During its most recent PrimeTime event, the Nationwide Marketing Group rolled out an impressive suite of solutions for its independent retail members via a partnership with vendor Retailer Web Services (RWS). The new AdRocket technology is the result of that partnership, and it’s a service that fully automates digital advertising, provides detailed analytics, generates calls and navigations to the store, fills online shopping carts, and more.
After the rollout of the technology, Nationwide and RWS put AdRocket to the test via a major summer campaign—at no cost to the group’s members. Throughout the month of May, the group ran several different promotions including a “May is Maytag Month” campaign and several Memorial Day campaigns for Beautyrest Black and Serta iComfort. According to RWS, the campaigns simultaneously executed more than 950 unique Google Display, Google Text, and Facebook ads for several hundred appliance and mattress retailers.
The ad spend of several hundred thousand dollars was fully funded by Nationwide and its retail partners Whirlpool and Serta Simmons Bedding.
Throughout those campaigns, RWS measured and recorded the activity of consumers after those ads brought them to the site for 185 retailer participants who were using websites built by RWS or All Your Retail. The findings were fairly impactful. After clicking through the ads, consumers
- continued to conduct research about the items in the promotions, visiting product pages of participating appliances or mattresses 33,812 times;
- contacted the store by phone using the click-to-call function nearly 7,000 times;
- looked for directions to the store from their smartphones 571 times;
- and actively started online transactions, adding 1,178 of the participating products to the retailers’ online shopping carts or requesting quotes.
RWS said that it then executed subsequent large-scale promotions that included a “Shop Local” campaign in June, and they are currently running Independence Day promotions for independent retailers throughout July.
The promise of the RWS AdRocket technology extends beyond its ability to automate those digital ad campaigns, as COO Jennie Gilbert pointed out. The technology has the ability to gather data prior to, during, and after ads are clicked, which allows for “thorough analysis, testing, and improvement” of the ads to ensure that they are driving valuable traffic and leading to actual conversions for the retailer.
“The AdRocket technology is superior in bringing scale by automation,” Gilbert said in a statement. “It places more ads faster and more accurately, freeing retailers—and advertisers—from placing ads by hand, which avoids costly human error and delays in starting time-sensitive promotions. AdRocket does all the work prior to the go live date and then programmatically places the ads within minutes. We look forward to future campaigns with AdRocket as more brands are excited to participate.”
We anticipate further findings to be announced as well as other added benefits of the AdRocket technology during Nationwide’s upcoming PrimeTime event in Las Vegas in August.