How dynamic remarketing implementation helped improve CTRs by over 50% and helped assist 20-22% of digital sales.

A health insurance brand was looking at re-engaging potential buyers who may have visited their e-commerce website and left without making a policy purchase. The key was to re-target them with personalized advertising, therefore, increasing the probability of them clicking through and re-entering the sales funnel.

GenY Medium was engaged to revamp the display marketing campaign.

Strategy was to show the exact plans that the user viewed and saw quotes for during his/her last session, along with an added discount.

The strategy was also to show the quote which was shown to the user on the display ad, therefore making it truly personalized. Further, on clicking the ad, the user would begin in his/her application form at the same point where they left. This enhances the user’s buying experience further.

The display marketing efforts resulted in more than 50,000 users returning to the sales funnel and moving up from where they left. As a result, 20-22% of the online sales month on month were directly impacted by dynamic re-targeting.

Marketing Objectives

• To bring back users who did not complete the policy purchase at the first go.
• Create re-targeting which is personalized and not one-size-fits all.
• To get more returning users for same re-targeting budgets driven by personalization

Challenge 

• Dynamic re-targeting setup in non-trivial. The CRM systems need to interact with the DSPs to continually pass on information related to users in order to create dynamic ads.
• Unlike for e-commerce and travel, dynamic re-targeting for financial services is not well understood and there were not many successful implementation examples to go by.
• Needed to interact directly with Google and Facebook executives who specialize in dynamic retargeting to get the system to work.

Approach & Strategy

Personalization of ad-communication

A series of A/B tests were done to understand what personalization would work best in order to improve click through rates. The conclusions were:

• Show the plan name which was of interest to the user
• Show the exact premium amount and cover which the user was interested in
• Show the benefit of clicking through on the ad versus starting the journey all over again – the user could save time and begin exactly where he/she left.

A few design iterations were tested out. It was decided that a coupon should be added as an additional incentive. Representative ads are shown below.

Integration between CRM and DSPs

Creation of dynamic retargeting required the client side systems to interact with DSPs in real time. Both Google and Facebook work in a similar manner where a constant feed of data needs to be created between the two systems.

Tracking pixels for dynamic retargeting ads needed to be implemented. A custom tracking code was created in order to fire up these retargeting ads which carried the variables to be tracked. The values of  these variables were taken from a “feed file” created using the CRM.

Note that such integrations are not straightforward. It took a few iterations, tests and so on for the system to work.

Technical challenges

The dynamic remarketing code is different from the traditional remarketing code in that it carries values for custom parameters that need to be passed to it in a specific format. Google provides these formatted codes segregated by industry (Education, Travel and so on). For the BFSI sector, none of the predefined codes would solve the purpose. Hence, we went with a custom code. There was technical implementation involved in terms of passing unique values that identify a user from the website to the tag.

Technical challenges included troubleshooting the issues both in the pixel set up with custom parameters on the website as well as with the feed file in Ad-words.

For those who love the detail, here are the two important issues faced and resolved:

• There were errors for the remarketing tag in the Ad-words panel which led to the error pertaining to the non-matching values in the custom parameters and feed file. It was found that this error is inherent to Ad-words remarketing tag and has been reported by others. This error resolved on its own once enough data populated through the remarketing tag.
• The feed excel file must be in a specific type (called SYLK format) for it to work. Once the feed file was uploaded in this format, we were able to see match between the common parameters that the remarketing code was tracking and the parameters in the feed file. This is essential for the ads to serve.

Optimization

Dynamic re-targeting ads take time to show results. The audience size needs to be significant.

Several optimizations were performed by varying bids and changing the creative communication, changing frequency caps as well as varying the ad-form (text, picture, gifs). The primary objective of optimization was to achieve the following:

1. Significant increase in CTR % for the usual re-targeting ads vs. dynamic re-targeting ads
2. Significant reduction in cost/revenue vs. other forms of digital advertising.

Impact

• Improved CTR % from 0.7% to 1% on Google and 1% to 1.5% on FB by using dynamic. A change of 40%-50% increase in clicks for the same number of impressions using dynamic re-targeting vs. the usual ‘on-size-fits-all’ re-targeting.
• Enabled more than 50,000 users/month to re-engage with the brand and move down through the sales funnel
• Assisted 20-22% of the online sales every month