The Trade Desk

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The Trade Desk are a media buying platform built for the open internet to help marketers have more reach, more transparency and ultimate choice across planning, pricing and performance.

Where the Trade Desk needed support was in managing their EMEA campaigns and strategising their digital campaigns worldwide to achieve more qualified leads and higher conversion rates.

Strategy

One of the core problems the team were facing was low conversion rates and limited tracking. This was exacerbated by the privacy laws in place in the region, which make the building of remarketing audiences, and tracking more difficult, with cookies often not accepted.

This meant that very little attribution was possible and so optimisation of the campaigns was limited, with both audience/targeting and creative testing being hampered. The lack of tracked site traffic also meant the most valuable audience, engaged visitors, could not be effectively targeted.

We suggested the use of in-platform native features, particularly those of LinkedIn.

To solve the remarketing issue, we proposed the use of 30 second video ads in awareness. These had two primary benefits:

  1. Users were given a quick introduction to the product, in a more engaging format than static
  2. We were able to build remarketing audiences from users who had viewed 75% of the videos. These users could be deemed a mildly engaged audience, who were now aware of the product and could be retargeted to drive conversion with separate content and clearer calls to action.

To ensure that we were going to be retargeting a highly qualified audience, we ensured the awareness targeting was as close to the ICP (ideal customer profile) as possible. Lists of suitable companies were uploaded and then targeted with job titles overlaid. This minimised wasted ad spend on users who would not have been deemed qualified leads.

To improve attribution and conversion, we proposed moving to in-platform lead forms. These are a lower friction conversion point as the user has many details filled in automatically and also never needs to leave LinkedIn, both of which save time. Crucially, they were also not dependent on the acceptance of The Trade Desk’s cookie policy, and therefore were being tracked.

We expected this to result in an overall improvement of performance as well as an increase in digital media.

Results

This led to the following key benefits:

  • The remarketing audiences increasing from a size of < 300 users to 320K
  • CP-lead falling by 90%

Digital Uncut has become a strategic partner and now supports the Trade Desk’s NORAM campaigns. Investment in this particular campaign increased 10X YoY due to improved performance.

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