Surpassing AliExpress' ROAS goal for 11:11
How AliExpress optimized its retargeting strategy for 11.11
AliExpress is a leading e-commerce platform. Through its desktop website and apps, small businesses sell a wide range of products to consumers, from clothing and jewelry to toys and garden equipment.
In 2020, AliExpress in EMEA partnered with us to develop and implement a series of retargeting campaigns for 11.11, the most popular online shopping day in the world. The company was offering discounts between 70% to 80% and required a strategy for encouraging existing customers to visit their app and make a purchase.
The challenge
AliExpress ran retargeting campaigns for 11.11 with us from July 2020 to November 2020. The aim was to boost the company’s Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) both before and after 11.11 by targeting users who had installed their app up to six months ago but had yet to make a purchase.
The strategy
In the build-up to the holiday, we experimented with different creatives to identify the best-performing templates for the 11.11 sale. These were designed by our in-house Creative Services team and were continuously optimized based on the performance data we observed.
When asked about the process, Alexey Sobolev, Senior User Growth Manager at AliExpress, said “one of the other important things we did during this time was to increase the number of products in the feed. We started with one million and then optimized our internal capacities to scale our feed to six million items. This helped us significantly increase the number of ad impressions. These campaigns showed the biggest ROAS for us.”
The results
The retargeting campaigns showed much higher Click-Through Rates (CTR) and achieved a 100% increase in ROAS when compared to the campaigns that were running before the promotional period.
From July to November 2020, AliExpress was also able to triple their budget with us and the company’s GMV saw a fourfold increase, “which means AliExpress became more profitable and the campaigns were optimized more effectively”, said Alexey Sobolev.
« Before the promotion, we did a lot of tests with Remerge to find the best strategies for promoting our products. We did a split test, adding two to six products on the creative, and then we chose the best-performing assets to use during the 11.11 sale »
ALEXEY SOBOLEV, SENIOR USER GROWTH MANAGER, ALIEXPRESS