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Universal Event Tracking opens new view of value for Commerzbank

  Article , Retail , Success stories

UET provides data-driven opportunities for German bank

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When you’re operating in a highly competitive banking market, a data-driven view of opportunity is vital. Commerzbank gets that view from Microsoft’s Universal Event Tracking—and it’s highlighting new routes for increasing conversions on current accounts.

As any leading bank knows, good investment decisions depend on data. Being one of the largest banks in Germany, competing with low-cost digital challengers as well as other established brands, it’s important to get those decisions right.

“The financial market in Germany is highly competitive, with lots of digital banks offering cheap current account with low fees,” explains Dominic Erdel, Senior Performance Marketing Manager at Commerzbank. “Our competitive advantage in the market comes from the fact that we offer classic high quality financial consulting as well as modern digital banking solutions. Our current account is our entry level product and so it’s a really important point of focus.”

We had reached a ceiling—and we realized we needed the database that tracking generates, in order to scale our Microsoft Campaigns for Commerzbank in an efficient way.

— Bodo Seifert, Account Director, SYZYGY Performance Marketing

A data-driven view along the conversion journey

Dominic and his colleagues are determined to take an objective, data-driven approach to marketing. The further they can see along the conversion journey, the better they are able to optimize their approach. Ultimately, that means looking beyond the volume of traffic that search engines deliver—and identifying those who deliver the highest volume of conversions.

 

“We are very performance driven. That was one of the key reasons for adopting Universal Event Tracking - it's great for optimizing our current activity.”

The customer journey data that Universal Event Tracking delivers has confirmed the value of Microsoft Advertising, delivering a high conversion rate from customers completing a form to being accepted and opening a current account. It also provides the volume and depth of data that Commerzbank needs to do more.

Scaling intelligently through insights

“We had reached a ceiling—and we realized we needed the database that tracking generates, in order to scale our Microsoft Campaigns for Commerzbank in an efficient way,” says Bodo Seifert, Account Director at Commerzbank’s agency SYZYGY Performance Marketing. “It’s given us the deeper insights to segment our data and focus on specific demographics rather than just thinking in terms of keywords. We can pick the segments that are working for us and focus on developing those.”

Taking a more data-led approach to performance marketing can feel like an intimidating journey to take for a financial services provider with a close eye on compliance. Dominic and Bodo knew that applying Universal Event Tracking would be a process with many stakeholders involved—and the support of Microsoft Advertising was crucial in helping to make it happen.

“The account team was really helpful with resources, information and answering the legal questions as they came up,” says Dominic. “Being able to deliver the information that our data protection and legal departments needed made a real difference to the process.”

And that process is now delivering the data-driven view of a competitive market that enables Commerzbank to pinpoint the greatest opportunities. Between July and September 2022 Commerzbank tested different automated bidding strategies to see which would drive the most efficient conversion rate. UET enabled the tracking and analysis of campaigns to compare enhanced cost-per-click (eCPC) bidding with target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA). The results of running the tests saw a 28% increase in leads, 66% increase in conversions and an 8% reduction in cost-per-lead (CPL).

The test confirmed the efficiency of target CPA as a bidding strategy and has since been adopted across Commerzbank’s biggest campaigns, all thanks to the measuring capabilities of UET: “It’s giving us that nuanced view and granular control we need to be precise about our targeting and drive better results,” says Dominic.

UET gives us that nuanced view and granular control we need to be precise about our targeting and drive better results.

— Dominic Erdel, Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Commerzbank

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