2012 IAB Awards | Paid Search Marketing Winner
Beating the Big Four
Agency: UM Australia and Reprise Media
Client: ING Direct
Strategy
UM Australia and Reprise Media’s task was to decrease ING Direct’s cost per application by 20% within 6 months (an effective reduction in average CPA of $44.48) without compromising on quality or the number of completed applications.
Tactics
Keywords such as ‘best online savings account’ and ‘low interest rate home loans’ and creative opportunities in which the big-four banks were lacking were discovered. Search terms were restructured into highly targeted campaigns, creating an opportunity to build out long-tail terms and to allocate budget to higher performing keywords, ultimately lowering CPC and CPA rates. To take advantage of lower average CPC’s from mobiles and tablets as well as spikes in usage searches at given times of day, device-specific campaigns were built, spend around these key times was increased and the campaign correlated branded messaging with TVC’s.
Results
50,239 additional visitors were driven to ING Direct’s site, with CPC’s reducing by 19% on average 19% and CTR’s increasing by 0.54% on average.
2,601 additional applications were achieved for the same media spend. In real-terms this equated to a cost saving of approximately $105K per month ($315K per quarter). Given the success of the campaign, the share of investment for search as a channel has subsequently increased from 40% of total media to 60% and continues to grow.
