Supporting a multichannel ad strategy across the U.K., U.S., Australia, and New Zealand

Since starting as a surf lifestyle shop in 1985, City Beach has evolved into one of Australia’s most prolific fashion brand houses.

Today, the company sells more than 300 brands—including RipCurl, Billabong, Nike, and Adidas—across about 70 brick-and-mortar stores in Australia, and through websites for New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Prior to using Feedonomics, City Beach sent feeds directly from its ecommerce platform to multiple ad channels. The company’s marketing agency at the time suggested using Feedonomics to scale its efforts and improve performance.

Since partnering with Feedonomics, City Beach has been able to A/B test changes to its product data more effectively, build ad campaigns around performance-based custom labels, and increase its ROAS, revenue, and sales across multiple channels and regions.

“We’ve been able to take a more granular approach with our ad strategy, to better improve efficiency and ROAS,” said Cristel Gonzales, Digital Marketing Manager at City Beach. “This has been particularly valuable when handling multi-region feeds and a large quantity of SKUs.”

Supporting City Beach’s growth with robust tech and a dedicated feed manager

City Beach advertises on Google, Facebook, Afterpay, Pinterest, Rakuten, Snapchat, and TikTok across multiple regions. The company also uses local inventory ads to drive foot traffic to its brick-and-mortar stores in Australia.

With Feedonomics as the central hub for all things feed management—including optimizations, tests, exports, and more—City Beach’s advertising initiatives have become more streamlined and connected.

“Feedonomics has taken the labor-intensiveness out of feed management and automated our feed optimization reliably, which has saved hours and even days [compared to] alternative methods,” said Reena Shohet, Digital Marketing Manager at Insightly Media, City Beach’s digital marketing agency.

At first, City Beach used Feedonomics without the assistance of a dedicated feed manager, but with increasing requirements and objectives to grow internationally, the company realized that it wanted an additional level of service to help with testing and implementation of feed changes across channels.

City Beach now takes advantage of regular check-ins with its dedicated feed manager to help advance its multichannel and multi-region ad strategy. Instead of moving from one tactic to the next, Gonzales said the sessions with Feedonomics have led to more cohesive campaigns that complement each other.

“Having [a dedicated feed manager] there gives us more of a strategy view of where we’re going with Feedonomics,” Gonzales, who manages all the brand’s paid marketing campaigns and online promotions, said.

On top of this dedicated point of contact, Feedonomics also provides a team of specialists to assist with integrations, channel onboarding, feed build, and more. These specialists are channel experts who know what features, promotions, and initiatives are possible in certain regions, saving City Beach time and money on trial-and-error.

“[Your specialists] would tell us, ‘OK, we’ve implemented this in Australia and the U.S., but it’s not yet available in New Zealand,’” Gonzales said. “So, those are the things that make our life easier and more efficient working with Feedonomics.”

Enabling split-testing and improving efficiency, ROAS, and sales across channels and regions

One of the most notable advertising strategies Feedonomics helps City Beach with is testing and grouping product data changes to determine what listings performed best. The team then implements those findings across its other feeds.

“One initiative that came from this was a different approach to organizing our feed,” Gonzales said. “The outcome enabled us to focus media spend on top-performing SKUs, while reducing exposure on lower-impact products.”

Feedonomics imports performance data from sources like Google Analytics, matches that data to SKUs in the product feed, and applies custom labels based on City Beach’s specified criteria.

The company categorizes products as “heroes,” “villains,” “sidekicks,” “zombies,” and “bestsellers,” which are based on ROAS, conversions, and revenue generated by those SKUs.

“The ability to split-test product listings gives us a greater ability to improve our feed optimization, and ultimately increase sales,” Gonzales said.

By tagging SKUs with in-feed custom labels, City Beach can now easily build ad campaigns around product performance. This increases the company’s ROAS, and as a result, has grown revenue as well as the amount of ad spend available on more channels.

“We’re kind of collecting learnings as we go, and that pushes not just City Beach, but also our advertising partners,” Gonzales said. “The opportunity, of course, is we’re able to grow spend and also revenue in those specific channels. So, that’s very exciting for us.”