Sports Direct improved efficiency and revenue, and still cut costs!

Sports Direct was the first Fraser Group brand to work with ROI Hunter’s Product Performance Management (PPM) Platform, and have worked with ROI Hunter since 2018. Using data-driven campaigns and ROI Hunter’s Template Editor to scale them, Sports Direct managed to have a strong 2020, despite the pervasive perils of the pandemic.

Though Sports Direct was able to maintain their momentum during the pandemic due to their data-driven campaigns and the popularity of leisure and home-workout purchases, the chaos of COVID-19 was a wake-up call. Sports Direct wanted to take efforts to refine their dynamic campaigns even further, as well as future-proof their business against any upcoming challenges. 

In order to refine their campaigns, Sports Direct wanted to capitalise on their first-party business data (margin, stock level, etc.), and use it to improve their product set filtrations.

First, ROI Hunter helped Sports Direct to connect the additional business data to their catalog. Facebook allows for up to five custom labels, but Sports Direct wanted to use more, and wanted a way to keep the data private. ROI Hunter helped them to map all their data-driven use cases to the ROI Hunter label, leaving Sports Direct enough space to map their margin data to a second custom label. 

Sports Direct was already using ROI Hunter’s Product Insights feature, which gathers product-level data from across a retailer’s channels and combines it with their catalog within the ROI Hunter platform. Because this data is integrated from multiple channels, Product Insights makes it simple to compare, contrast, and act on cross-channel data.

Sports Direct had used Product Insights in the past to put together the two prospecting campaigns they were running:

• Bestsellers (products in the top 15% in terms of site-wide revenue over the past 30 days).
• Hidden Gems (products with a low number of impressions on Facebook, but a high number of transactions per Google Analytics). 

Using the newly connected business data, ROI Hunter helped Sports Direct to refine these campaigns: certain brands were picked to be excluded from promotions, and a new rule was added, requiring products to have a margin of at least 35%.

The Bestsellers campaign also used the newly connected stock-level business data in order to exclude products with out-of-stock variants from promotion, further saving Sports Direct’s ad budget.

The newly refined campaigns soon showed they were worth the added effort. Compared to the previous iteration, the new Bestsellers campaign showed a greatly improved conversion rate per Google Analytics, with an increase of 45%. Cost per click (CPC) decreased by a dramatic 33%, and cost per action (CPA) dropped by £2.16.

The Hidden Gems campaign showed marked improvement as well, with CPA falling by 33%, CPC down 28%, and conversion rate increasing by an incredible 61%. 

The overall impact of the campaign improvements allowed Sports Direct to reduce their PPM spend by €25.5k, while increasing their PPM revenue by €2.3M!