results from the campaigns have been stable and consistently good,” says Rob. “I love how efficient it is to run campaigns with Criteo — we have a lot of reward with minimal effort.”