Société Générale finds superior returns on the Microsoft Audience Network

Responding to such opportunities is baked into the culture of Société Générale, France’s third-largest bank and an institution that prides itself on innovating in the interests of its customers. That means exploring new ideas while carefully controlling risk, which made the Microsoft Audience Network an ideal fit.

“We pride ourselves on being one of the most innovative finance companies in France—and this has to apply to our customer acquisition strategy as well,” says Mame-Coumba. “We can’t just settle for doing the same basics. We need to test new things to stay ahead of the competition—but we also need to be in control. Knowing that our campaign would only run on Microsoft properties that we could trust gave us the confidence to go ahead.”

Setting up a retargeting campaign on the Microsoft Audience Network involved only a small investment of time for Mame-Coumba and her team. “The actual campaign creation only took us around 20 minutes,” she says. It started delivering eye-catching performance almost as quickly. After just one week, the campaign was delivering a CPA six times cheaper than search, on the back of a conversion rate 24% higher. When a marketing investment delivers returns like these, it makes sense to increase your exposure.

“The results were so strong that we quickly increased the budget,” says Mame-Coumba. “After three weeks, the role of the Microsoft Audience Network had grown so much that it’s now generating 46% of our total conversions at a CPA 48% lower than search. That’s a result of being able to retarget people who are showing some interest—but it’s also a result of the extra reach we get from encountering people across Microsoft properties and different devices.”

That extra reach will be contributing to customer acquisition in more ways going forward. “We are relaunching the Société Générale brand in January—and we’ll be giving a wider role to the Microsoft Audience Network campaign at that point,” says Mame-Coumba. We’ll have a wide range of visuals and video assets to leverage, and we’ll be expanding the scope of the campaign to include first-touch encounters with new customers as well as retargeting.”

For Mame-Coumba, exploring the full potential of the Microsoft Audience Network is a vital part of moving Société Générale’s performance marketing forward. An appetite for trying new things is what enables her team to keep pace with a changing digital landscape. “We’ve found that competition for search ads has been increasing, generally, which makes search traffic more expensive, she says. “Discovering the value of digital native ads has been a good opportunity for us—it’s an exciting new space for us to explore.”