Commentary

Discount Tackle Fishes For Marketing Relief - And Lands It

Obsession. Reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor. But I'm dating myself.

A fishing gear retailer that prides itself on obsessing over using the best technology has found marketing success by partnering with a tech company that is equally obsessive -- about ecommerce marketing.

Discount Tackle says it shows how one change can have a domino effect through an organization’s marketing mix. Jarrod Rogers, director of marketing and operations at MetaCommerce, which owns Discount Tackle, tells Insider Performancethat the company had found it nearly impossible to manage Google Shopping manually on top of other priorities.

“One team member was spending about 20 hours a week on it alone,” he said.

Following recommendations by Discount Tackle’s colleagues, the retailer brought on Sidecar, an ecommerce tech provider. Sidecar’s technology integrates with platforms to automatically manage campaigns, keywords, audiences and bids.

Sidecar’s team also provides regular reporting.

“We meet with them to review progress, make sure we’re hitting our ROAS goal, and discuss any upcoming changes in our product catalog or business. Time previously spent on Google, Facebook, and Bing is now funneled into efforts like SEO, which to me is the holy grail of marketing. Sidecar is a hands-off approach to SEM, which allows us to focus on the other pieces of marketing.”

High praise. So what were the results?

* 15 employee hours saved weekly
* 61% Google Shopping ROAS improvement
* 10.5x Facebook ad revenue growth, with ROAS exceeding goal
* 116% website traffic growth

Rogers explained how it worked:

Sidecar created audience segments based on purchase intent and set the technology to spend according to performance.

The majority of spend is going to high-intent retargeting campaigns, which is where we see the most efficiency. By contrast, the low-intent segment is where we find new audiences. We’ve generated a wellspring of new details about Discount Tackle’s target audience — including qualities that caught us by surprise," he says.

"For instance, we knew we catered to older, outdoorsy males. Then Sidecar’s campaigns started to show that 25-year-olds and females were engaging with our ads. Sidecar also A/B tests ads with each audience. Winning ads automatically incorporate into go-forward campaign management.

The approach is a little different for Google Shopping ads. 

In that case, we find that success depends heavily on leveraging product brands. Branded products are our top performers. So, for instance, one campaign houses all products associated with brands like Z-Man soft plastic baits and Daiwa fishing rods. Sidecar’s technology monitors all the campaigns continuously and increases spend on top products and rolls back on lower performers.

Ultimately, by combining data from Sidecar with business analytics on our end, we learn more and more about our shoppers and how they want to engage with our brand," Rogers says. "At this point, our partnership with Sidecar takes care of itself. We would need at least another marketing person internally if we didn't have Sidecar.

Discount Tackle was about 5% of MetaCommerce’s business before we partnered with Sidecar. Today, Discount Tackle is 55% of our business. We’ve crushed it on customer acquisition through Sidecar.

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