QuanticMind Designs Custom Integrations to Enable Online Thrift Store ThredUP to Scale Spend by Over 50%

From both an optimization and dashboard reporting standpoint, we’ve seen real benefits. QuanticMind has ultimately afforded us a lot more transparency into, and understanding of, how everything is performing.

At a time when marketing processes are becoming increasingly siloed and decentralized, cultivating a robust integration system is the key component to building powerful digital architecture and driving data excellence. Without connections to the relevant sources of truth, advertisers run the risk of developing campaigns blindly and will find it challenging to enable advanced optimization strategies, fuel accurate forecasts, and expose lucrative business insights that can unlock breakthrough ROI.

For Joanne Yuen—the Acquisition Marketing Manager at thredUP—this risk was a reality back in early 2018. The digital advertising platform employed by her team to manage paid search was experiencing significant issues integrating their true metrics directly into their pay-per-click strategies, and this was hindering her ability to achieve next-level growth.

“We’ve always been primarily focused on maintaining ROI goals,” Joanne explains. “However, for a long period, we were optimizing based on pixels so we could only focus on actual lead or conversion data rather than the internal KPIs that we want to evaluate performance on. Ultimately we were focusing on directional metrics and not predictive values that contribute to our ROI model.”

The situation was proving too much of a barrier for Joanne and her team as the set-up was neither providing them with visibility into the channels driving revenue nor conducive to supporting future growth scenarios. A new solution with more sophistication was needed to activate and scale their paid search marketing initiatives.

The Formation of a Winning PPC Program

The timing was perfect, then, when QuanticMind reached out in February 2018 to pitch the core differentiators of the company’s bespoke machine learning-powered bid management software. With a pressing problem that needed addressing, the thredUP team was open to hearing more and discussions immediately centered around QuanticMind’s capacity to execute granular, custom-made integrations with any data source. “This was something we had been trying to get for years from other tools but just couldn’t,” Joanne recalls.

When we learned that QuanticMind could implement our desired integration easily and then seamlessly report on it, it was a simple decision to transition on to their platform. It was definitely the main selling point.

Conversations moved forward quickly and a pathway to onboarding was soon laid out. ThredUP’s data engineers partnered with QuanticMind’s specialized team of data architects to incorporate their internal KPIs into the bidding process; an exercise that required a great deal of creativity. “I remember at first we didn’t have enough conversion data to integrate our goals properly,” Joanne says. “The QuanticMind team collaborated closely with us to find ways we could work toward those metrics and that led to the creation of our weighted hybrid conversion optimization.”

That was very helpful, and, in that situation, they were an important partner in strategy and not just execution. QuanticMind really went above and beyond to help us there and this is now what we’re optimizing a lot of our campaigns towards.

Following on from the successful implementation of this new, refined bidding approach, attention turned to streamlining inventory management. The problem hitherto facing Joanne was one of limited resources. The underlying nature of thredUP’s business dictates that they are constantly receiving new brands of clothing and her team was compelled to manually create an ad group for each, which was hugely time-consuming.

QuanticMind assumed control of the program and applied its suite of artificial intelligence algorithms to automate this entire process, thereby affording the thredUP team more bandwidth to strategize and develop marketing tactics that drive true business growth. “There’s been a lot of back and forth here,” Joanne describes. “Previously we kept coming into issues just based on how our business is and how we send data through. QuanticMind has been very patient with us during this process: they’ve worked tirelessly on this to ensure we’re set-up effectively.”

A Transparent Path to Revenue

Together, these optimizations have empowered Joanne and her team to scale their program with great precision—increasing spend by over 50%—while simultaneously improving the efficiency of their campaigns.

Joanne attributes this growth to QuanticMind’s capacity to cut through the noise and expose deep, intelligent insights: “For the first time, we’ve been able to actually optimize toward our internal data which is what we report our performance on. This includes all of the models that our data science team worked really hard to create for us,” she says.

The major gain has been surfacing really clear, granular data to help us understand the performance for those metrics down to the keyword level, which is something we never had before. So from both an optimization and dashboard reporting standpoint, we’ve seen real benefits.

In the past, we had to manually stitch our Adwords and internal data together to really understand our outcomes. QuanticMind has ultimately afforded us a lot more transparency into, and understanding of, how everything is performing.