Convenient, Smart Wine Discovery
Ever wanted to try a new wine but not known where to start? Problem solved! Winc curates wines for you on a personal level, based on your preferences. You don’t have to travel to distant lands to explore new wines, or even go to your local wine merchant. The ability to obtain great wine is at your fingertips, and your wines are delivered directly to you at home so you can spend more time enjoying.
The Goal: New Activation Growth
Restrictions on advertising for any sort of alcohol is a well-known limitation for digital advertisers. So how do we make sure we are getting in front of the right audience, many of whom spend time shopping online? Most display ad types, typically used for branding, are not available to Winc and similar businesses, so together with Metric Theory, they got creative about how to grow.
Our Strategy
- Shopping Campaign & Feed Launch
- Automated Bidding Strategies
- New Product Marketing
Shopping Campaign & Feed Launch
Shopping ads have restrictions around promoting alcoholic beverages, making advertising difficult in a channel where our target audience lives. Metric Theory carefully crafted a Shopping feed and campaigns from scratch to ensure compliance with all restrictions, which meant being able to take full advantage of Shopping ad placements without the fear of disapprovals. The teams also worked together to come up with unique product combinations based on fan favorites to lower shipping costs and make Winc more competitive on Shopping.
"Our long-standing partnership with Metric Theory, and their deep understanding of our business and the advertising landscape, has enabled them to implement innovative strategies for shopping and bidding automation. Their efforts have established Search and Shopping as the highest-growth and highest-ROI channels for new customer acquisition at Winc."
Automated Bidding Strategies
While a lead shows interest and intent, the bottom line comes down to users activating a subscription account. The teams used automated bidding to grow the traffic and leads while taking cost per Activation into account. Because Activation volume is lower than the higher-funnel ‘lead’ metric, it was difficult to drive enough volume to use automated bidding to its full potential based on Activations alone. To harness that powerful machine learning data, the teams analyzed Winc’s activation numbers to work backward to profitable cost per lead value that could be utilized with auto-bidding strategies. Using that custom profitability number as a guide, over 75% of the account has been transitioned to using automated bidding strategies such as Target CPA to keep growing relevant volume while maintaining profitability.
New Product Marketing
Beyond promoting the staple wine subscription service, the teams got creative with other product offerings. Metric Theory began advertising for Winc’s gift cards, a great gift at any time of the year, but especially leading up to the high season of Q4. This new advertising strategy provided an additional avenue for revenue with a more direct, immediate view into bottom line impact and scalability.
50%
increase in Activations YoY
53%
increase in Shopping Activations MoM
79%
increase in Activations YoY with auto-bidding
