English
Wojas Mitigates Ad Blocking With Bloomreach Engagement
Wojas is one of the largest and most loved Polish footwear manufacturers by its customers. It has a network of over 150 company stores in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Belarus.
The company produces several hundred thousand pairs of shoes every year and uses Bloomreach Engagement to offer its customers the best possible shopping experience online with its brand. Wojas also offers handbags, briefcases, and belts.
The Challenge
The amount of internet users who use an ad blocking tool or something similar has become concerning for customer data platform users and website analytics users in general. Ad blockers are another external factor that can have a major impact on the quality of data that you base important marketing decisions on, and obscure real customer behavior on your site.
That is because many ad blockers go beyond just hiding ads, and also disable known tracking scripts, e.g. Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. This can lead to these pixels not firing appropriate events (add to cart, purchase), which leads to campaigns not being deployed or being stopped entirely for customers. This of course leads to lower ROI.
Because of the negative impacts on campaigns, Wojas desired to explore the possibilities to mitigate adverse effects of ad blockers with Bloomreach Engagement.
Since 2020, we have changed our approach in communicating with our clients. Due to the fact that the Wojas brand has a wide range of customers, we wanted to adapt our website and promotion of individual product groups to their individual preferences as much as possible. Thanks to Bloomreach and Vecton, we now offer customers individually tailored products, and the customer experience on our website is similar to that which customers value in our physical stores.
Michael Wojas
The Solution
Wojas desired to mitigate the ad blocking issue and better recommend products online to its customers. It also wanted to personalize the customer experience to the fullest by tailoring the experience to the individual preferences of its users.
Bloomreach helped to solve all of these challenges with custom tracking domain. Simply put, this means that the script monitoring Wojas’ users’ activities sends data to a subdomain within the Wojas domain and from there to the Bloomreach platform.
Third-party trackers (e.g. Facebook Pixel, Google Ads pixel) will always have to send data to third parties. On the other hand, a first-party solution like Bloomreach Engagement allows companies to be in full control of the customer data they gather, and also the ways in which they gather the data.
This way of gathering data allows ad blockers and browsers to know that it’s the company that owns the domain gathering the data, not a third party that will use that data to build a cross-site profile of the customer — which is what ad blockers aim to disable.
For comparison’s sake, this is like telling customers (in a technical way) that the brand wants to get to know them and use their behavior to improve their experience rather than an advertiser trying to build their profiles to better target them with advertising.
Another benefit was that certain experiential elements which were driven by Bloomreach Engagement started showing up again for customers who used ad blockers. These were misidentified as third party advertising before and customers with ad blocks wouldn’t see them.
The Results
While the change may sound technical and complicated it took less than a week to implement in collaboration with our partner Vecton. The changes allowed Wojas to immediately solve problems related to certain pieces of content not displaying on the website and issues related to user preferences.
Thanks to Bloomreach Engagement, almost all Wojas users see a website tailored to their individual preferences and easily find products to fit their needs faster.
The use of a custom tracking domain is only one way to solve the problem with ad blockers and browser cookie limitations. If you want to learn more about the business benefits or technical intricacies of building a first-party data platform to personalize on-site experiences and marketing communication, schedule a personalized demo today.
