Unlocking product segmentation for a multi-brand fashion collection

For more than 50 years, APG & Co. has curated a collection of Australia’s up-and-coming fashion brands, with a mission to help them evolve and grow to the top of the industry.

As the Digital Marketing Manager at APG & Co., Vanessa Tsang’s role is to build each brand’s online presence and boost sales through various ecommerce initiatives.

Tsang’s team primarily focuses on new customer acquisition and re-engaging consumers who have already visited the website, so serving ads to those audiences is a fundamental part of the company’s digital marketing strategy.

APG & Co.’s current collection includes three brands—Sportscraft, Saba, and JAG—and the team advertises their products across seven channels (Google Shopping, Facebook, Criteo, Rakuten, Klaviyo, Snapchat, and Pinterest) in Australia and New Zealand.

Those 42 unique exports were a lot to handle for one team, especially when each advertising channel has specific listing requirements and best practices to follow. Formatting each product catalogue in-house meant Tsang and company were splitting time between feed management and campaign management.

APG & Co. did most of the data formatting manually, so it was difficult or impossible to get granular with certain product details. For example, Tsang said the team never really had a tool that could help optimise product titles, and there were also limitations in other parts of the shopping experience.

“We previously weren’t able to segment the products as nicely as we could,” Tsang said. “We probably bundled everything into the one ‘all products’ campaign.”

After dealing with these challenges for some time, APG & Co. decided to seek out a feed management partner. Tsang and one of her colleagues had used Feedonomics at a previous company, and the seamless onboarding experience and platform benefits they experienced made it an easy choice for the team.

Since APG & Co. started working with Feedonomics in November 2021, the company has seen significant improvement in key advertising metrics, saved countless hours on feed management, and now has a more holistic view of its feeds through the platform.

“The ease of using the product was a massive win, and then the service has been great for us,” Tsang said. “The team has been great, the experience with Feedonomics has been great, and the results have been great. So I highly recommend it.”

Where platform flexibility and full-service support meet

Because Sportscraft, Saba, and JAG have separate product data sources, Tsang’s team leaned on Feedonomics’ platform and full-service support team—including a feed manager dedicated to APG & Co.—to ingest each brand’s catalogue, optimise listings for every channel, and configure feed exports more efficiently.

To optimise each brand’s product listings, APG & Co.’s dedicated feed manager set up custom transformer rules within the Feedonomics platform, which enabled quick, large-scale changes across different product catalogues.

“With the team on board at Feedonomics, we could start to play around with the titles,” Tsang said. “We were able to clean up and standardize how our product titles look, so from an aesthetic perspective, [they look] better in the eyes of the consumer.”

By giving the team more control over product data, Tsang said Feedonomics has unlocked product segmentation for APG & Co., allowing the digital marketing team to build out different journeys based on where prospects are in the funnel.

“With Feedonomics’ help, we were able to break [campaigns] out into a category level where we can start to treat them a little bit differently,” Tsang said. “We can bundle our audiences into our best-selling category and use that subset of products to serve to the prospective audiences, so when they do see our products, it’s the ones we want to hero. It does allow a lot of that flexibility to build our strategy to see the whole funnel through.”

That flexibility extended to updating promotions as well. Because APG & Co.’s digital marketing team uses a custom label spreadsheet to designate which SKUs are eligible for certain promotions, the company’s dedicated feed manager set up a custom import that automatically passes changes from the spreadsheet into the platform on an hourly basis.

“The fact that we can update custom labels on the fly actually helps alleviate the stress from our perspective, because we don’t necessarily need to rely on a middle man to help us do it,” Tsang said. “We can literally just load it onto a sheet, have it upload, and it’s gone into the ether and passes back to the feed for us. I think that works really well because there are so many changes on the ecommerce side that it’s probably better that we are able to manage it like this.”

Tsang’s team is able to focus on promotion- and campaign-specific details because APG & Co.’s dedicated feed manager handles the implementation of all data transformers and business rules on the Feedonomics side.

“[Our dedicated feed manager] is super on the ball,” Tsang said. “I don’t think we’re in the same time zone at all, but he gets back really quick, like within two to three hours. I don’t know how he does it, but he does it, so it’s bloody great. And then in addition to that, on days when I thought he wasn’t awake yet, I just use the feed support channel. And even with that, the response rate is just so quick… So I feel like from a support perspective, Feedonomics by far has the best support for any partner.”

Save time and increase performance

The platform functionality and hands-on support APG & Co. receives from Feedonomics has made a significant business impact on its brand collection. Perhaps the best illustration of that, Tsang said, came after the team optimised the company’s Google Shopping feeds and segmented its catch-all campaign into category campaigns for one of the brands.

“Straight off the bat, we saw our CPCs improve by 48% and our ROI increased by 86%,” she said. “So we’ve seen massive wins from the segmentation. Similar numbers are seen across the board for the other brands, but I think that one was quite impactful for us.”

Beyond the performance returns, Tsang said Feedonomics has saved the team countless hours and given everyone at APG & Co. more visibility into the data sent to each channel.

“The fact that you can have the one hub to power all of the feeds across the regions is a massive time saver for us,” Tsang said. “We’re not necessarily duplicating the process six to 12 times per brand. We can literally just make that change on the platform and the output files we want to apply it to. With that, it saves a lot of time and it does allow us to have a holistic view of how the current feed looks from a channels and countries perspective.”