Under Armour Used Real-Time Data, Display Ads to Drive Holiday Sales

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By Max Blau2013-12-14 23:30:41 UTC

Under Armour has become a sports apparel giant over much of the past two decades. The Baltimore-based company, which has sponsored some of the world’s biggest athletes, including New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper, has tapped into data — and display media — to promote winter sales leading up to Christmas.

Jason LaRose, Under Armour’s new senior vice president of ecommerce, wanted to generate excitement for its product lines by creating “highly relevant and engaging” holiday advertisements that reached far beyond UnderArmour.com.

Days before Black Friday, Under Armour launched an 18-day promotion for its full holiday gift guide using Google’s lightbox ad format — a type of unit that expands into a full-page takeover ad — to attract interest in the brand.

Web users have been greeted by a 250-by-300 pixel promotion [click to see the ad in action] with several apparel items and the tagline, "roll over to get armoured." Once web users hovered a mouse over the ad for two seconds, Under Armour’s holiday expanded into a full-page gift guide that included discounts, top 10 picks for men, women and kids, and links to purchase sportswear.

LaRose wanted Under Armour's winter campaign to reach both general fitness consumers and sports enthusiasts between the ages of 18 to 34. To do so, the apparel manufacturer's staff relied upon Google’s display network — using interest, category and keyword targeting to find its desired audience. According to the senior vice presidents, the company also leveraged ruled-based targeting tactics to raise the promotion’s chances for success.

"The campaign has been phenomenal to-date," LaRose says. "In addition to substantially increasing awareness for [Under Armour]’s holiday offerings, we've engaged with consumers at a high rate and driven targeted site traffic. This campaign has been an essential add-on to our holiday marketing portfolio."

That improvement has largely happened through key changes based on consumer data collected during the campaign. LaRose, who thinks creating relevant promotions that resonate with consumers can be a major challenge, overcame those obstacles after analyzing the information at hand.

"The biggest tweaks [came] within the hands-on optimizations that we've made within our user targets," he says. "We've dynamically swapped out interest and keyword targets to ensure we're driving efficient traffic volume while also achieving scale."

Not only did Under Armour’s banner promotions help the company reach the right consumers, it also led to improvements with their larger social media efforts. LaRose's team used data amassed from the online promotion to refine messaging sent out to more than 2,600,000 Facebook fans and nearly 270,000 Twitter followers.

"We've also been able to tweak our content in social media based on targets and in-unit engagements to scale relevancy," LaRose says.

Image: Google/Under Armour

That approach has proven successful. Under Armour’s team realized that men's and kid's apparel had garnered the most activity during the holiday ad's initial rollout. Based the campaign's early analytics, LaRose tailored the company's social posts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to feature more products from those respective sportswear lines. Under Armour's staff also used metrics to help inform what items of clothing would specifically be promoted in those messages.

LaRose says the promotion's ad-unit engagement rate has more than doubled since it launched. He credits his team's data-based decisions for connecting Under Armour's potential customers with the brand.

“We were able to provide a useful service by bringing our product to the consumer in an elevated fashion,” he says. Though the company is mum on precise sales numbers for Black Friday, its stock price has steadily risen throughout the holiday period (and 2013, in general), suggesting the brand's marketing tactics are paying off.

Image: Flickr/paulrabil

Topics: Advertising, Business, data, e-commerce, Marketing, Metrics That Matter, Under Armour