DELVE - Retail Marketing Campaign of the Year

Company: DELVE, Boulder, CO
Company Description: DELVE is a certified Google Marketing Platform Partner, a Google Cloud Certified Services Partner, Amazon Advertising Partner, a Google Analytics 360, Display & Video 360 and Amazon DSP expert, and one of Inc5000's fastest-growing companies.
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Categories - Industry
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing Campaign of the Year - Retail

Nomination Title: Lumber Liquidators Achieves Triple-digit Return on Ad Spend

Specify the date on which this campaign or program was launched: January 2019

Lumber Liquidators offers hardwood flooring products from more than 25 domestic and exotic wood species in over 100 physical locations across 42 states, as well as a full online store. Lumber Liquidators’ sought to improve their digital media effectiveness by personalizing offers for relevance and conversion. To do this, Lumber Liquidators needed to gain deeper insight into the product and price threshold preferences of their regional customer audiences.

Lumber Liquidators’ previous approach to creating offers and digital advertising was to design and deliver ads to appeal to a broad audience, based on perceived intent from search terms. The offers included discounts and featured flooring that was targeted across multiple audience segments. However, they wanted to explore whether they could go further in their personalization efforts, so they asked DELVE to identify data sets that could be used to drive personalization and test the data-informed ads across regional audiences to look for correlation between the ad personalization elements and conversion rates. The first place to start was to analyze sales data by product category and geographic region (down to the store level) to identify trends that could inform offer creation and ad design.

DELVE analyzed Lumber Liquidators’ GA360 and offline-sales data to uncover regional preference data for their various flooring products. For example, laminate flooring sold better in the southwest, hardwood flooring sold better in the northeast, and vinyl flooring sold better in the south. Based on this analysis,

DELVE collaborated with Lumber Liquidators marketing team to develop a digital media targeting strategy to serve ads featuring each region’s best-selling products to consumers within those specific regions, creating more personalized and relevant messaging. Utilizing multiple creative display templates and dynamic feeds, DELVE utilized a variety of product photos, headlines, and CTA copy to dynamically generate hundreds of variations of ads to serve by geographic region. Through the direct integration between CreativeStudio, DV360, and Campaign Manager, DELVE’s media team was able to seamlessly geo-target consumers in real-time -- including dynamic personalization of ads and offers. By testing the hundreds of ad variations, DELVE was able to optimize ads by region to increase return on ad spend (ROAS) and overall revenue value of each transaction.

The results of DELVE’s efforts to identify, test and optimize data-driven ad personalization was impressive. Offer click-thru-rate (CTR) increased substantially across multiple ad combinations and delivered a 26% increase in ROI. Further, Lumber Liquidators saw increases in return on ad spend (ROAS) across all key flooring types: 319% for hardwood, 197% for vinyl, and 253% for laminate.