Leading car manufacturer drives service bookings with auto optimisation
Overview
A leading car manufacturer tasked media agency PHD UK with decreasing the cost per acquisition (CPA) measured on the number of car service bookings.
PHD used an early version of demand-side platform The Trade Desk’s Planner tool to uncover deep data-driven insights on location and device which were applied to the campaign before it went live.
Planner is designed to allow brands and agencies to generate, launch and analyse programmatic media plans in one place. It uses data-driven insights from The Trade Desk’s AI engine to help create pre-optimised campaigns.
With technology in place to suggest the most efficient way to allocate budget and develop custom ad groups, this campaign proved that smart planning and use of data works.
What was the role of digital within the media mix?
When launching the campaign, PHD leveraged The Trade Desk’s auto-optimisation tools, which helped drive performance across an array of variables – including site, creative and device.
The trader also used campaign-level frequency caps and cross-device capabilities to make sure strategies didn’t overlap and impressions weren’t wasted.
AI-driven audience insights and inventory recommendations allowed the brand to analyse how its audience was consuming media and recommend the right mix, enabling it to share key insights while also reaching the right people and optimising budget.
Results/Achievements:
When combined with the trader’s ingenuity in manually optimising time of day and supply-side platform using bid factors, the campaign beat its CPA KPI and scaled.
The primary reason for this was the trader’s ability to dynamically bid based on defined criteria – focusing a large amount of its media spend on retargeting existing owners of the brand’s cars and using an extensive negative keyword lists to maintain brand safety.
Planner provided valuable insights which enabled the trader to start off with a pre-optimised campaign setup before a single amount was spent on media.
During the campaign the trader was able to tailor its bidding strategy to mimic the sales cycle through granular reporting and bid factors on recency. This combination of tactics resulted in 2,200 service bookings throughout the year.
In a sentence...
Leading car manufacturer decreases CPA with The Trade Desk’s AI-fuelled optimisation features.
