For Black Friday, Sport Chek had an ambitious target: beating Amazon at the online retail battle they’ve dominated for more than a decade. Quite a challenge, since Sport Chek invests nothing close to the billions that Amazon invests online.

In the seven days leading up to Black Friday, the team detected a new analytic trend: the average number of items left abandoned in Sport Chek’s website carts increased by the hour, reaching unpreceded highs. The agency identified this new trend as “digital window shopping”: after placing items temporarily in Sport Chek’s carts, consumers looked for similar options on its competitors’ websites.

The team quickly realized that these temporary carts were a goldmine of insights. In real time, they revealed which items, out of the hundreds of thousands sold by Sport Chek, could be used to attract an unpreceded number of visitors to its website. It also revealed what categories and products to leverage to win Sport Chek’s share of voice in the war against Amazon.

A live data stream was quickly set up to generate insights from the “digital window shopping” phenomenon and select the star products to be advertised and key categories to bid on. In real-time, data from abandoned carts adapted and drove the media execution. The top 1,000 products left in carts, URLs and associated SKUs were fully leveraged to created new, dynamic campaigns in only a few hours. Armed with the insights of the shopping carts abandoned over the previous seven days, the company gained precious optimization hours over the competition.

This new approach was anything but a mere re-targeting campaign; the team did not use cart data to retarget the small pool of visitors who had abandoned them. Instead, items found in abandoned carts were quickly featured in the mass campaign, reaching 30% of Canadian consumers in only a few hours. The insights generated created massive reach in record time. Star products were promoted online to a wide audience of high potential consumers, through a variety of digital touchpoints.

A live data feed was used to select which Search categories to bid on. Sport Chek simply did not have the means to win the bidding war against Amazon across all categories. But thanks to the rich insights found in the carts, it could win in the right categories. These categories drove a high volume of consumers to its website and their conversion was optimized with a carefully planned mix of upsell tactics.