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nline marketplace Matahari Mall said Thursday it saw a 160 percent increase in sales per month throughout the fourth quarter of 2015, with mobile users being the largest group of visitors to the site.

Matahari Mall, which was set up in September last year, said the growth in sales was mainly due to focused ads created by French online advertising company Criteo.

According to data from Criteo, Matahari Mall reaped the benefits of Criteo'€™s ability to retarget online advertisements to users of their service, resulting in a 900 percent return on investment (ROI) for every ad created.

The data stems from Criteo and Matahari Mall'€™s collaboration at the very beginning of the marketplace'€™s launch.

Criteo'€™s advertising method involves servers analyzing Matahari Mall'€™s visitors, tailoring ads to users'€™ browsing patterns and then placing them on other websites the visitors may use.

The advertising company has worked with several Indonesian e-commerce platforms, such as Lazada Indonesia, Tokopedia and Bukalapak as well as with the highly visited news website kompas.com. The company claimed its method had brought substantial sales growth to Matahari Mall.

Matahari Mall'€™s head of online marketing, Timothius Martin, said Criteo'€™s advertisement method had helped generate up to 30 percent of the website'€™s sales volume.

'€œWe have also invested in search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and manual media buying, to complement the Criteo method,'€ he said on Thursday. With the help of Criteo, Tim added that Matahari Mall was able to save a significant amount of advertising funds.

He said despite the large online presence, up to 98 percent of the platform'€™s visitors did not make purchases, amounting to a visit-to-purchase conversion rate of just 2 percent. This is what the company refers to as '€œlost sales'€.

'€œTo achieve increased conversion rates, we want to capture as much data as possible to inform our strategic marketing efforts and make up for our lost sales,'€ Tim said.

About 60 to 80 percent of Matahari Mall'€™s customers purchase from the '€œrecommended products'€ section, not the originally sought products, as the result of intensified ad retargeting by Criteo.

Meanwhile, Matahari Mall chief executive officer Hadi Wenas said the platform would target the mobile segment more aggressively in 2016, considering that 60 percent of its online traffic came from mobile users.

Matahari Mall plans to intensify in-app and cross-device marketing in the year ahead.

'€œWhat I see in terms of trends is that people tend to shop less when they are using mobile [devices]. This could be attributed to things such as '€˜impulse buyers'€™ or concerns about their network service quality or something like that,'€ he said, adding the platform would seek to boost mobile transactions.

Wenas added that the platform currently had 200 designated online-to-offline points, which include Matahari department stores and Hypermart grocery stores, where customers could pick up their orders. It has partnered with 5,000 Pos Indonesia post offices nationwide to assist in handling customer orders as well.

Matahari Mall is an offshoot of the Lippo Group conglomerate.