‘Heycar’s innovative paid search campaign by Bind Media won Silver in Media Paid Search and Gold in Media PPC for B2C at The Drum Awards. Despite a challenging automotive market in 2024, the campaign focused on dealership lead generation and online e-commerce, achieving a 55% increase in lead volume and a 351% rise in vehicles sold.
The automotive market is fiercely competitive. Combine that with an economic downturn, declining vehicle sales, and rising interest rates, and the subsequent reduction in consumer demand during 2024 made it a tough year for many brands in the automotive space to keep their head above water, let alone thrive.
Heycar, a leading online car marketplace, approached us (Bind Media) with the task of driving ambitious business growth with a reduction in budgets, across two distinct areas of their business: dealership lead gen and online e-commerce.
We were targeted to more than halve the cost per dealer lead by 55% and also double the monthly e-commerce orders.
Thoughtful strategy, best-in-class execution, and detailed analysis underpinned our approach from the start. The solutions that evolved, thanks to the creativity and efforts across multiple specialist teams, resulted in a marked improvement to performance.
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It was clear from our initial observations that there was a significant opportunity to increase the efficiency of paid search activity with better segmentation and implementation of a value-based bidding solution to help inform SA360 bid strategies to optimize more effectively toward users that had higher intent signals.
In addition to this, our team unearthed under-supplied vehicle models throughout the UK where market demand was high (looking at search trends/volume versus vehicle registration data from SMMT). By segmenting and prioritizing these models in our strategy, we capitalized on this market gap to drive performance where inventory was strong.
Whilst formulating our media strategy for paid search, we focused on data hygiene; revamping GA4 and integrating internal data with a centralized reporting system to analyze discrepancies between ad platform and internally reported attribution, leading to more effective budget distribution.
With the assistance of Google, we helped guide Heycar through the process of becoming one of the first advertisers in Europe to utilize PMax for vehicle feeds. Through steady scaling, feed optimization, performance analysis, and iterative creative testing, we have been able to prioritize this campaign type to deliver incremental growth while driving efficiency.
Previously, Heycar had been utilizing tCPA to inform bid strategies whereas in reality each conversion action value was significantly different. We used internal data to determine the weighted value of these actions and built out a server-side solution, whereby values were set and adjusted based on their true value to the business. This solution was initially experimented with prior to widespread adoption, which then evolved throughout the year to drive continued improvements to performance.
Alongside this, we implemented a tiered bidding strategy that mirrored our budget allocation. This meant aggressively bidding on areas offering the greatest commercial value while applying a softer approach to areas with lower demand.
Through discussions with Heycar, we determined that reducing dealer cost per lead wasn’t the best performance metric for paid search. Instead, we focused on a return on ad spend model, prioritizing profitability over CPA reduction targets.
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A key challenge was recognizing that lead values varied by dealership due to a non-linear commission model. By integrating first-party data into our server-side value-based bidding solution, we optimized bids based on actual commission potential before passing values back to platforms.
On Meta, we initially consolidated campaigns to help drive more learnings through single campaigns, testing singular broad audiences versus ad sets that were more segmented.
We then took this one step further in introducing 'Advantage + Shopping campaigns'. This was possible through combining multiple events through a singular bidding event, which opened up the ability to optimize towards both orders and leads. Previously this hadn’t been an option. We have continued to use Advantage+ Shopping and have continued to see this drive a strong performance across different campaign types.
We implemented templates with 'Smartly'. This allowed us to ensure that custom columns can be updated directly from the feed and pulled into the platform, further allowing us to make more use of broader product sets to serve relevant product information to the right users through dynamic creative.
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Finally, we overhauled SA360 inventory templates, resolving errors and implementing a new system that tiered makes/models based on stock levels and market intent. This improved budget allocation and overall search performance.
Our data-driven approach yielded impressive results for Heycar's marketing campaigns. From our efforts, we were able to drive:
(July - Dec 2024 versus previous 6 months, excluding brand search).
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Bind Media
We're Bind Media. Our human-led approach to performance marketing combines data, AI-driven insight, and creative thinking with deep expertise across paid media (PPC),...