How the bank connected digital ads, online conversions, and loans issued offline to activate optimisations.
With their headquarters in Budapest, OTP Bank Group is one of the largest independent financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe offering a full range of banking services to private individuals and corporate clients. They launched programmatic advertising to raise brand awareness, promote consumer cash loans in Russia, and stimulate people to complete loan applications on the website.
Their performance agency MGCom set out to study whether website loan applications delivered significant value for the business. They wanted to discover whether online post-view conversions – defined as loan applications on the website – eventually resulted in the issue of loans offline. To do so, they needed to measure loans issued offline in OTP Bank offices and connect them with previous ad impressions. This would ideally allow better optimisation going forward.
We not only can measure post-view conversions, but also loans issued and average loan amount, which fully corresponds to the business targets of our bank’s digital marketing activities.
The team used the Google Marketing Platform to launch an advertising campaign in Display and Video 360. By implementing a Campaign Manager pixel on the website, it became possible to monitor loan applications completed online after an ad impression. The pixel generated an ID for each application. This custom variable could then be matched to an ID in the bank’s own customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Analysis allowed OTP Bank to correctly attribute each online loan application made after an ad impression to the appropriate source – direct, organic, or paid. Using Google Analytics 360, they could see the full online multi-channel conversion path. They also gained insight into the offline customer path, including whether a person went on to visit an OTP Bank office, the city where the office was located, whether the application was approved, if it wasn’t approved then why, whether the person eventually received a loan, and the loan amount.
“We have already succeeded in monitoring customer paths after a click, but now we've moved forward in measuring conversions to analyse the impact on business after an ad impression," observes Anton Akulov, Head of Online Acquisition of OTP Bank Russia. “We not only can measure post-view conversions, but also loans issued and average loan amount, which fully corresponds to the business targets of our bank’s digital marketing activities.”
During the eight-month campaign, the team’s analysis and optimisation delivered impressive results. They managed to increase the total number of loans issued after an ad impression by 50%, double the average loan value and triple the value of all loans issued after an ad impression at an increase in advertising spend of only a factor of 1.85.
