About Van den Assem
Van den Assem Shoes is a Dutch retailer focused on footwear. Founded in 1910, this family-run company owns 13 stores throughout The Netherlands. When the marketing team saw a rapid rise in online sales, they instantly expanded their online advertising strategy – and with success. Currently, over 50% of all sales are the result of Van den Assem’s e-commerce efforts. As this is a huge business opportunity, the company plans to actively increase this number even further.
The challenge
With online sales being such a significant part of its revenue, Van den Assem quickly recognized the importance of improving its online exposure. For this, the company relies on a comprehensive marketing team, including a performance marketer, trade marketer, and e-commerce specialist.
Together, the team set up a successful online advertising strategy and now runs many digital advertising campaigns. From an always-on display campaign attracting new potential customers to a lower-funnel campaign that retargets website visitors with Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) on Facebook. Van den Assems DPAs showed great performance in terms of interactions and CTR, continuously improving their Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) remained a challenge.
For the marketing team at Van den Assem, Facebook is one of the most important online advertising platforms. But here, marketers have limited options to optimize the performance of digital ads. The main reason for this is that Facebook offers limited customization options. Not only to Van den Assem, but retailers in general. The team wondered: how could they further improve their ROAS when advertising on Facebook? As it turned out, they needed to zoom in on two elements: branding and customization.
“Our customized ads performed surprisingly well. We didn’t expect that before we started our test: even if results toned down after a while, ads created with Bannerwise perform significantly better than ads built with Facebook.”
The solution
By turning to Facebook and using standardized templates, the marketing team at Van den Assem had limited design and customization options at hand. The templates Van den Assem used didn’t allow for much branding and missed out on valuable persuasion techniques such as adding product ratings and automated promotions. They also lacked the ability to maintain brand consistency outside of their owned channels.
When the team learned about Bannerwise, they noticed this solution offered the ability to build customized dynamic creatives. With a Creative Management Platform as their go-to solution, Van den Assem gained the ability to create premium-looking, on-brand dynamic product ads that allowed for a significant number of customization options.
They decided to do a test, running their usual DPAs – created with Facebook Business Manager – against DPAs created with Bannerwise. Could on-brand DPAs further improve their ROAS?
Van den Assem was able to add their branding and persuasion elements like the discount percentage
The result
The outcome was obvious. Dynamic Product Ads created with Bannerwise resulted in a significantly higher conversion rate: 13.5% versus the usual 2.5% for ads created with Facebook itself. As the ads created with Bannerwise were much more relevant to the audience, the clicks that occurred were considerably more valuable. As a result, ads created with Bannerwise led to a 51% increase in ROAS.
These results underline how important it is for businesses to look beyond their click-through rate but also emphasize the need for branding and customization. For companies such as Van den Assem, a lack of branding eventually results in lower conversion rates, mainly because their dynamic ads are too generic and don’t highlight important USPs.
If you truly want to get the most out of your online advertising efforts, make sure to customize your dynamic creatives. Van den Assem supports this: by merely implementing a Creative Management Platform into their workflow, the company’s ROAS improved by 51%. This makes their digital advertising efforts significantly more viable.
“Working with Bannerwise taught us how important it is not to be blinded by a large number of clicks or views. When it comes to digital advertising, ROAS really is the most important KPI.”
- Daphne Sprenger, Performance Marketer at Van den Assem
