Netshoes sees 5X increase in conversion rates with DoubleClick Bid Manager

E-commerce in Brazil has grown 20+% year over year for the last five years. In this highly competitive environment, choosing the right advertising partner is a critical strategic decision for a retail brand to ensure their message breaks through. 

Netshoes is the world's largest sports retailer, selling everything from basketball shoes to fitness gear across all of Latin America. Historically they have been deeply focused on performance advertising, and at times have used up to eight different advertising platforms and retargeters at once in search of the best results.

But recently, Netshoes decided this approach wasn't giving them the best results. They found they were competing against themselves by bidding for the same audience with multiple ad providers, driving costs up and ROI down. Managing so many platforms was complicated and costly, demanding dozens of extra hours each week from the marketing team.

To solve these problems and boost performance, Netshoes turned to programmatic buying from DoubleClick Bid Manager.

The power of programmatic

"The direct-to-publisher media buying model was not efficient for us any more," says Danilo Mangini, Media Manager for Netshoes. "Our goal was to reduce our CPA, optimize overall performance and improve our communication with customers. We simply wanted to buy the inventory we wanted, when we wanted.” 

Netshoes started by setting up a head-to-head test of its three top demand-side platforms, giving each the same budget. After six weeks, one platform stood out: DoubleClick Bid Manager. "The results we got from DoubleClick were 50% better than the other partners," says Mangini. 

Netshoes adopted DoubleClick’s entire stack, consolidating their media buys across display and video. Their goal was to increase sales, but also to improve control and transparency by being able to measure every detail of their campaigns. 

With programmatic, Netshoes can be smarter about its ads, combining first-party and third-party data to reduce CPAs and deliver creatives throughout each customer's sales journey. Bid Manager has natural integration with Google Analytics Premium to add more power and precision to marketing. "It makes life easier when you can get all the info from Google Analytics and use it in real time," Mangini says. 

As a result, Netshoes' conversion rates have risen significantly. In fact, they're a remarkable 400% better with Bid Manager and dynamic creatives than with other channels. 

Bid Manager has also simplified life for the Netshoes team, says Mangini. With consolidated ad buying, "the time saved on things like checking tags and compiling reports from across platforms now goes into campaign optimization. We estimate we save 15% of our online marketing team's time each week."

Adding dynamic creative and video

With powerful data analytics in place, and more time to spend on optimization, Netshoes wanted to ensure they were optimizing their creative in order to increase clicks and conversions. Fueled by a deep understanding of their consumer, they implemented dynamic creatives so they could show the right message to the right person.

TrueView video ads also became an important part of the Netshoes programmatic mix. The company's goal with video is not to drive the last click, but to start a conversation with customers and move them along in their journey. "TrueView is an engagement format for us," says Mangini. "We use it as a laboratory to test creative: to tell stories and see how they influence a customer's journey in the buying process." 

TrueView is the only video channel Netshoes uses, and the cost-per-view is highly competitive with a view rate well above the Brazilian benchmark. 

Netshoes' overall results have been so good that when the company launched Zattini, a new online store with casual fashion for young women, they did so with DoubleClick programmatic display and video.

"Our studies showed that online video is a very relevant point of contact with women 18-34 years old," says Mangini. "So we decided to launch and promote the Zattini brand through TrueView in DoubleClick Bid Manager as well as display ads.” Google's dedicated customer team is also a winner for Netshoes. "Support from the Google team has really helped us," says Mangini. "It's something we haven't had with other partners."