Supporting omnichannel for a multinational fashion company

Meaningful results

Ovative is a digital marketing agency on a mission to solve one of the biggest challenges in omnichannel commerce—how can brands with a widespread marketing presence identify exactly what’s working and what’s not?

When consumers interact with a brand at multiple touchpoints—a website, a physical store, an ad, social media—measuring incremental success and the overall impact of a marketing campaign isn’t easy.

Zak Haines, Senior Director of Product Feeds & Tag Management at Ovative, believes the solution lies in the agency’s Marketing Analytics Platform (MAP), an AI-driven tool that helps the company measure and unlock Enterprise Marketing Return (EMR) for its clients. EMR is a proprietary metric that accounts for short-term, incremental results, and long-term, overarching data analysis. Because Ovative’s strategies require the ability to manage data effectively, Feedonomics has been one of its key partners for more than five years, helping to optimize product data feeds, syndicate catalogs to new channels, and set up tests to improve campaign performance.

The partnership came in handy when a New York-based, multinational luxury fashion company was looking to improve its digital marketing returns and manage strategies for its three brands under one roof. Each brand used a different ecommerce and feed management platform, so streamlining operations was another big focus. “The company was looking to consolidate all of that, at least the digital media and the measurement of it, across the brands and channels with one firm, and we had the capabilities to take that on,” Haines said.

As part of the transition, the fashion company migrated product data from its three brands to PlumSlice, a product information management software. That data is continually imported to Feedonomics, where it can be optimized, categorized, exported, and syndicated on hundreds of marketing channels. With ongoing consultation and support from the feed specialists at Feedonomics, Ovative’s in-house teams took over feed and campaign management for the fashion company in 2021

After six months, one brand’s total revenue grew by 153%, and within a year, the agency profitably scaled the brand’s total paid media budgets by more than 200% across channels, with an increased return on ad spend and a lower cost per click. Rather than managing product data in isolation on disparate channels—such as online and offline—the fashion company has a single “data source of truth” and branches out to additional channels by connecting the source data to software like Feedonomics and Salesforce.

The Ovative team believes that the fashion company’s omnichannel approach is a model more large companies will adopt. “I think we’re going to see a lot more of that in the future, at least with businesses that size and larger—and that savvy—because it’s smart,” Haines said.

Listing products on a wide network of ad channels

With a unified approach to feed management, the fashion company has expanded its reach and sped up the go-to-market of campaign optimizations.

It advertises on Google, Facebook, Bing, Criteo, and affiliate channels, runs local inventory ads for more than 500 store locations, and uses product data in its email remarketing campaigns. According to Haines, the company was running more than 170 different exports from Feedonomics at one point.

Simple problems in the fashion company’s source data—such as missing attributes, price mismatches, unexpected stockouts, or incorrect formatting—can cause listings to be disapproved by the regulatory algorithms on Google or Facebook. Feedonomics has safeguards in place that help detect data anomalies before they’re exported and disapproved on the sites, and sends alerts to the Ovative team when an issue is identified.

“Feedonomics really helps us with upstream, ‘What are the problems going in the data?’, so that we don’t have to wait to find out if X, Y, or Z is broken on Facebook,” Haines said. “We already noticed it in the inbound data, and we can get that corrected. There’s a lot of data, and a lot of data equals a lot of opportunities for data to be incorrect.”

Testing changes and applying optimizations across brands and channels

Although Ovative manages the same kinds of campaigns for all the fashion company’s brands, —including paid social, display, paid search, and SEO—the investment and success varies for each brand on different channels. Using the Feedonomics platform, Ovative has been able to test changes to the fashion company’s product ads with a high degree of control to maximize incremental performance.

“There are nuances, but the desire is to have it all fairly similar in terms of what’s going on with their product data and who they’re exporting to,” Haines said. “And if we’re testing new partners, we want to intentionally test one, maybe, and use the learnings across brands, versus having to test on all three at once, retest, or anything like that.”

Some tests are only viable because of the automations and data transformations available within the Feedonomics platform.

In one test for Facebook dynamic ads, the agency directed shoppers to the homepage of a brand, rather than to the product detail page, by changing the URLs in the feed. In another test, product image URLs were swapped to showcase images of models wearing the products to determine if shoppers were more responsive to the ads.

“We were able to use transformers to find that correct image, and then change it only in the Facebook feed,” said Haines. “I don’t know how you would do that if you didn’t [use Feedonomics]. I guess you could manually do it. But this is something we’re exporting every hour. So that’s certainly something that was enabled only by having that technology platform in place.”

Performance data for the fashion company’s product listings is imported to Feedonomics and then used to group products by profitability, new customer acquisition rates, and other dimensions. Once the products are labeled in the product feed, they are used in campaign strategies that are optimized for those products.

According to Haines, the segmentation of products has helped the agency know when to “over-promote” products that bring in new customers to increase future customer value.

Getting ahead of the game with quality product data

Ovative’s feed team works in tandem with Feedonomics’ feed specialists to support the fashion company, and feed management tasks are divided up based on complexity, urgency, and experience with an issue.

“I think we’ve got a great partnership with Feedonomics where we’re in pretty active communication,” said Haines. “My own feeds team is less than a year old, so we know there are things we’re not going to know how to do.”

Even with access to 24/7 support and full-service feed management from Feedonomics, Haines’ team has made an ongoing effort to learn as much about the Feedonomics platform as possible to make quick feed adjustments.

In addition to completing interactive lessons in FeedAcademy and coursework through Feedonomics’ Certified Partner Program, the team takes advantage of monthly calls and quick messages to Feedonomics’ feed experts to “eliminate stumpers off the list.” Anything that Ovative learns in support of one client can be used to optimize feeds for other clients on Feedonomics as well.

“I think that as we continue to hone our best practices around feed data, Feedonomics allows us a scalable way—both in terms of efficiency and breadth—to effectively deploy those best practices,” Haines said. Haines and his team believe that quality product data will only increase in importance as the industry evolves and more media becomes shoppable.

“I’m glad that I feel we’re a little bit ahead of the game in terms of actually having a specialized and dedicated feeds team,” Haines said. “We recognized how much of our media was reliant on ads that effectively exist because of product data. We’ve got marketing specialists, and it’s not the best use of their time—when there are issues with that product data—for them to stop what they’re an expert at and go try and figure that out, because they have a Google suspension or whatever. So we have a team that’s specifically there to address those issues, and I think that puts us in a good place.”