A Back To Basics Approach

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Brand Summary:

Brand Summary:

Cars.co.za is an online automotive platform which connects people who are interested in buying or selling cars in South Africa. It is currently the largest online automotive platform with over 1 million potential buyers and over 82 thousand cars for sale.

Objective:

In the last six months, Cars.co.za has invested heavily in digital marketing with the objective of becoming the leader in the online automotive space - overtaking its biggest rival AutoTrader. With Search budget increasing incrementally by 5% MoM we leveraged this by competing more aggressively on Search with AutoTrader, but also explored different avenues such as smart display to bring in additional traffic to site and leads to the entire Cars.co.za ecosystem.

Strategy:

The primary focus is to boost overall leads volume across the entire Cars.co.za ecosystem, this meant moving budget (i.e. cutting back UAC monthly budget by R100,000) to more efficient channels such as Search. With the additional Search budget we wanted to strengthen our foothold in the Car space further with the DS bid strategy by competing more aggressively with our keywords. Further to this, we wanted to explore new avenues such as Smart Display to see if we can supplement our PPC activity and bring in more traffic and lead volumes.

Implementation

1. Strengthening our foothold in the car space - By shifting more budget into Search it puts us in a better position to be more competitive in this space. With the help of the DS bid strategies and its forecasting tools, we were not only able to react more fluidly to competitor's movement in the market, but also bid more aggressively across the account. We accomplished this by reviewing auction insight data with DS bid strategy forecasting tools to decide whether to push further on Search activity.

2. Smart display activity - As Google introduced a new beta recently, we decided to explore this avenue to supplement Search activity. Smart display was set up in August with creative focusing on Brand set at a Target CPA of R80. Not only has we’ve seen an uplift in impressions, we’ve also managed to deliver additional leads on top of Search activity.

Results

YoY Total Conversions Search (May-Oct) 17/18 = increased 53.00%

YoY Conversion Rate Search (May-Oct) 17/18 = increased 10.62%

Smart Display Leads = Delivered additional 0.98% of leads on top of total leads (i.e. 4,395 leads)