Cultivating great customer experiences online

E-commerce continues to grow at an astounding rate, with new retailers entering the market daily. But it’s not just start-ups that need to succeed online. Established businesses have to strengthen their brands by attracting online shoppers and offering fantastic digital experiences.

Jockey International has long held a place of prominence as a leading undergarment brand in department stores worldwide. The brand is now looking to expand its online presence by offering outstanding products and fantastic customer service through digital channels. Jockey fans can now find their favorite Jockey undergarments, intimates, sleep wear, and active wear at traditional stores or at Jockey.com and other online marketplaces.

“Over the past 10 years, our e-commerce division has become a major revenue channel for us,” says Mark Mraz, Director of PPC and Marketplaces at Jockey. “Jockey.com carries every product, with the largest range of sizes, selection, and colors anywhere. It’s a fantastic way for us to help our customers find exactly what they need and deliver the excellent customer experiences they expect from our brand.”

As Jockey focuses on growing sales online, Mraz and his team have worked to optimize paid search advertising. Paid search is one of the most important ways Jockey attracts online shoppers, driving roughly a quarter of Jockey’s e-commerce. It’s a highly competitive field with Jockey battling with online retailers large and small to get its ads in front of consumers. To succeed, Jockey needs to cost-effectively manage thousands of keywords in multiple product categories across different search engines.

When Mraz heard about Adobe Advertising Cloud Search, he was excited to test it. With features powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, Advertising Cloud would help Jockey save time managing search advertising while getting the most out of its advertising spending.

“We saw immediate results from Adobe Advertising Cloud Search,” says Mraz. “We have tested Adobe against many other digital marketing solutions over the years, but Adobe Advertising Cloud continues to outperform every competitor.”

Effective search ad management with AI

Prior to using Advertising Cloud Search, Mraz and a colleague managed search advertising bids manually, which was time consuming and ineffective.

“Trying to manually manage bids for thousands of keywords with a team of just two people was impossible,” says Mraz. “There simply wasn’t enough time to analyze how each keyword influenced sales, so we spent most of our time looking at how to improve bidding and positioning for our top 10 keywords. We were increasing sales, but those gains were inefficient and advertising spending began to outpace sales.”

Using Advertising Cloud Search enabled Jockey to automate bidding on search keywords. With Performance Optimization, powered by Adobe Sensei, Advertising Cloud Search uses machine learning to analyze how often a keyword leads to a sale. Then, it automatically places bids while adjusting how much budget Jockey spends on each keyword, spending more and placing higher bids on successful keywords and cutting back on keywords that don’t perform as well.

Spend Recommendations, another Advertising Cloud feature powered by Adobe Sensei, also helps Jockey optimize ad spending. By using artificial intelligence to run accurate and detailed predictive models, Jockey can quickly determine how much to spend across all portfolios. If the team has extra budget at the end of a month, it can use Spend Recommendations to predict how much extra revenue it might generate by adding spend to different portfolios.

“With Adobe Advertising Cloud Search, we’re seeing an average 1.4% year-over-year increase in advertising spend, down from 21% in previous years, while maintaining high sales,” says Mraz. “We’re spending our advertising budget much more effectively while still guiding customers to the Jockey products and experiences that meet their needs.”

Finding time to improve customer experience strategies

With Advertising Cloud Search automating much of Jockey’s search engine marketing, the Jockey team can invest more time in improving its advertising strategy and customer experiences. They can test different types of landing pages, display banners, or ad copy to see how they can drive sales by helping customers quickly find the products they want.

The team has used some of the saved time to refine its search strategy. They created four search portfolios in Advertising Cloud that include branded and non-branded keywords for Google and Bing accounts. This allows Jockey to create different goals for different types of search engines and optimize advertising performance for each portfolio.

For example, keywords don’t always perform the same on Google and Bing, so optimizing advertising spend based on Google might lead to missed opportunities on Bing. Non-branded keywords tend to have lower sales compared to branded keywords, but they’re still very effective at increasing brand recognition and encouraging future sales. Jockey can optimize spend for non-branded keywords based on other factors, such as click-throughs and traffic.

“With Adobe Advertising Cloud automating our bid management, we can focus on refining our search strategy and can continue to lower costs and increase sales,” says Mraz.

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