Polyvore Expands Promoted Products Ad Program To Canada, UK, Australia

With more than half of its traffic coming from international visitors, social commerce site Polyvore is expanding its Promoted Products ad program beyond the US to Australia, Canada and the UK.

In the vein of other social platforms such as Pinterest, Polyvore’s ads are native in format, adopting the look and feel of the editorial content on the page. The ads may appear on the site’s Shop and Product pages. Ads, which are not identified as “Promoted” unlike Polyvore’s Promoted Collection ads, link directly to brand and retailer web sites.

Polyvore says over 150 advertisers have participated in the program so far, and seen an average of 6 times return on ad spend, as visitors are predisposed to shop.

Advertisers upload their product feeds on the self-service ad platform, which also supports Google Shopping product feeds. Ads are shown based on relevance to search, bid, engagement and recency. Advertisers are charged on a cost-per-click basis.

Polyvore launched Promoted Products in the US in early 2013, and performance advertising now accounts for roughly 80 percent of the company’s revenue, according to Arnie Gullov-Singh, Chief Revenue Officer at Polyvore.

Advertisers include retailers and brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch and The RealReal, which says 58 percent of their social media traffic was driven by Polyvore in their first month in the program.

A study last year by ecommerce personalization engine, RichRelevance, found that retailers’ average order value from Polyvore referrals was $383, beating out Pinterest ($199), Facebook ($93) and Twitter ($58).