Riding into Success: Australia’s Largest Online Bicycle Retailer Conquering the US Market

82% avg. ann. paid ads revenue growth
40X revenue growth

Objectives

Establishing market presence in the US, building brand awareness, driving sales & efficiency

Industry

Technology

About the Client

BikesOnline USA is a California-based online specialty retailer that sells both bicycles and the accessories that accompany them. The company was launched in 2019 by Bicycles Online AU. It was founded in June 2011 in Australia, with the aim of making cycling more accessible by offering a wide range of high-quality products at the lowest prices possible. Unsurprisingly, BikesOnline has also been recognized and commended for its success. It was once featured on BRW’s Fast Starters list, and was previously a Telstra Australian Business Awards finalist.

Challenges

Holding a significant market share in Australia, BikesOnline was looking for new opportunities to expand overseas. Initially, the company was considering the EU market. However, after conducting thorough market research, our team of professional digital advertisers (with extensive expertise in the bike industry) recommended entering the US market instead.

Stepping into a new market was challenging for the brand as they were seeking new growth opportunities. Like any market, the US market presented its own barriers, such as dealing with high competition and navigating cultural differences. The bike niche was no an exception. The retailer needed to understand diverse consumer preferences and build awareness in a crowded business. This requires investments in advertising to introduce and establish brand identity.

In 2020-2021, stock restraint issues became very sensitive, driven primarily by soaring demand (leading to 46% YoY US sales growth) and supply chain problems caused by the pandemic. Retailers were struggling to keep the inventory in stock during the peak demand of the lockdowns and restrictions. Managing and improving efficiency amid stock shortages presented a complex challenge requiring ad strategy adjustments.

Historically, the industry had experienced seasonal demand fluctuations, requiring careful inventory management to prevent overstock during off-peak periods. However, the surge in demand caused by the pandemic led retailers to miscalculate future needs.

As a result, during 2022-2023, the bicycle industry faced difficulties associated with decreased demand, overstock with more than $765 million in inventory by the end of 2023 Q1, and high competition. Businesses were forced to adapt their strategies to manage inventory levels effectively and drive sales.

To successfully conquer the US market while effectively navigating industry challenges, BikesOnline once again turned to VIDEN.

Solution

Campaign Strategy

Budget distribution across Meta Ads, Google Ads, and Microsoft (Bing) Ads
Re-balancing the media mix towards the middle and bottom of the funnel
Strategy adaptation due to lower consumer demand and higher competition
Developing a creative and data-driven approach to paid advertising

In 2019, to recognize the power of paid marketing and reach new audiences on a larger scale, the VIDEN team developed a strategy to distribute the budget across the following ads campaigns:

Meta Ad video campaigns to reach target audiences (interested in buying mountain, road, and gravel bikes) by highlighting each product’s unique selling propositions.
Google Ad shopping campaigns to put product ads directly in front of users who are actively searching for goods. Each one categorized by user buying intent, maximizing high-buying intent coverage to generate revenue immediately.
Microsoft (Bing) Ad shopping and search campaigns to leverage lower competition inventory and receive better return on the ad spend (ROAS) to support revenue streams.

As we stepped into 2020-2021, the business landscape changed due to the pandemic. Our ad experts adjusted the media mix strategy to focus more on the middle and bottom of the funnel to align with exceptionally high demand and limited stock across the industry. We shifted our tactics to Shopping Google Ad and Microsoft (Bing) Ad campaigns to maximize efficiency.

2022 was marked by lower consumer demand and higher competition, leading to rising ad costs, especially across paid search auctions. The ads team adapted the strategy by:

Shifting budgets to Meta Ads, where ad costs were not less affected.
Heavily focusing on creatives to stand out, address customer needs, and demonstrate the brand proposition (great value for its price, free shipping, and returns).
Implementing a dynamic bidding strategy based on stocks, margins, and competitors’ pricing to maximize the coverage of the best potential auctions.

Additionally, introducing parts and accessories (P&As) let us build another acquisition angle across Google Ads and Meta Ads, with further opportunities for customer retention and upselling.

As we continue our partnership with BikesOnline, the team is constantly leveraging the creative and data-driven approach for paid advertising.

With ever-shrinking targeting capabilities provided by ad platforms and an overall shift to broad targeting, creatives play a pivotal role in identifying the customer intent at different stages of the journey, because of this, they must:

Appeal to audiences who are unaware of bike trends across different categories.
Educate customers on how to make the right bike selection.
Communicate the best value propositions of price, delivery, and customer support when a prospective buyer is about to make a purchase.

Our team created a wealth of high-quality content, which allowed us to form a strong and meaningful connection with our audience. AI adoption in the creative process exponentially speeded up testing hypotheses, ideas, and ad angles.

Extending the data-driven approach to all aspects of digital advertising included the following:

Measuring the efficiency beyond the platform numbers, moving to incremental ROAS and profits (full-funnel marketing analytics).
Automated trends analysis (competitors, ad auctions, creative trends).

Results

Five years of close collaboration between VIDEN and BikesOnline USA have led to outstanding outcomes:

In 2019, the break-even ROAS was achieved within the first six months after the campaign’s launch. We outperformed the business plan by 30% by the end of the year.
VIDEN increased sales more than six-fold and achieved a 47% growth in incremental ROAS between 2020 and 2021.
Despite the industry experiencing softness in post-pandemic demand, we managed to maintain and increase paid ad revenue to double the pre-pandemic volumes with about 10% lower efficiency, which was better than the projected and industry-wide outcomes. The ad engagement rates (click-through rates) was over 80% better than the industry benchmark showing consistent YoY improvement.
Since the brand’s inception in 2019, paid ad revenue has grown by 82% on average YoY, with a 14% annual improvement in efficiency (ROAS).