Under Armour isn't Anyone's Analytics Underdog

Under Armour:

Being from Baltimore, Under Armour is one of the success stories that everyone loves to tout. The sports apparel company is the definition of superior with high-quality products and a stellar marketing team. Pinned up against sporting good giants Nike and Adidas, Under Armour aims to drive online traffic to their websites that are aimed at a variety of audiences - both niche and mass pleasing. Despite the harsh competition, Under Armour has continued to grow, with last quarter marking the fourth consecutive quarter of over 30% growth (Symington, 2014).

Website Success:

To achieve such great e-commerce success, Under Armour uses Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite (Adobe, 2014). This system, as detailed in my blog post two weeks ago, is a very high-powered system that “helps you to uncover business opportunities and successes by turning customer interaction into actionable insights. With the market-leading solution, you can better understand the entire journey (Adobe, 2013).”

Under Armour’s Manager of Web Analytics & Optimization, Beau Kemeys cited the ability to look beyond page visits, orders, and revenues per product and evaluate how to leverage web analytics and optimization solutions to modify e-mail marketing, web content, and purchase suggestions (Adobe, 2014).

Under Armour has completely optimized the website based on data provided by Adobe’s Marketing Suite.  Items are categorized well, which helps visitors to easily navigate to the pages and products they’re interested in viewing. In addition to easy navigation, visitors are shown products that other people have viewed with similar browsing habits, or products with similar features. The thinking behind this is that if a visitor is potentially interested in one product, they may also be interested in something similar, or something that another user with similar tastes found worthy of purchase.

One of the benefits of the Adobe Marketing Suite is that it allows the webmaster to see and analyze how customers arrived to the site, their online interactions, product searches, content viewed, and the steps leading up to purchase. With this information e-commerce retailers can better anticipate the habits of visitors, their interests, and where in the process they lose (or gain) a sale.

Under Armour’s Kemey said that by using this tool, his team was able to see that despite certain products seeing lower-traffic on their standalone pages, they saw a large spike in purchased when listed on a higher-profile area of the site (Adobe, 2014). Unexpected victories can become apparent when viewing website data with such precision.

Another tool that Under Armour uses in addition to the Adobe Marketing Suite to monitor engagemtn, called Needle, is a social selling platform that allows existing fans to answer customer questions directly on the company’s website (Needle, n.d.). Other brands that use Needle include Coach, Nikon, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Ocerstock.com. According to Needle’s website, the platform can deliver real-time results with conversion increases of 10% (Needle, n.d.).

In a presentation that Under Armour’s Manager of Web Analytics & Optimization gave at Adobe Summit in 2012, he said that Under Armour sees a 27% conversion rate from customers who talked one-on-one with a Needle user, compared to typical single digit conversions (Bell, 2012). 

Social Integration and Growth:

Last year, Under Armour launched an 18-day holiday promotion that included a web overhaul, Google AdWord campaign, and social media (Blau, 2013).

Under Armour used GoogleAds, targeting interests, category and keyword targeting of potential online customers, leading them to the website according to Jason LaRose, Under Armour’s Senior Vice President of e-commerce. All social media ads were tailored based on the traffic to the e-commerce site for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (Blau, 2013). Since operating this way, LaRose acknowledged that social engagement with ads has doubled.

App Integration:

When Under Armour launched the “I WILL WHAT I WANT” campaign, the company saw a huge spike in traffic to the e-commerce site. Most of these visitors were women and 70% of them were new to the Under Armour brand (Symington, 2014). Under Armour saw engagement skyrocket, which was evident through over 350,000 downloads of the “I WILL WHAT I WANT” app (Symington, 2014). The fact that Under Armour was able to get 350,000 individuals to download an app based on a single commercial is astounding. As long as these users continue to have the app, Under Armour has access to them through email, push reminders, and more.

While the 350,000 downloads was impressive, that number almost pales to the 30 million registered users of the app (Barker, 2014). Under Armour collects data through their app, such as how users work out, where they do it, and for how long (Cornstock, 2014). The app collects data profiles so the company can differentiate between exercise enthusiasts by looking at the data sent back from users. Under Armour can analyze the time of day, frequency and distance, they can distinguish between groups of people, and gain more insight into their users’ habits.

Recommended Tools and Tactics:

It’s clear that Under Armour knows what they’re doing with their e-commerce team. Sales are up, conversions are great, and website and app traffic continues to grow exponentially. Looking at their website, it’s difficult to imagine it any other way. Below are hypothetical goals that Under Armour should focus on next year.

Goal: Track abandoned shopping cart rate from new site visitors new to the Under Armour brand.

With the I WILL WHAT I WANT app, Under Armour has the opportunity to continue a meaningful relationship with an entirely new market. The tracking can be done using Adobe’s Marketing Suite to automatically generate marketing emails to customers who are logged in to the site. If Under Armour were to tie the app to their website, they would have the personal exercising habits of users in addition to their potential shopping habits.

References:

Adobe. (2013, October). Adobe.com. “Adobe Analytics Premium.” Retrieved from, http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/solutions/digital-marketing/digital-analytics/pdfs/solution-overview-analytics-premium-ue.pdf.

Adobe. (2014). Adobe Online Marketing Suite Success Stories. “Under Armour.” Retrieved from, http://sjstransky.writerfolio.com/attachments/26691.pdf.

Barker, J. (2014, October 24). Baltimore Sun. “Fitness Technology is personal to Under Armour’s Plank.” Retrieved from, http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/under-armour-blog/bs-bz-plank-health-technology-20141024-story.html#page=1.

Bell, B. (2012, March 30). Brooksbell.com. “How to Life Conversion Rates with Social Proof.” Retrieved from, http://www.brooksbell.com/blog/how-to-lift-conversion-rates-with-social-proof/.

Blau, M. (2013, December 14). Mashable.com. “Under Armour Used Real-Time Data, Display Ads to Drive Holiday Sales.” Retrieved from, http://mashable.com/2013/12/14/under-armour-black-friday-metrics/.

Cornstock, J. (2014, May 15). Mobihealthnews.com. “How Under ARmour will use MapMyFitness data to sell apparel.” Retrieved from, http://mobihealthnews.com/33158/how-under-armour-will-use-mapmyfitness-data-to-sell-apparel/.

Needle. (n.d.). Needle.com. “Needle.” Retrieved from, https://www.needle.com.

Symington, S. (2014, October 29). Fool.com. “5 Things Under Armour’s Management Wants You to Know.” Retrieved from, http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/29/5-things-under-armour-incs-management-wants-you-to.aspx.