ADIDAS: WINNING RETAIL SEARCH WITH PRICE (EXTENSIONS)

Retail in Asia, with expectations of double-digit growth YOY and eCommerce sales expected to grow by 14% CAGR until 2021 (source: Forrester), has become transformational for brands. Driven by a constant wall of ‘Mega Sale’ campaigns – 9.9, 11.11, Prime Day, 12.12, Christmas & Chinese New Year – consumers are spending but they expect a retail environment that is frictionless and competitive on price.

With this in mind, adidas wanted to grow ahead of the market but was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a competitive edge, and take fair share of growth, without the ability to add price to its paid search campaigns and match consumer expectations.

Our barrier? The current state of play is that Google Ads and the Google Merchant Centre don’t ‘talk’ to each other, and with 15,000 products across the region adding price to Paid Ads is not a manual job We embarked on the task of literally re-writing the code on Google so that our ads would fetch product data automatically from the Google Merchant Centre feed and identify matching custom labels in Google Ads in real time. This would mean a huge technical innovation, something Google didn’t want to embark on alone.

Our performance and analytics teams, along with our in-house coders are now able to automatically add custom price-extensions directly in to Google Ads. This is a three way task between Google Cloud Platform, Google Merchant Centre & Google Ads.