Modanisa expands their audience base with Contextual Targeting

Istanbul’s Modanisa is a modest fashion ecommerce company that Reuters selected as the world’s most popular Islamic apparel website in 2016. The company’s vision is to meet modest women’s desire to wear the clothes that fit the life and times they live in. It sells over 1000 brands and 100 thousand products and was the first Turkish fashion platform to deliver online clothes shopping to this audience in such variety.

In March of 2018, Modanisa earned the “International Business Excellence” award for elevating local vendors on a global platform and making them global retailers. As Turkey’s first international online shopping site platform and e-export champion, Modanisa is proud to introduce small producers and designers to the world.

To support its vast array of vendors, Modanisa has a multi-pronged marketing plan centered on increasing its audience base in key markets and retaining existing customers with personalized ads offering them the right products.

But with a unique product category and target audience (women interested in modest fashion products), interest and demographic-based targeting is not enough to reach new users. That’s why Modanisa decided to test contextual targeting.

Reaching the Right New People with Contextual Targeting

Modanisa had already been working with Criteo on app advertising campaigns when Criteo launched its new contextual targeting solution. Gülfem Alçelik, Digital Marketing Assistant Manager at Modanisa, was eager to give it a try, explaining, “We are always open to test new products aligned with our strategy. With contextual targeting, we had a chance to reach new users based on the user’s content preference and by doing so, we are able to increase our audience base.”

The benefit of Criteo’s contextual targeting solution is its unique commerce fingerprint. It marries contextual signals from a webpage with first-party commerce signals to reach not just new people, but new people who are ready to buy, driving incremental qualified traffic.

Criteo’s technology calculates an affinity score between each product in a retailer’s catalogue and every contextual category and domain in Criteo’s media network to identify and target the media most likely to perform. Commerce data and contextual signals also inform product recommendations and ad creative to increase engagement and drive more qualified traffic.

An added benefit is that contextual targeting is not reliant on cookies, making it a smart way to build an addressable audience both today and when cookies are gone. “Digital advertising is changing rapidly,” said Alçelik. “We are mostly focused on app but still we are looking for solutions to not lose our web audience as well. So, until that time comes, we are looking for the alternatives.”

Keeping the Momentum Going

Three months in, Modanisa is happy with the results of their contextual targeting campaign, which has reached 50M+ users. According to Alçelik, “Based on retention rate, CTR, and user metrics we can say that the campaign positively affected our audience. We were able to gain users who have high retention and generated sales with a low cost per session. Criteo’s performance, knowhow about different markets, reach, and full funnel solution are all strengths that we value.”

Always looking to test and learn, Modanisa is now planning to launch a video campaign to build awareness and will pair it with a consideration campaign targeting those who watched the awareness video. Criteo is excited to help them drive outcomes across the entire customer journey.