To keep the Campmor brand and its suite of products top-of-mind for interested audiences, Campmor uses Dynamic Remarketing on the Google Display Network. With Dynamic Remarketing, ads are tailored to each person based on the pages or products they previously viewed on an advertiser's site. The result? Campmor saw 300% higher CTR, 37% lower cost-per-conversion and a 16% higher conversion rate during a sixth month period in 2012.
Goals
Increase brand awareness
Remain in customers’ view and consideration
Familiarize consumers with newer, niche product categories
Approach
Complemented search ads with Google Display Network campaigns
Used Dynamic Remarketing to show automatically tailored ads
Used Remarketing tag across website
Results
300% higher CTR, 37% lower cost-per-conversion
13% higher ROI, 16% higher conversion rate compared to static remarketing
Flexibility, ease of new tag helped drive record display revenue
Born out of a New Jersey garage in 1978, Campmor has grown into one of the largest retailers of camping and outdoor equipment. In 35 years of doing business, Campmor evolved from a primarily catalog-based retail model to a largely online model, with approximately 75% of its business coming from its website, 5% from catalogs and mail order, and the remaining 20% from its brick-and-mortar store located in Paramus, New Jersey. “We were one of the first in our niche to be an online retailer. We had our first ecommerce site in 1998,” says Nick Scilingo, who has been a part of the Campmor team for 13 years and is presently the company’s director of SEO and SEM. “Since then, we’ve grown into selling everything, from camping and survival gear to running and fitness clothing, and expanding into yoga clothing and gear,” he says. To grow its online business, Campmor has used Google AdWords for the past several years and partners with agency Covario to maximize the impact of its digital marketing.
Building brand presence, product awareness with display
After starting with search advertising and Product Listing Ads on Google.com, Campmor expanded into display advertising on Google’s Display Network. Using tools like Keyword Contextual Targeting and Dynamic Remarketing in its display strategy, Campmor sought to grow brand awareness after having experienced dwindling brand searches year-over-year and growing competition. When hefty printing costs forced Campmor to reduce its seven annual catalogs to two, Campmor did not want to miss out on branding outreach opportunities. “We really felt the need to keep the Campmor name in the customer’s eye,” recalls Nick, “and the easiest, most effective way to do that is with display advertising.”
Campmor also leverages Google’s Display Network to create awareness about its more recent product lines that consumers do not traditionally associate with the retailer. “We’re really just starting to develop some of our smaller, more niche categories – like running, yoga and fitness – so our focus right now is acquainting our customers with those categories, since in our space, we’re traditionally known for camping and survival outfitter gear,” explains Nick.
Converting customers with Dynamic Remarketing
To keep the Campmor brand and its plethora of products top-of-mind for interested audiences, Campmor uses Dynamic Remarketing to show potential customers the right ad at the right time. People who have already visited Campmor.com see Campmor’s ads as they browse other sites in the Google Display Network; these ads are dynamically tailored to each person based on the pages or products they previously viewed on Campmor’s site. For example, someone who viewed men’s walking shoes might see a dynamically customized ad featuring a pair of men’s walking shoes and other related, recommended shoes. Campmor targets its Dynamic Remarketing ads to several defined lists of users, such as shopping cart abandoners and people who viewed brand-specific pages, category-level pages, or the homepage.
After a six-month period in 2012 during which Campmor ran both dynamic and static remarketing campaigns side by side, Dynamic Remarketing achieved 13% higher ROI and 16% higher conversion rate. Cost-per-conversion was also 37% lower with Dynamic Remarketing, and clickthrough rate was 300% higher than with static Remarketing ads. "We’ve seen excellent results," Nick notes.
Covario’s Associate Director Ryan Hessenthaler, who helps manage Campmor’s AdWords campaigns, says Dynamic Remarketing has had a major impact on Campmor’s online marketing strategy. "Campmor’s willingness to allow us flexibility with testing new opportunities from Google has really led to some outstanding results, nowhere more so than Dynamic Remarketing," says Ryan. "It has far and away been our biggest success outside of traditional search advertising, and a real game changer for Campmor’s overall paid program.
Remarketing at scale with a simple tag
When comparing different groups who saw Campmor’s Dynamic Remarketing ads, the abandoned shopping cart list achieved the highest ROI, while the campaign featuring brand-specific pages drove the most revenue. Since Campmor placed a single Remarketing tag throughout the website, Nick and his team can now experiment with targeting additional groups using flexible lists, without the need to create and add separate tags for each new audience list. This saves Campmor time and resources and allows the team to painlessly scale its Remarketing activity, especially during critical retail periods like the holiday shopping season. For the 2012 holiday season, Campmor was easily able to create nearly 100 new Dynamic Remarketing lists for its brand-level pages, helping drive record revenue from Google’s Display Network for that quarter.
Often times we see a customer come and only look at one or two pages of our website, and they leave – as quickly as they came in, they’re gone. We needed an alternative way to get back in front of them. Dynamic Remarketing is the only way we’ve found to be extremely successful in doing that.
Reconnecting with customers when it matters
For Campmor, Dynamic Remarketing is an essential tool for continuous branding and creating awareness around its more recent, less traditional product lines. "Since Campmor carries a vast array of products, being able to hone in on each one of those categories and advertise it – and do it justice – is one of the best parts of these marketing campaigns," says Nick.
"Overall, the goal of all our Remarketing campaigns is to really maximize the time in front of a potential customer. Often times we see a customer come and only look at one or two pages of our website, and they leave – as quickly as they came in, they’re gone," he continues. "We needed an alternative way to get back in front of them. Dynamic Remarketing is the only way we’ve found to be extremely successful in doing that. It’s really about being able to connect with the customer at every stage."
