A crucial question often arises for lead-generating marketers in the Middle East: How do you truly link online leads with actual offline business results to improve lead quality and prove your digital campaigns' offline impact? Volkswagen Middle East, an automotive brand that traditionally bases campaign success on offline actions, such as test drives and showroom car sales, sought to tackle this precise challenge.
Previously, Volkswagen fine-tuned their campaigns towards generating online leads, then passed those to the dealerships to manage offline actions like test drives and sales. Since online campaigns lacked visibility into that offline data, the brand was effectively streamlining efforts towards generating online leads, but couldn’t identify more valuable or qualified leads; meaning people more inclined to visit a showroom and take a test drive.
By connecting online campaigns with offline events, Volkswagen knew they’d gain the ability to enhance campaign effectiveness towards key business results, like test drives and showroom car sales.
This inspired the automotive brand to a strategic pivot. Here’s a macro overview of their transformative journey:
Under the bonnet: Fine-tuning leads for optimal performance
“To kick off this strategic shift, we approached Volkswagen’s Dubai dealer, Al Nabooda Automobiles, as a possible pilot partner,” Virginie Ludmer, director of marketing and PR at Volkswagen, said. “They showed a strong readiness to adopt and adapt for the pilot, and weren’t just open to working with a new customer relationship management (CRM) system, but also committed to updating it with accurate, daily data, on top of maintaining their own dealer management system. They were keen to double down to help us ensure the project’s success and validate a concept that we hoped to scale to other dealers and markets.”
With a pilot partner in place, digital analytics consulting company, Trkkn, stepped in to design and implement a robust measurement infrastructure. This ensured accurate tracking of both online and offline leads and events by building a secure data pipeline in Google Cloud. This pipeline integrated data from CRM systems, capturing crucial offline actions, and directly exported all events data to Google Analytics. Google Cloud’s built-in security measures helped ensure that the data was protected.
Next, media agency PHD assigned specific values to both online and offline actions in Search Ads 360, reflecting their importance in the sales process. For example, qualified leads and test drives were given higher consecutive values than only filling in an online lead form.
With these insights and new value assignments in place, PHD got to work upgrading Volkswagen’s lead-generating Search campaigns to AI-powered Search. This involved a powerful combination of broad match and value-based bidding.
Broad match allowed Volkswagen to expand their reach, appearing for a wider range of relevant search queries and capturing diverse consumer intent and signals. This was then optimised by value-based bidding, which, armed with the new online and offline conversion values, could dynamically bid more strongly on searches most likely to drive high-value actions, like test drives.
Fuelling growth: Prioritising high-value, qualified leads
Linking online leads to offline interactions also delivered another unexpected bonus for Volkswagen: they cut down on costs. “By prioritising leads ready to convert, we don’t spend precious marketing budget on low-intent individuals,” Ludmer said.
She explained that this drives conversion rates down the funnel, as a higher percentage of genuinely interested leads move through subsequent stages. As a result, the cost to secure high-value outcomes, like a qualified lead or a test drive, falls.
“This also transforms our internal sales efforts,” Ludmer continued. “It empowers our teams to laser-focus their energy on leads with the highest probability of conversion, unleashing the most valuable interactions, and directly elevating our key performance metrics.”
Volkswagen’s strategy pivot worked. The dynamically informed campaigns understood that qualified leads that were more likely to result in test drives were more valuable than leads just submitting a basic online form. As a result, the brand dramatically improved its metrics: a 19% lift in lead qualification, an 18% drop in cost per test drive, and a 28% decrease in cost per qualified lead.
These impressive gains powerfully demonstrate why optimising campaigns for leads primed for impactful offline actions drives superior results.
“Our strategic shift ultimately led to tangible positive results and a solid proof of concept for the wider region,” Ludmer said. “This approach is now being used as a blueprint for scaling to other markets.”
