How Aquila realized the true impact of paid social on their in-store sales

At the recent Lexer Customer Marketing Awards (LCMAs), Aquila won both First Prize and People’s Choice for their innovative entry. Find out how the leading men’s footwear brand used Lexer’s CDXP along with the new Facebook Offline Conversions API to prove paid social ROI.

Over the past 12 months Aquila has focused on levelling-up their paid social campaigns, using insights to target high-value segments with promising results. With the ultimate goal to better understand the impact paid social investment has on their in-store sales.

Running an omni-channel business with multiple customer journeys, sources of traffic and streams of revenue calls for a holistic customer-centric approach to marketing - but also reporting too.

We have always assumed paid social media advertising has played a part in the offline customer purchase journey, but we were never able to measure how big of an influence until now. - Kiara Pecenko, Head of Marketing at Aquila.

The solution

In partnership with their digital performance agency DataSauce, Aquila utilised their enriched single customer view from Lexer’s CDXP and the new Facebook Offline Conversions API to finally be able to measure just how much of an impact online ads have on their in-store sales.

The Offline conversions API allows you to attribute the performance of your online ads to real-world transactions. Both Facebook and Google offer retailers the ability to link online ads with offline outcomes such as in-store purchases, phone orders, bookings, and more.Lexer can help you clean, format, and continuously send your transaction data to Facebook and Google so this attribution can occur, increasing the accuracy of campaign performance reporting in your account.

Offline Conversions API benefits: 

• Attribute in-store sales back to the online ads that influenced them
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• Measure the influence digital ads have on in-store sales
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• Improve paid ad attribution and optimization
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• Improve reporting, measurement and inform omni-channel strategy

The results

The trial provided Aquila with added clarity and a new perspective of their paid social campaign performance. It also helped confirm a lot of previous digital marketing assumptions too. 

• The Offline Conversions API was able to attribute an increase of 195% of store sales back to paid online ads - meaning Aquila was able to accurately report an increase of 255% in blended omni-channel ROI compared to the previous ROI for online only.   
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• These results gave Aquila the confidence to increase their paid social spend by 400% knowing the true impact of paid online campaigns.
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• And the insights gathered have already started to influence future campaign strategy and marketing budget allocation too.

Without the visibility from the Offline API and Lexer, we could never paint the picture of influence paid social media advertising had on our offline sales, and be able to confidently increase our spend as significantly as we have over the last few months. - Kiara Pecenko, Head of Marketing at Aquila.

By establishing an enriched single customer view, combining this with an omni-channel marketing strategy and utilising new reporting technology, Aquila was able to more accurately quantify the impact of their paid social campaigns and confidently double down on their strategy.

About Aquila

Aquila is the leading men’s footwear brand in Australia, operating across 40 retail stores nationwide. Proudly Australian owned since 1958, they are known for their commitment to creating quality, stylish men’s shoes and accessories for any occasion.

Know your customer, grow your business 

Lexer is the CDXP of choice for over 150 leading brands and retailers, such as Sur La Table, Martha Stewart, Cotton On, John Varvatos and more. We put the power of your customer data directly into your hands, ensuring you have the insights necessary to grow your business. Our intuitive tools enable retail, marketing, and service teams to create data-driven engagement strategies that positively impact every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Interested in learning more about how Lexer can help you improve customer engagement and maximize results? Book a demo with one of our retail experts.