Challenge
Testing the role of retention in performance marketing
ABOUT YOU is one of the largest online retailers for fashion and lifestyle in Europe and the leading provider of personalized shopping experiences on smartphones. In the award-winning ABOUT YOU app and on aboutyou.com, customers find inspiration and a range of around 750,000 items from nearly 4,000 brands.
In performance marketing, acquisition often takes center stage, leaving retention strategies underexplored. ABOUT YOU wanted to test that assumption. Their hypothesis: Highly loyal shoppers may convert without additional advertising, and retention spend on this audience could be reallocated elsewhere.
With an advanced attribution model already in place, the team wanted to go beyond the data taken into consideration within their internal attribution and challenge the belief that all touchpoints are valuable.
“One of the biggest limitations of attribution models is they always say “yes” to every touchpoint. Incrementality tests can be used very well to challenge that,” said Lina Zeiss, Senior Performance Marketing Manager at ABOUT YOU.
Solution
Measuring impact with Ghost Bidding methodology
Working with Criteo, ABOUT YOU launched a campaign in Germany targeting valuable customers using CRM-based audience segments. These users received lower-funnel, personalized messaging to re-engage them with relevant offers.
To test the real value of these touchpoints, ABOUT YOU implemented Criteo’s Ghost Bidding methodology—a privacy-safe A/B testing framework built for the open web. This approach simulates a control group by identifying users who would have seen an ad if Criteo had bid and won, without actually serving the ad. By comparing behavior between exposed and “ghost impression” users, ABOUT YOU could isolate the true incremental impact of its retention campaign.
“Criteo’s Ghost Bidding is one of the most precise methods we’ve seen for testing incrementality in programmatic. It helps to answer the questions attribution models often can’t,” said Lina Zeiss, Senior Performance Marketing Manager at ABOUT YOU.
Results
Proving the value of retention with incremental revenue uplift
The results were impressive: Within the exposed group, we managed to deliver 622% incremental return on ad spend with 99.3% confidence level. The campaign also proved that even your most frequent, loyal shoppers benefit from relevant marketing. Far from being wasted, retention spend on this group was driving measurable value.
“It’s easy to assume loyal shoppers don’t need extra nudges. This test showed us that meaningful retention campaigns still matter and pay off.”
