Decathlon Canada grows affiliate revenue by 533%

Find out how Decathlon optimized partner management with the powerful impact.com platform to expand into a new market.

Case study

Decathlon Canada and Seven Square Media teamed up with impact.com to grow affiliate revenue by 533%

Situation Expanding to a new market

As a leading global sporting goods retailer offering 10,000+ products across 80+ sports, Decathlon expanded its North American territory to Canada. Relationship- building with key affiliate partners was essential for connecting with a new market and introducing its products. The team conducts extensive field and lab testing to manufacture quality sports equipment and gear based on findings and customer feedback. With a fairly new partnerships program, diversifying the partner portfolio beyond affiliates and coupon sites became imperative to understand how each partner’s customer demographics and personas relate to Decathlon Canada. Additionally, the limited resources and experience with affiliate marketing internally made partner management time-consuming and affected efficiency .

There was no recruitment strategy, and current affiliate partners weren’t being optimized. The team needed two things to succeed with affiliate partnership management:

An agency with Canadian retail affiliate experience

A robust and intuitive management platform

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Solution

Outcome

About

Decathlon

Decathlon is one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the world. Founded in France in 1976, the family-run company design, manufacture, and distributes affordable products for more than 80 sports worldwide. The company has over 1,700 stores and sports installations in more than 60 countries worldwide.

Seven Square Media

For over a decade, the Seven Square Media team has created high-performing affiliate marketing campaigns for some of the world's top brands. The team focuses on creativity and quality to match brands with affiliates that tell the stories their clients' customers need to hear.

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Solution

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Solution Leveraging time-saving tools to increase efficiency

The impact.com partnership platform and technology solutions have been extremely effective, allowing our team to focus on building strong relationships, recruiting efficiently, and onboarding new partners, which has resulted in the continued growth and success of our program each year.

Decathlon Canada chose Seven Square Media for their proven expertise and experience in affiliate management to launch a partnership program in 2019. The team at Seven Square Media used impact.com's features and tools to position the sports retailer brand's program for success.

Diversifying the partner portfolio for better reach

The impact.com Marketplace allowed the recruitment team to filter their partner search according to the audience, country, demographic, and category. The tool's additional affiliate recommendations introduced new partnership opportunities within Decathlon Canada's verticals—resulting in collaborations with key partners like Brim Financial, Klarna, and Buzzfeed. The team capitalized on the platform's key suggestions for seasonal campaigns and the newly-added partner features.

David Zagury Head of Digital Marketing, Decathlon Canada

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Solution

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Solution (cont.) Leveraging time-saving tools to increase efficiency

Implementing paid search policies to avoid violations

Analyzing reports to drive partner performance and customer insights

As the program matured, the team needed to monitor the search space more aggressively. The impact.com Paid Search Monitoring feature helped implement policies that ensured partners followed guidelines and identified violations. The platform’s subscriptions allowed for monitoring ten keywords across Google and Bing. Paid Search Monitoring empowered the team to take swift action to resolve issues like publishers using branded keywords in search engine marketing, which violated Decathlon Canada's terms and conditions.

The impact.com platform's reporting function improved team efficiency by 20 percent by offering a variety of in-depth reporting options to achieve various outcomes: ● By using the Behavior Report in impact.com's Optimize feature, the team gained context into customer behavior at various levels, including partner, ad, partner group, and deal. ● Optimize's Customer Value Report and Behavior Report gave insight into partner customers, average order value (AOV), and same-day conversion. The team used the data to strategize a commission plan to incentivize partners to drive incremental sales.

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Solution (cont.) Leveraging time-saving tools to increase efficiency

Analyzing reports to drive partner performance and customer insights (cont.) ● The Action IDs of impact.com's Advanced Action Listing Report helped review the entire customer journey to accurately attribute the affiliate channel for an order. ● The Benchmark Report within the Optimize suite provided a comparative analysis to benchmark Decathlon Canada's program performance against other sports advertisers in the affiliate industry. The analysis focused on active partners, conversions, and cost per action. ● The Benchmark Report also assisted with analyzing the brand's partners and ranked them against their segment size. The team used this data to identify active and top-performing partners in the program.

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Solution

Outcome

Outcome Growth in affiliate revenue, conversion rate, and efficiency

affiliate revenue year over year growth

533%

Within the first six months of launching Decathlon Canada’s affiliate program on impact.com, the team saw a 533 percent increase in affiliate revenue. Revenue grew by another 503 percent in the second year and continued upward in the third year. In the first six months, the team saw an average conversion rate of 2.8 percent. After just six more months, that shot up to 4.8 percent. By the program's third year, the affiliate program had reached a conversion rate of 7.9 percent. The team credits the impact.com platform with helping them achieve such rapid success. The platform’s tools empowered them to continually optimize resources so that they could spend more time on outreach and work more closely with their partners.

conversion rate increase after three years

182%

20%

efficiency boost

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