With the aims of increasing post-click sales and establishing best practices in remarketing, BT and its agency Maxus wanted to develop a more sophisticated targeting strategy. Traditional retargeting reached users based on previous visits to certain website pages, but BT wanted to use analytics metrics to target much more precisely according to criteria including recency, frequency, referral source, duration of visit, journey path and stage of cart abandonment.
Approach
Linked Google Analytics
Premium account to DoubleClick Bid Manager
Segmented and retargeted audiences using granular criteria
Goals
Drive post-click sales
Establish best practices in remarketing techniques
Results
69% higher post-click sales and
87% lower CPA than previous retargeting activity
30% higher post-click sales and 42% lower CPA than retargeting activity executed outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager
As a starting point, Maxus and BT chose to use DoubleClick Bid Manager as the programmatic buying platform, enabling the team to buy display media effectively and efficiently across exchanges in real time. Beyond this, DoubleClick Bid Manager also offered a unique opportunity to capitalise on insights from BT's Google Analytics Premium account.
Segmenting for success
Google Analytics Premium gave BT the ability to create granular audience segments based on consumers' previous on-site behaviour. The integration with DoubleClick Bid Manager meant these segments could be readily shared with the platform to make more precise media buys.
The segmentation strategy didn't stop there, though. Other Google products were used to segment further audiences, which could then also be targeted through DoubleClick Bid Manager. For example, BT used DoubleClick Search to target consumers by keyword who had clicked on paid search ads. It also targeted visitors to its non-sales-related online content using DoubleClick For Publishers. Finally, it targeted those who had viewed or clicked BT videos using YouTube.
From segmenting audiences in Google Analytics Premium to targeting those audiences in DoubleClick Bid Manager, the solution gave Maxus and BT complete end-to-end control. It provided full transparency, a single customer view across all channels, better measurement through unified reporting, de-duplicated metrics across all channels and the ability to make full use of the data to improve on the results going forward.
"Working with Doubleclick Bid Manager has allowed us to utilise some impressive features such as the ability to create and target custom audiences made with 1st party data from Google Analytics Premium" says Dan Webster, the Account Director at Maxus. He adds "These types of integrations have given us a real edge in the programmatic arena and the subsequent efficiencies have allowed the team at Maxus to turn this activity into a powerful performance channel for our client."
Sales go up as costs go down
BT measured the post-click cost per acquisition of the new approach compared to both the results of the previous year and the results of other remarketing activity simultaneously executed outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager. The results showed that using a suite of Google solutions with full data integration between all products enabled layered targeting to deliver far greater effectiveness.
The new analytics-driven approach produced a 69% increase in post-click sales and an 87% reduction in post-click cost per acquisition compared to the previous year's retargeting activity. It also compared favourably to the remarketing activity that ran simultaneously outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager; post-click sales were 30% higher and post-click cost per acquisition was 42% lower. On the strength of these results BT has now consolidated its display retargeting through DoubleClick Bid Manager.
"Our goals were to build up "óbest practices' of programmatic display remarketing techniques with a focus on driving post-click sales, benchmarking ourselves against previously-used techniques," says Alison Thorburn, Head of Digital DR Media at BT. "The DoubleClick suite of products enabled us to do this quickly and efficiently as audience data can be easily organised and utilised." According to Alison, these positive results will see BT continue to expand its programmatic media buying for direct response.
The DoubleClick suite of products enables audience data to be easily organised and utilised.
- Alison Thorburn, Head of Digital DR Media, BT
