Serving 4.6 million customers, T-Mobile Austria is a leading telecommunications provider. The eBusiness team is focused on driving conversions while keeping the cost per acquisition down. They had been optimising their bidding using only manual techniques when, together with their performance agency e-dialog, they decided to test an automated approach based on machine learning in AdWords.
About T-Mobile Austria
Telecommunications provider
Headquarters in Vienna
4.6 million customers
About e-dialog
Specialist agency for programmatic marketing, search, digital analytics and conversion optimisation
Headquarters in Vienna
Goals
Drive conversions
Improve cost per acquisition
Approach
Launched data-driven attribution in AdWords
Tested AdWords Smart Bidding strategies Target CPA and Enhanced CPC
Used AdWords Drafts & Experiments to measure performance uplifts
Results
Boosted conversions by 22%
Decreased overall cost per acquisition by 27%
Increased conversion rate by 23%
“We had been optimising our bidding activities over the past years and wanted to take the next step,” explains Christina Luger, Digital Business T-Mobile. Together with e-dialog, T-Mobile switched their account to data-driven attribution in AdWords. In contrast to the last-click attribution model that T-Mobile had been using, data-driven attribution uses conversion data to calculate the actual contribution of each keyword across the conversion path.
How does it work? AdWords looks at all the clicks on an advertiser’s Google Search ads. By comparing the click paths of customers who convert to the paths of customers who don’t, the model identifies patterns among those clicks that lead to conversions. The model then gives more credit to those valuable clicks on the customer’s path.
Next, e-dialog implemented AdWords Smart Bidding for T-Mobile. Smart Bidding uses information produced via the data-driven attribution model to optimise for conversions or conversion value in each and every auction. They chose two automated strategies, Target CPA and Enhanced CPC, to automatically set the right bid to help get the most conversions at the best cost per click within their daily budget.
“With AdWords Smart Bidding we were able to leverage the full potential of Google’s bidding technology and have a better understanding of synergies between generic and brand keywords.”
– Joan Hoban, Digital Business, T-Mobile
As a final step, e-dialog and T-Mobile used Drafts & Experiments in AdWords to assess how the new approaches affected performance. The results showed that combining data-driven attribution with Smart Bidding in AdWords produced 22% more conversions than the previous manual bidding approach, with a 23% higher conversion rate and 27% lower cost per acquisition.