Challenge
An important car dealer in Bucharest (MIDOCAR) had a campaign named “50 Golfs”, the scope of it being the sale of a 50 car supply… “ASAP”, to quote from the brief :). Our team implemented a performance marketing strategy in order to achieve the following objectives:
- Generating the highest possible number of leads with a acquisition interest;
- Optimising the campaigns depending on the number of generated leads;
- Maintaining a profitable cost per acquisition (cost per lead).
To reach these objectives we used:
- Google Ads Display (placements, interests, context, display keywords select)
- Google Ads Search (targeting the acquisition intentions expressed on Google Search)
- Facebook Ads (clearly defined audiences based on the Volkswagen buyer profile: age, gender, interests, geographic area, marital status, etc.)
- Retargeting: on Google Display Network, YouTube, and Facebook.
- Manual tagging of URLs in order to identify in the offer request forms the sources from which any client came and to conclude which channel was the most efficient. Because all the requests came only through the Landing Page contact form, the results of the campaigns could be clearly measured and the leads could be followed until a successful sale.
- A dedicated Landing Page for the campaigns, optimised for lead generation.
- Historical data from the previous MIDOCAR Volkswagen campaigns in order to create Remarketing audiences, audiences such as “lookalikes”, and choosing keywords and websites with good conversion rates for the auto industry.
What were the results?
“From our research, the «50 Golfs» campaign became so well known in the onlne environment, that there were lively discussions between users on forums such as vwforum.ro and computergames.ro regarding the veridicity of this offer and the existence of the cars.
In three weeks, Today’s generated approximately 1000 leads for the Second Hand Auto Department at MIDOCAR, this being true after our calculations, the Das WeltAuto media campaign with the best results of 2014.”
– Laura Plugaru, PR & Communication Specialist MIDOCAR
After only one week of campaign, the MIDOCAR sales team already had more than 10 interested people, very close to a sale and in approximately one and a half months all the 50 cars were sold.
- Over 70% of leads were generated from the Facebook campaigns.
- Campanigns have generated leads at a 2-3x lower cost per conversion than the regular cost in the auto industry.
- Google Search campaigns have generated leads with a conversion rate of 3.5%.
- Retargeting campaigns have generated leads with a conversion rate of 3.83%.
- Display and Remarketing campaigns have generated more than half the leads that came from Google (so they had greater volumes than Google Search).
Campaign Landing Page
This aggressive strategy for generating leads in a short-term campaign would not have worked as well without using a dedicated Landing Page for it, optimised for generating leads by creating the feeling of urgency and by encouraging the completion of the offer request form:
The key elements used in the landing page to encourage lead generation were:
- Including a visible, short and easy to fill out form form which the leads were collected.
- Creating the sentiment of urgency by mentioning the number of cars as well as the ones that were available at a given time. (Mention: the number of remaining cars was updated manually once every couple of days, as cars were sold).
- Mentioning the positive characteristics of the 50 units in a visible area of the langing page: price, how old the model was, etc.
- Maintaining the information in the landing page short enough to spark the curiosity, to be read easily and fast but to also be enough to understand the advantages offered by MIDOCAR.
- Using actual photos vs. “stock” photography. The picture on the landing page was of the actual models that were being sold.
- Have you noticed? The Landing page does not have any phone number, so the only way interested consumers could contact MIDOCAR was through filling out the form. This has allowed precise measuring of the generated leads from online campaigns and lead follow-up from first contact with the ads from the campaign, up to the acquisition.
Campaign Ads
Here are some examples of ads from the campaign, that were created to be according to the messaging and visual of the landing page, a small “trick” that positively influences the conversion rate.
The ads for the Google Display Network were created in more dimensions, in order to target as many available slots on the Display Network as possible. Two examples:
On Facebook we have had Newsfeed Ads as well as Righthand Side Ads:
And in the search campaigns the text ads we used were adapted depending on which keywords were searched by users, to increase relevance and implicitly the conversion rate:
"We asked Today’s to help promote our business since we trusted them and we weren’t disappointed: our number of clients grew significantly." 
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“With Today’s help we had the courage to try out a Google AdWords campaign for the first time and, to my suprise, it brought us over 80% more new clients..."
