Hi there, thanks for joining us today. I’m Drew Teagle and I’m a senior business lead at Google
working with retailers on their marketing strategies. We're in for a great conversation
with women’s apparel retailer Chico’s FAS and their performance marketing agency, Adlucent.
Together, their goal is to accelerate online and in-store sales growth for the Chico’s FAS
brands — especially across the competitive apparel categories. To help achieve this,
they were early retail testers of Google’s new Performance Max campaigns, which allow retailers
to use a single campaign to access new inventory, formats, and audiences across all Google channels.
Chico’s and Adlucent saw strong results from their initial 4 week test
that led to an expansion through the holiday season.
Joining me for this discussion is Kimberly Grabel,
Senior Vice President of Marketing at Chico’s FAS and Ash Dhar, CEO of Adlucent.
To kick us off, Kimberly, why don’t you tell us about the Chico’s FAS brand,
marketing strategy, and focus areas?
Thanks Drew! Chico’s FAS is actually comprised of three unique brands:
Chico’s, which started as an artisanal boutique on Sanibel Island in 1983, White House Black Market,
a later acquisition but also a boutique format, and Soma, our intimate apparel brand.
From a marketing strategy standpoint, we’re laser-focused on driving omni-channel sales,
meeting our customer where she is, and bringing new customers to our boutiques and website
to experience the great products that we offer!
Specifically for our Soma brand, we’ve been looking to reach new customers and grow sales.
We saw incredible growth through the pandemic as consumers sought
out categories like wireless bras and comfortable undies, all day PJs and Loungewear.
The intimates category, however, is highly competitive and we wanted to ensure we
continued to fuel Soma’s growth, which was the challenge we gave our Adlucent team.
With this in mind, Adlucent approached us with the opportunity to test Performance Max.
That’s right Kimberly. With Soma, we have been successfully running Smart Shopping campaigns
so it felt like logical to test Performance Max. Given that Performance Max lets us access
new inventory and formats, we were hoping that we’d be able to capture greater demand
across new customers, while doing so more efficiently than we had in the past.
Performance Max reaches both lower-funnel strategies like Search and Shopping as well
as upper-funnel formats like Display, Discovery,
and YouTube — this gives our advertisers the opportunity to be visible to customers
at all points in the consumer journey, not just at the bottom of the funnel.
Results were quick and impressive. In 2 weeks of testing Performance Max with Soma,
we saw a 38% increase in revenue while CPCs declined by 5%. Equally striking was
that conversion rates increased substantially, resulting in an over 80% improvement in ROAS.
Because of the success we saw with this initial test,
we worked with Kimberly and her team to expand the Performance Max program
and launch campaigns on top categories for other Chico’s brands. Specifically, we launched blouses
and tops campaigns for Chico’s and for White House Black Market we focused on dresses, denim,
and tops categories. Both brands have seen strong results, similar results that we saw in Soma.
It’s awesome to see Chico’s and Adlucent testing, optimizing,
and scaling Performance Max across brands. Ash, how does Performance Max complement your other
campaigns across the Chico’s FAS brands? That’s a great question, Drew. Given
Adlucent’s scientific approach to campaign development and management, we systematically
moved all Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max, across all Chico's brands.
We found that Performance Max does a better job at optimizing placements
across Google channels to find the best time to serve ads alongside our other campaign types.
With Performance Max and our other campaigns
running together, we can deliver a unified message for Chico’s. As we rolled out Performance Max,
we saw better engagement with our ads which turned into better return on ad spend.
Over 30 days of testing with White House Black Market, Performance Max helped double conversion
rates and delivered a 23% increase in ROAS for denims. Equivalently, for the tops category,
we saw a stronger 31% increase in ROAS while still improving conversion rates considerably.
In a similar test for Chico’s activewear,
there was the strongest improvement in conversion rates, resulting in a ROAS increase of almost 50%.
That’s great, thanks for sharing these strong results! Kimberly, I’m curious,
has Chico’s always taken a fluid approach to investing and optimizing budget across channels?
Across our brands, we’ve always been focused on driving return on our ad spend — wherever this
requires us to focus and invest across the funnel. Our approach has been to capture all
the most efficient traffic first and expand into the upper-funnel to increase awareness,
pull consumers further down the funnel, and help grow the scale at the very bottom of the funnel.
Google has so much more visibility into the context around consumer behavior,
beyond what any individual advertiser could ever see. With Performance Max, we’re able to tap into
that knowledge to help us connect with the right customers for our brands — wherever they may be
across the funnel — on YouTube, Discovery, or Shopping and Search. Engaging with our customers
at the right stage allows us to better connect them to either the online or in-store experience
that they’re looking for from one of our brands. Thanks for sharing your approach, Kimberly.
It’s encouraging to see Chico’s and Adlucent breaking channel silos.
My last question for you both — what’s next for Chico’s and Adlucent regarding Performance Max?
We’re continuing to further roll out Performance Max across Chico’s brands,
beyond just testing specific product categories. While Kimberly and our partners at Chico’s were
among the first movers, we continue to test and roll out PMax across our client base and we’re
seeing good early success, beyond apparel. For Adlucent specifically, we’re excited
to keep evolving our scientific approach to help our performance marketing clients
use Performance Max to acquire better customers and increase lifetime value.
We recently launched Adlucent Index™, our new technology that brings control into automation.
Adlucent Index™ lets us control and change how we value each conversion rather than just bidding on
clicks. We ingest and customize additional data sources, including, but not limited to,
first party data, product margins, and lifetime value, to feed enriched signals back into Google’s
automated algorithms. This allows us to adjust and train Performance Max and other campaigns
to acquire better customers, based upon the advertiser’s specific goals and unique data.
We can develop a truly unique and enhanced, automated algorithm based upon Google signals
and Adlucent’s indexed adjustments. So we leverage the best features from Google’s automation
while adding value to help advertisers optimize campaigns
to the metrics that are most important to their business.
This is especially powerful when clients are launching new products or brands,
like Kimberly will talk about with Bodify. That’s right, Ash. We’re in market right
now with Performance Max for our latest Soma bra launch – Bodify – our new bra packed with
patented innovations including a flexible cup that creates a custom fit for her. For this launch,
we are taking advantage of the full-funnel benefits of our campaigns. From video components
that allow us to tell a fuller, new-product story to text ads, we can ensure that we’re
in front of customers looking to learn more, allowing Soma to control the Bodify messaging.
We're also exploring new ways to customize Performance Max’s automation with Adlucent Index,
the tool that Ash just described. This will let us feed Google’s automation with all of
the complexities of the Chico’s FAS business and its brands. We're particularly looking forward
to doubling down on our effort to capture new customers and drive them to our brands.
Lastly, we continue to take an omnichannel approach with our business. Throughout 2022,
we’ll focus on engaging with the local components of Performance Max, such as optimizing campaigns
for store visits, to drive an integrated approach between our websites and our stores.
It sounds like you both have exciting things in the works and it’s great to hear how Performance
Max fits into your plans! Thanks for sharing how Chico’s and Adlucent were early to test,
iterate, and scale Performance Max to see these impressive results across the Chico’s brands.
For advertisers tuning in, you can start using Performance Max today
to maximize your reach and find more converting customers across all Google channels,
including YouTube, Search, and Discover. Beginning in April, you’ll be able to upgrade your existing
Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max with a “one-click” tool in Google Ads.
For Local campaigns, you’ll be able to upgrade starting in June.
Thanks for watching!