Challenge

A large auto motors manufacturer continues to enjoy year-on-year growth through the development of highly efficient, affordably priced new gasoline and electric powered automobiles.

With the advancement of audience technology platforms, brands are increasingly looking to run a business-driven audience strategy, have the technical knowledge of the platforms combined with a data-driven mindset to activate the data itself.

The challenge that the auto motors manufacturer faced was to connect customer experiences with business outcomes in an increasingly complex technology and data driven landscape. We found that audience strategy is the golden thread that binds everything together.

As such, the manufacturer and Merkle identified audience strategies based on the manufacturer's 3-step customer experience in order to connect customer experiences with business goals: near market, in-market, and owner relationships.

Solution

The auto motors manufacturer and Merkle used audience strategies to connect customer needs and business needs. We selected a seed audience for effective prospecting expansion and built the prospecting lookalike models based on this selected audience. These lookalike cookies allowed us to identify potential clients that mirror similar behavior as our existing customers, and third-party data helps find those who are in the market for a car.

We turned a generic acquisition targeting strategy into an accurate and holistic segmentation by leveraging the SF Audience Studio (DMP) across three use cases: suppression, frequency capping, and analytics. By combining third-party data with first-party manufacturer owner data we were then able to target them with relevant messages via cross-channels, digital channels, display, search, social, website etc.

Results

• 17% of Q1 media campaign impressions (13M) are over-targeted
• 72% decrease of over-targeted impressions on DBM from April to May
• 75% campaign CPA decrease in overall campaign CPA from April to May
• 10X lower CPA for popular model DMP retargeting segments
• 10.3X higher conversion rate comparing with site retargeting segments for crossover vehicle