The client:

Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. It represents a series of video game consoles developed by Microsoft, as well as applications (games), streaming services, and an online service by the name of Xbox Live. The brand was first introduced in the USA in November 2001, with the launch of the original Xbox console.

The challenge:

Wanting to lock in pre-Christmas sales as early as possible to avoid hyper-competitive Black Friday and pre-Christmas deals, Microsoft Xbox was seeking a way to gain increased prominence across top retail sites, informing and converting shoppers who may still be investigating product options, as gaming consoles typically involve long research and consideration phases

The solution:

Criteo Sponsored Products leverage real-time targeting to reach shoppers on the world’s largest retailers. The process resembles search engine marketing, but is custom-built for e-commerce, enabling advertisers to target shoppers at various stages of the shopping journey. Criteo Sponsored Products allowed Xbox to ensure the brand was top of mind for pre-Christmas shoppers to drive sales in a declining console market. Subsequent focus was placed on different ad placements to most effectively capture both undecided and high-intent shoppers.

How it works

1. Relevant Advertising: Product ads are served to relevant shoppers on e-commerce sites, driving sales for brands.
2. Unprecented Scale: Criteo Sponsored Products are served on more than 50 major retail sites globally, with more added every month.
3. SKU-level Attribution Leveraging first-party point-of-sale data, brands can connect advertising to actual SKU-level sales outcomes across retailers, devices and channels.
4. Actionable Insights Criteo provides key insights into marketing performance across retailers to help brands confidently re-invest in winning media strategies.

The results:

By implementing a broad, multi-faceted ad campaign on Criteo Sponsored Products, Xbox saw a highly efficient return on advertising spend (ROAS), above category benchmarks, with consistent gains across multiple product spend levels.

The return achieved was also consistent across ad placements throughout the retail shopping funnel, including placements for search-based shopper journeys and for browse shopper journeys in places like category and product detail pages.

The campaign further focused on placements in upper-funnel, high-traffic areas including homepage and general gifting search and browse journeys to most effectively drive awareness and therefore incremental sales for consumers who may not have even been considering the category at the start of their shopping journey. By performing an AB test during the first five weeks of the campaign, where incrementality was measured by comparing shoppers exposed to ads versus a control group, Criteo Sponsored Products were proven to deliver a 15.7% lift in unique users purchasing products.

Aina Bolstad, senior marketing communications manager, says: Criteo Sponsored Products helped Microsoft Xbox drive purchase among both brand-loyal and new users.

“Xbox was looking for a way to really move the needle before the 2016 festive season. We had the promotional fundamentals ready: solid deals on great product bundles. But Criteo Sponsored Products took our results to the next level by enabling us to gain strong exposure for those offers across key retailers.

“The results far exceeded our expectations, delivering a great ROAS in a short timeframe, with the strong incrementality we were seeking.”