Best Buy Canada is a leading consumer technology retailer that has been providing customers with the latest and greatest in technology since 2002. Best Buy Canada currently receives around 300 million annual website visits and 50 million annual store visits.
In 2019, Best Buy launched Best Buy Ads, the company's in-house media network, as a key driver of growth as a strategic initiative. To support their goals, Best Buy turned to Google Ad Manager.
Goals
Best Buy Ad’s first goal was to drive revenue growth. As a Vancouver-based company, Best Buy Ads also wanted to expand their reach by building stronger agency relationships, particularly with those based on the East Coast of Canada.
Their second goal was to enhance the Best Buy shopper experience. To do this, Best Buy Ads focused on delivering innovative advertising solutions, leveraging first-party data and customer insights to provide personalized and relevant ad experiences.
As a final goal in their program, Best Buy Ads sought to provide vendors with tools to reach their desired audience among Best Buy shoppers effectively. This would allow partners to maximize their brand awareness and sales growth.
Approach
Best Buy Ads chose Google Ad Manager 360 as a supply-side platform for several reasons, including the ability to easily onboarding inventory and streamline operations quickly due to Ad Manager’s flexible solutions. Additionally, working with Ad Manager offered Best Buy a seamless way to tap into a vast network of advertisers and make their own inventory easily accessible for marketers looking to reach their specialty audiences at scale.
Once the technical implementation was complete, Best Buy Ads ran numerous experiments to optimize their ad inventory and maximize revenue. This included testing different pricing, inventory mixes and ad placements to find the most effective strategies to deliver a positive shopper experience, drive strong results for their advertisers, and maximize revenue for the retail media business. They continue to use the Opportunities and Experiments tabs in Ad Manager to use AI and Google tools to identify areas for further testing.
Results
Since choosing to use Google Ad Manager, Best Buy Ads has seen significant growth in its advertising business. Fill rates increased from 69% in 2022 to 85% in 2023, and due to optimization and testing, they’ve been able to command more premium CPMs than at the time of launch.
Overall, Best Buy Ads' work with Google Ad Manager has been a tremendous success. They have achieved their goals of maximizing revenue, optimizing inventory, expanding reach, and continuously improving their advertising business with access to premium programmatic opportunities.