Academy Sports 2x their DPA performance with Hunch AI-powered templates
Choosing the right partner for the paid social campaigns
Academy Sports + Outdoors is a major player in the US sporting goods market, with a substantial presence across 18 states and ambitious plans for nationwide expansion. Generating $6 billion in annual revenue from over 280 stores, the company has emerged as an innovative force in the retail industry. They adeptly balance their dominant in-store sales with a strong focus on their online presence.
Recognizing the importance of paid social media in driving sales, Academy Sports launched an internal initiative to enhance their creative capabilities, aiming for more innovative solutions. As a major advertiser on Meta, they collaborated with Meta's marketing science team to conduct a Conversion Lift Study, in which Hunch was one of the participants. The study's objective was to assist Academy Sports & Outdoors in selecting their preferred paid social partner. Hunch successfully addressed the creative challenges of Academy Sports' catalogs, and here’s how we did it.
Hunch AI Background removal enhanced 350,000+ product images
Meta’s marketing science team conducted a 4-week conversion lift study to measure the lift in ROAS for Academy Sports & Outdoors.
In short, Conversion lift helps measure the incremental performance of your Meta ads. When you run a Conversion Lift Study Meta randomly splits your target audience into two groups (audiences), where the test group sees your ads, and the control group (aka a holdout) doesn’t. Most tests take 3 to 4 weeks to complete (depending on various factors like the budget or number of conversions required to get an accurate reading). The performance is compared over time to determine the incremental lift. This measures the conversion that wouldn’t have happened without exposure to your ads.
To add more complexity to this study, instead of comparing two different creatives, they were comparing three - Hunch, Competitor’s, and No overlay templates.
We leveraged our proprietary AI-powered background removal technology to automatically strip away the backgrounds from all 350,000 product images in the client's catalog. This allowed us to generate fully personalized and enriched Dynamic Product Ads without any manual intervention.
Superior ad performance on all frontiers with Hunch AI-powered creatives
The results from this Conversion lift study showed that Hunch outperformed both competitor overlay and no-overlay templates across all frontiers:
- Hunch AI-powered creatives achieved a +102% higher incremental revenue compared to competitor's overlays, and a +158% higher incremental revenue compared to templates without overlays.
- 2.3x ROAS - Hunch outperformed both competitor’s and no overlay templates, driving an incremental ROAS lift of 2.3x.
- 64% - Estimated annual savings by choosing Hunch as the paid social partner.
Academy Sports + Outdoors picked Hunch as their go-to paid social partner because the study demonstrated that Hunch's technology and team can provide long-term value, beyond just meeting the immediate objectives of the Conversion Lift Study.
Conducting studies like this one is a powerful yet expensive way to gain insights, and while it can be self-managed, collaborating with the right partner like Hunch can streamline the process.
If you want to conduct a Conversion Lift Study and uplift your ASC campaigns with Hunch's AI-powered DPAs, give us a call to explore how we can assist you.
