Success Stories: adidas Group

— Despite the fact that adidas and Reebok belong to one market segment, they are positioned differently. Adidas is focused not only on athletes, but also for those who prefer a sporty style in everyday life. Reebok is primarily a brand for professionals and fitness enthusiasts, and it produces a line of clothes for everyday wear.

— Adidas recently opened its online store and we have been actively working on online advertising. Of course, we continue to use traditional channels such as placing ads on TV and in print to promote the brand, as well as holding and sponsoring sporting events.

When choosing tools to promote on the Internet, we focus on their effectiveness. Right now the most important channels for us are contextual advertising and retargeting. We also use mailing lists and social networks, but contextual advertising is unrivaled from an efficiency standpoint.

— It’s important for us to increase the number of orders from the online store, so we closely work with its main indicator – conversion. From this perspective, Yandex.Direct is more efficient than other contextual advertising systems, as it leads to new clients. With the help of Yandex.Direct, we not only promote our products, but also talk about the brand and the advantages of our technologies.

— We try to maximize targeted advertising. For example, we allocate a separate campaign for winter, summer, autumn and spring collections. In each of them we make unique ads for specific products while regularly adding new ones. That way it gradually increases the audience share and at the same time improves conversion.

We use an automatic strategy aimed at maximum conversion to advertise our products. However, we still do the process manually with campaigns according to brand needs, especially when it’s important to get premium placement. We also place an ad for certain information queries, like the match footballs for the 2014 World Cup that adidas traditionally produces for example.

— We work with an agency iProspect. Our specialists define the overall direction and share ideas, and the agency team realizes those tasks.

— We’re experimenting with additional links in ads as they’re very effective. It’s important that the links are as relevant as possible to the query. The same rule applies to text, because if for instance a person is looking for red trainers, it’s important to show them an ad specifically about red trainers from adidas. We closely follow the relevance of our ads and regularly update the texts. You can’t use the same ad for three years running. It reduces the effectiveness.

— I’d compare it to an experienced salesperson that understands customers from the first word and immediately offers the buyer exactly what they’re looking for.

— It’s important to decide straightway how you will advertise: by yourself or through an agency? Your future strategy development depends on that.

It’s also worthwhile clearly outlining the structure of your ad campaign. Usually we split the campaign into three parts: brand queries (e.g. “adidas”); product requests adjacent to those (e.g. “adidas football boots”); and non-brand queries (e.g. “buy shoes”). For each group of queries we choose a strategy. This allows you to more accurately track the performance of each ad and helps a lot when working on the quality of the text.