Eataly: Scaling Customer Acquisition with Customized Videos

Eataly wanted to increase product consideration among new, potential customers, drive more traffic to their website, and increase purchases. They were interested in testing how video would work for this objective  but previously had challenges scaling video production and customization to the necessary level as they had thousands of individual products and more than a hundred different product categories.

To ramp up the usage of video advertising, Eataly decided to test Smartly.io's Video Templates, which enabled advertisers to create fully customized, on-brand videos at scale from product data feeds and existing static and video assets.

Smartly.io’s Video Templates helped Eataly to create and edit customized videos of different product categories featuring some of the best-selling items per category. To showcase the power of video ads in driving traffic, they tested these customized videos against image carousels that were enriched with on-brand graphics using Smartly.io’s Image Templates.

The ads were targeted to Lookalike Audiences of previous customers and website visitors, and Eataly used A/B testing to ensure the results were statistically reliable.

A/B testing proved that using customized, on-brand videos were the recipe for success for Eataly. Videos performed significantly better than static image assets and drove 43% better CTR with a 47% better, positive return on ad spend against static carousel ads.  

“We saw that video seems to work much better for us in the upper part of the funnel, both in terms of clicks to the landing page and conversions. This test has given us great visual results with a very manageable investment.”

Michele Cortellessa, Digital Marketing Manager, Eataly Net