The challenge

The Canadian division of one of the largest outdoor retailers in the world realized online sales were lagging and needed to improve when compared to US online sales ratios. However, they were up against internal stakeholder preference to continue focusing the majority of marketing investment in traditional offline channels and sports sponsorships. They engaged Vovia on digital media to help grow online revenue as well as demonstrate the potential for digital marketing investment.

Our strategy

We began by improving their data integrity by fixing tracking issues, addressing sampling errors, and improving their ecommerce data integration with Google Analytics in order to bring across sales data by product category (e.g. hunting, fishing, camping, etc.), rather than just by individual SKU. This required a substantial overhaul of the existing analytics setup, but provided us with better data to optimize towards.

Once their data was cleaned up, we were able to restructure and optimize the digital campaigns based on this data, which drove immediate performance gains. Over time, we also introduced new channels to increase their online presence, leveraged first party data to create custom audiences for targeting, and leaned into AI and Smart Bidding tactics.

The results

Within the first three months of working together, we were able to increase the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) of their online campaigns from 0.45 to to 12.7 and have continued to build on those initial gains over time. The end result is a 762% increase in digital campaign revenue over the past five years, while even to this day, we continue to drive continued performance improvements.