Carrefour Italy – 1370% ROAS by Recreating the Storefront Online

How to Connect With Grocery Shoppers Online

As consumers spend more of their time online, product discovery and purchases also increasingly happen online. For winning retailers this means they need to be present during these key online consumer moments to convert more customers.

Carrefour wanted to understand how to drive grocery sales more effectively, so they needed to test different ad formats on Facebook. Carrefours overall business challenge was two-fold. They wanted to find powerful online ad formats to A) increase market penetration and reach new customers as well as B) increase the basket size of existing shoppers. In addition to robust testing capabilities, they needed a tool that would also allow them to create mobile-first, visually engaging and thumb-stopping ads in different formats at scale.

Statistically Significant Performance Tests With Engaging Creative

Together with their agency, H48, Carrefour tested two different ad formats: carousels and collection ads. To make all creatives more engaging, they used Smartly.io's Dynamic Image Templates to enrich the ad imagery with graphics and other elements. For the collection ads, Smartly.io's Video Templates were also used to customize the hero videos at scale. Targeting was done using zip codes of the participating stores to localize the promotion.

In both formats, Carrefour promoted a competition which allowed customers to win the products that have been purchased online during the competition. The creative in the collection ad had a hero video which explained the competition, and an online storefront created using Facebook's Instant Experiences. The carousel featured a “landscape” with a continuous design from one card to the next that explained the main idea of the promotion.

To validate the results, Carrefour used Smartly.io's Ad Studies Tool to run an A/B test to see if one of the formats was performing better with a statistically significant margin.

1370% Return on Ad Spend

 The performance of both ad formats was very impressive, but collection ads proved to be the winning format for Carrefour by a significant margin. They achieved a ROAS of 1370% (vs. 911.5% ROAS in the carousel ads) and generated over 40% more purchases.

Using Smartly.io's Ad Studies, they could prove with  statistical significance that highly visual, thumb stopping creatives that provide an online storefront for shoppers are a recipe for success. Carrefour is now looking to scale up usage of collection ads with instant experience for promotional initiatives that need to convert mobile traffic into customers.

“Discovering the best performing ad formats for Carrefour’s needs is a key component of a successful digital strategy for us. Smartly.io enabled us to easily test and identify success factors to grow our digital sales channel without compromising profitability. “

Carmen Bramato – Digital Marketing Manager, Carrefour Italia