The Challenge
Reaching a luxury automotive audience online is challenging, but reaching existing owners is even more demanding. CRM data cannot easily be used. Contextual targeting for luxury autos risks wastage, getting enthusiasts without the financial means to purchase. And qualitative offline data is challenging to activate for a digital campaign.
PHD faced this challenge when promoting their client, Mercedes-Benz’s product, Digital Extras. The brand needed to reach both in-market luxury car buyers and Mercedes-Benz owners to communicate the unique value of Digital Extras, which give owners access to a range of remote features like locating or locking their vehicles. With its positioning as a luxury brand, it was essential to reach people not just interested in Mercedes-Benz but also with the means to purchase. The client had a conversion KPI to validate the effectiveness of the campaign.
The Solution
To address this dual audience challenge, PHD identified an innovative ad tech partner, Digiseg, capable of providing vital real-world segments highly correlated with luxury vehicle intent and ownership: high income, substantial savings, and homeownership.
Digiseg activates household demographics from publicly available sources, like national statistics offices —real-world data— for online targeting. They create neighbourhood maps based on demographic cohorts and then match IP-addresses to these neighbourhoods, surpassing the granularity and accuracy of postcodes. Importantly, this data covers all possible IP addresses in a country, ensuring a significantly broader reach than cookie-based audiences. The methodology is 100% probabilistic, containing zero personal information; the IP addresses are calculated, not collected from events, and there is no logging or tracking, making it some of the most privacy secure data in the industry.
The campaign used industry standard, cookie-based intent audiences to establish a baseline and then used Digiseg data with identical creative to validate the added value of IP-based targeting.
Results:
Using household characteristics, data delivered impressive improvements on cookie-based intent audiences across the full range of campaign KPIs.
- CTR: 2.370% better than using cookie-based audiences with identical creative—1,73% compared to 0,07% for the cookie-based audiences.
- CPC: 93% lower than the cookie-based data, again using identical creative: 0,13€ compared to 1,81€ for cookie-based audiences.
- Conversions: 83% more conversions than the cookie-based audiences.
- CPL: 43% lower than the cookie-based audience.
This case was a winner at the IAB Mixx Awards in Belgium 2023.