Crocs finds incremental sales growth on Amazon with the help of Perpetua’s automation

Crocs, Inc. is a casual footwear manufacturer that prides itself on innovation and comfort. Its most famous style, the Classic Clogs, is globally recognizable, with over 300 million pairs sold worldwide since launching in 2002. Crocs is headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, and has more than 4,000 employees globally.

Because the brand views online sales channels as key to reaching new shoppers, Amazon has been a core component of its sales strategy for over a decade.

As the brand’s investment continued to scale on Amazon Ads, Crocs' internal specialist team wanted to invest more time in developing strategies designed to drive incremental top-line revenue for the brand. In 2018, Crocs turned to Perpetua, an advertising API-integrated partner that offers an AI-powered optimization platform for sponsored ads campaign management, to streamline campaign setup, management, and optimization.

We were looking to manage our bid optimizations at scale for the thousands of keywords we use and demonstrate incremental lift on expected and predicted consumers' interest, and drive minimum threshold return on incremental lift from marketing.

– Ben Newson, Senior Manager, Etail and Distributors, Crocs

Before working with Perpetua, the Crocs team spent 30-50% of its time spot-checking keyword bids, trying to identify poor performers and increasing bids to capitalize on strong performers. To drive greater operational efficiency with campaign management, the team looked to Perpetua’s offering with the hopes of saving time without sacrificing precision or performance.

By using Perpetua’s platform to manage sponsored ads campaigns, the Crocs team was able to see how it would benefit from its campaign management and optimization processes.

We liked Perpetua’s machine learning approach and its focus on incremental sales. Perpetua optimizes bids programmatically, which is faster and more accurate than our manual process. We now have time to focus on strategies, testing, and analysis.

– Megan Mohr, Associate Manager, Etail and Distributors, Crocs

Perpetua had freed up some of Crocs' operational investment, which allowed the brand to focus on incremental opportunities it hadn't yet explored. While the brand had seen great success with its branded keyword strategy, Crocs uncovered an opportunity to expand its focus more on category and competitor term sets. Perpetua's advanced targeting feature allowed Crocs to look at its keyword strategy between brand, category, and competitor term sets and find new potential.

Crocs worked with Perpetua to prove the merit of this new keyword strategy with a small test budget and was able to yield positive results for two product lines.

Crocs' new keyword tactic strategy expanded to unbranded category keywords and unbranded competitor keywords, which allowed the brand to recognize an incremental sales opportunity.

Phase 1 results:

• Weekly sales increased by 100% for product line #1
• Weekly sales increased by 120% for product line #2
• Incremental ROAS (return on ad spend) of 300%
• Defined as lift in ordered revenue for the product set during the test period compared to the baseline.

After seeing success, Crocs then scaled its investment in this strategy to help drive new customer acquisition goals and deliver incremental sales lift.

Overall, since working with Perpetua, Crocs has exceeded ACOS (advertising cost of sales) goals and in its first year increased sales attributed to advertising by 3x year over year.

Perpetua has also driven efficiency for the Crocs team, allowing it to save more than three hours each week by automating time-intensive tasks, like keyword harvesting, bid optimization, and campaign setup. Because of this, the team reallocated that time to work on high-level ad strategy and testing new concepts.

Scale and new customer acquisition are evergreen objectives for our e-commerce businesses. Perpetua and Amazon keep us pointed in this direction.

– Ben Newson, Senior Manager, Etail and Distributors