ING Bank in Turkey Adopts tCPA Bidding to Boost Conversions by 33%

To address these needs ING Bank adopted Google AdWords’ Target CPA (tCPA) algorithm. As an AdWords Smart Bidding strategy, tCPA works by setting bids to help get as many approved consumer loan applications as possible at the target cost per acquisition established by ING Bank. It uses advanced machine learning to automatically optimise and offers auction-time bidding capabilities to tailor bids for each and every auction.

“When utilising a manual CPC bid strategy, the cost per acquisition was more difficult to control and required a lot of human involvement”, explains Alper Gökgöz, Managing Director. “But we still wanted increase conversions. Our aim was to let Google continuously learn which customers are more likely to complete the conversion process. By changing the bid strategy to tCPA, the algorithm provided us with more conversions and a stable cost per conversion with less human effort.” 

The implementation was straightforward. First, the team changed the definition of conversion from “all consumer loan applications” to “approved consumer loan applications”.  Then they replaced their manual CPC approach by switching on the tCPA strategy. In this way, the algorithm could begin to optimise more efficiently to what ING Bank values as a conversion.

In two months, the total conversions from search campaigns increased by 33% while the cost per conversion remained at the same level. “These results showed us that Google’s Smart Bidding can bring better results than a manual bidding strategy in terms of cost optimisation and conversions. After achieving these successful results, we plan to use tCPA more often and minimise our manual processes.”