German retailer Ambiendo accelerates performance with Criteo

Ambiendo is a German retailer that specializes in premium home furnishings. With over 200 brands known across Europe for their luxury and unique styles, Ambiendo helps upper-class Europeans outfit their spaces with the highest quality items.

To create the best experience possible for its customers, the retailer has a highly digitalized and automated logistic process to ensure fast delivery. It also works hard to understand its target audiences and provide the additional service they desire, including calls with product consultants to answer questions.

Ambiendo’s CMO, Jan Pohlkamp, sums up the retailer’s secret to success as follows: “We provide a consistent, authentic customer journey starting from acquisition to product and shop strategies, ending with logistic perfection.”

Creating an authentic journey requires a personalized marketing effort. To help it deliver individualized experiences while meeting target KPIs, Ambiendo tried several retargeting solutions.

Achieving performance targets with the right partner

Ambiendo launched two failed collaborations with retargeting providers where the ROI didn’t meet expectations. They were beginning to doubt that any solution could meet their desired KPIs when they decided to try Criteo.

When asked why Ambiendo chose Criteo, Pohlkamp said, “Criteo was completely dynamic, using CPC (cost-per-click) bidding without any fixed costs. The only effort was integrating the Criteo tags within our shop pages.”

The campaign took a few days to start performing in the right direction. But after testing and adjusting the CPC bids, the campaign was consistently delivering Ambiendo’s set KPIs. “The algorithm is as good as promised,” noted Pohlkamp. “With patience and slight CPC adjustments, Criteo can be a successful solution for most of the shops.”

The ease of campaign set up and the support provided by Criteo’s account managers were also key benefits, as was the ability to optimize a campaign against a set revenue goal. “Introducing the opportunity to adjust the campaigns based on a cost-to-revenue ration instead of CPC bidding was a game changer. It has uplifted the granularity to reach our KPI targets by far,” explained Pohlkamp.

Increasing brand awareness with similar audience campaign

Moving forward, Ambiendo is focused on improving their brand awareness in the market. They see Criteo’s Similar Audiences as one way to help them do so. Pohlkamp says, “While we have brought ROI campaigns at Criteo to perfection in the last years, we can now extend to similar audience campaigns at Criteo to reach higher brand awareness.”

Criteo’s Similar Audiences can identify new people who have behaviors and characteristics that are similar to Ambiendo’s best website visitors. In this way, Ambiendo can expose its brand to new audiences that will be highly likely to be interested in them.

“The flexible and fast-adapting opportunities with Criteo to react on customer trends and their needs and converting users to convinced customers of our products will stay one of our major basic marketing goals in the next years,” says Pohlkamp. “Starting from this solid base there are options to reach similar audiences with Criteo. And if Criteo stays efficient and provides campaigns where the KPIs can also be met with Similar Audiences, we rate this as a good basis for expanding our customer group in the future.”