Objectives
Norwegian Log Buildings is a leading provider of luxury Scandinavian log buildings. They specialize in designing, manufacturing, and installing bespoke cabins, annexes, and garden rooms across the UK.
Following successful paid social and paid search campaigns, Norwegian Log wanted to increase engagement and maximise leads from their existing audience of site visitors. To achieve this, we launched a campaign to re-engage site visitors who had not yet submitted an enquiry, using a Kaizen programmatic retargeting campaign.
As part of the campaign we tested a bespoke bidding strategy, prioritising ad and website interactions in postal areas with an above-average proportion of the population in the A/B social grade. Norwegian Log buildings are an investment purchase and most of their customers sit in this demographic and therefore similar prospects are more likely to be seriously interested in the products.
- Increase engagement
- Drive leads
- Improve efficiency
Our Approach
To make sure our test bidding strategy could be evaluated accurately, we initially put a small portion of the daily budget into a strategy retargeting the audience at a fixed CPM, while the remaining budget went into an automated ‘maximise conversions’ strategy.
Once these strategies had been active for long enough for us to gather sufficient performance data, we created our bespoke bidding algorithm. The algorithm layered scores for ad and website interactions over postal area multipliers based on social grade data from the most recent UK census. We ran the new ‘social grade’ retargeting strategy alongside the baseline and maximise conversions strategies, targeting the same audience using the bespoke bidding algorthim.
As the campaign progressed, we redistributed the budget between the strategies each week based on their comparative performance to maximise the Return on Investment.
Results
We chose to pause the baseline strategy before the end of the campaign, as it was the worst-performing of the three strategies, and the budget would make more impact if put into the maximise conversions or our own social grade retargeting strategy.
Initially, the maximise conversions strategy seemed to outperform the social grade strategy. However, over time our DSP’s machine learning took effect and the bespoke algorithm ended up significantly outperforming the maxmise conversions strategy, even with regular optimisations.
Over the two months both strategies were active, the social grade strategy achieved a 16% reduction in impression cost compared to the ‘maximise conversions’ strategy, with a 34% reduction in cost per website visit, and an 86% reduction in cost per lead.
Interestingly, the maxmise conversions strategy continued to drive clicks more efficiently, with the Cost Per Click 95% higher for the social grade strategy. However, the click to pageview ratio for the maximise conversions strategy was 47%; significantly lower than the 89% for the social grade strategy. This demonstrates the social grade strategy behaving as we expected: driving higher quality clicks at a lower ad impression cost, resulting in more efficient pageview and conversion rates despite the higher cost per click.
The Kaizen display campaign also did a good job supporting activity across other active channels. Six percent of leads attributed to Bing, 4% of leads attributed to Facebook, and 10% of leads attributed to Google Search involved at least one Kaizen display touchpoint along the user’s path to conversion. This demonstrates Kaizen display’s effectiveness at nurturing audiences and helping to drive conversions through all channels.
- 1.2 million retargeting impressions
- 0.17% Click Through Rate overall
- 10% assist rate for leads attributed to Google Search
- CPM down 15% with social grade strategy
- Cost per visit down 34% with social grade strategy
- Cost per lead down 86% with social grade strategy
- Click to pageview rate up 88% with social grade strategy
Ed Taylor, CEO at Norwegian Log Buildings said:
“equimedia’s novel approach to targeting shows they can take a basic retargeting campaign and apply clever tactics to improve performance over time.”
34% reduction in cost per site visit
86% reduction in cost per lead
88% increase in click to pageview
Interested in seeing what we can do for you? Get in touch and let us know about your requirements today.
