adidas taps into Commerce Growth to expand new customer base

In today’s fast-growing market, the legendary sportswear brand adidas is focused on building partnerships that push the boundaries of advertising, exceed their current performance limits, and continuously test their way to optimal success.

In particular, the adidas performance marketing team was on the lookout for a partner to expand and solidify its audience base in the Middle East and North Africa. With a need for a strong customer growth partner outside of their current social and search channels, adidas teamed up with Criteo to help them build a firm core of traffic and revenue among their regional target customers.

Expanding the adidas customer base with Criteo AI

Focusing on adidas’s three main Middle Eastern and North African markets—Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt—Criteo launched a customer acquisition campaign focused on audience prospecting. With Criteo’s prospecting solution, AI-powered audience-modeling technology targeted shoppers at scale who were a good fit for adidas when they exhibited active shopper intent.

Criteo also activated a customer retention campaign that enhanced adidas’s retargeting efforts through Adaptive Revenue Optimization. Criteo’s ARO technology defined the campaign’s cost-per-click bids according to adidas’s return on investment goal in order to maximize performance and reach cost of sales targets.

The activations were optimized towards web conversions rather than visits, using Criteo’s Smart Bidding. Criteo also helped adidas leverage coupon overlays during sales periods. By combining the optimization capabilities of Criteo’s Smart Bidding with the use of coupon overlays, adidas drove more conversions on their website and made the most of sales opportunities.

Throughout both acquisition and retention activations, Criteo leveraged always-on optimizations to continuously improve adidas’s performance while ensuring that global brand safety guides were followed.

Aleksandra Matveeva, Performance Marketing Manager at adidas shared, “We benefit most from Criteo’s high standards of client services, quick turnaround times, and long-term strategy building for 2023. While dynamic retargeting is a key Criteo tool, mid-funnel campaigns offer the best ROAS results among other mid-funnel tools and surprisingly low traffic costs. We recommend Criteo as an immediate traffic driver and strong dynamic retargeting solution.”

Optimizing customer growth at scale

During a five-month period, Criteo helped adidas improve their total return on investment across low-funnel campaigns from 1.25X in January to 2.08 by the end of May. They also saw improvements in mid-funnel campaigns’ return on investment from 0.68X to 1.23X over the same period. Return on ad spend improved by 66% in low-funnel and 81% in mid-funnel campaigns.

In the future, adidas seeks to activate upper-funnel tactics, such as expanding into new markets, using the learnings from existing markets, and investing more in in-app conversions.

“Criteo can be a key partner in driving marketing efficiencies as we optimize and scale, while understanding attribution from a mid-funnel point of view,” shared Aleksandra Matveeva.