Driving programmatic performance for Indian brands – A look at the campaigns that won three Agency Reporter Front Bencher Awards

by Vidula Ashok, Product and Media Analytics Lead, MiQ

At the recent Agency Reporter Front Bencher Awards, we were delighted to win three awards: Digital Marketing Excellence, Best Performance Marketing, and Best Moment Marketing.

And winning awards is great. But, for us, the real success is that the campaigns delivered such powerful results for our clients. Here’s a look at the campaigns that grabbed us the gongs, and how our data partnerships across online and offline data providers helped us build a robust and connected data lake of around 700m customers in India.

1. SOCIAL & MOMENT – COINSWITCH

How we used Twitter and search signals as key proxy signals to identify demand
With consumers beginning to take notice of cryptocurrency as an alternate financial investment option, leading cryptocurrency brand CoinSwitch wanted to focus their digital advertising activity on educating and growing their audience. Identifying the audience with high affinity to these topics was the key to targeting the right segment with the right call to action to drive education, app installation, and revenue growth.

Using Twitter Trends

• Twitter has had a major impact on crypto market trends. By identifying the high correlation keywords and hashtags, we tracked trends across the volume of Tweets by hour, date and geo.
• By creating an automated algorithm which scaled ad delivery in accordance to cryptocurrency focused volumes, we were able to adjust spend dynamically.
  

Using the search and browsing trends

• Online search and browsing are the first behaviour demonstrated by users, so we combined data signals across users’ online browsing behaviour and search trends to find the right audience. 
• By capturing the search and browsing volumes for relevant keywords, we created an index score which helped us score demand on an hourly basis.
• By syncing our campaign’s delivery and bids with the above data, we could then deliver ads when the high intent audience was available online.

Korra, our agency partner and CoinSwitch helped refine the details of twitter and search trends to help us do more precise tracking and bidding.

Using these strategies, we boosted metrics like click-through rates while also reducing the cost-per-click. In fact, the CTR increased by 2x, leading to a higher number of installs and registration.

2. PERFORMANCE MARKETING – L’OREAL PROFESSIONAL

How we used custom targeting strategies and solutions to drive performance
With the advent of the online beauty vertical, the way consumers browse and buy beauty products has changed. L’Oréal Professional, one of the leading beauty businesses, wanted to drive awareness around its range of professional products by connecting interested users to their WhatsApp Business account to build a personalized relationship with their customers.

WhatsApp Business integrated creatives: Using our in-house creative solutions, we were able to integrate L’Oréal’s WhatsApp Business account with the best performing social creatives. This led any consumer who was interested directly to the WhatsApp page where they could then interact with a beauty expert and get help.

Social boost creatives: We used social boost creative formats, which focus on embedding L’Oréal’s social creatives in digital advertising assets, to increase user awareness of the brand and its services.

Custom scoring algorithm: We used a custom scoring algorithm, which helped score and bid higher for inventory signals which had a higher propensity to drive more clicks and better view-ability. 

Cherry picking the target audience: We used a brand survey to better understand the client’s audience and improve the accuracy of the intent audience rules.

Sync with demand: We used a beauty demand index – a tool that tracked when target consumers were online and browsing for beauty products – and increased or decreased the intensity of the campaign as the beauty demand index went up or down on an hourly basis. This created massive efficiencies.

We also used a few additional strategies:

• Targeting the generic beauty affinity audience
• Fine tuning our audience strategy to L’Oréal specific signals
• Optimising programmatic inventory
• Regular servicing and client connect.

We worked with L’Oréal and Wavemaker to coordinate on getting the hyper local data, salon addresses, best performing social creatives and Whatsapp business account integration. It was a perfect integrated approach.

These strategies helped us deliver stellar results: our campaign achieved 1.18x the benchmark CTR, and a 4% growth in brand awareness, with 62% of the users exposed to MiQ ads saying they were likely to consider L’Oréal in the future.