Würth’s most valuable player is the Microsoft Audience Network

Ask most marketers to think of their most valuable channel for driving leads, and you won’t find many who answer with display advertising. Silvia Vender knows better. As the Performance Marketing Specialist for Italy for the wholesale manufacturer, Würth, she’s committed to pushing boundaries to cost efficiently increase her volume of leads. For Silvia, that means exploring the performance potential of display advertising, a format that most marketers associate with upper-funnel brand building.
 

“We never limit ourselves when we innovate,” she says. “And expanding into new channels and talking to new suppliers is a big part of what innovation means for our business. Our goal is to increase lead volumes while also improving performance, and when one channel becomes saturated, we don’t settle for that. We look for other opportunities.”
 
Silvia’s drive to keep increasing lead volume testifies to the scale of Würth’s addressable market. Headquartered in Germany, the business supplies fastener systems and products to every size and sector. Its catalogue of more than 130,000 products includes everything from screws through to vehicle parts.
“We’re an omnichannel company with salespeople, shops, and digital channels—and my role within the performance team is to take care of display advertising,” says Silvia. “We have complementary roles for search and display advertising when it comes to performance. Search is focused on orders, and the main key performance indicators (KPIs) are order volume and cost per order. Our display ad campaigns are focused on lead generation, and the main KPIs are the website registrations and cost of leads.”

The quest for new sources of leads, and an opportunity to innovate with a new performance player, brought Silvia to the Microsoft Audience Network. “Our main goal is to be as efficient as possible, which means more volume at the lowest possible cost,” she says. “The Microsoft Audience Network gave us those results, right from the start. In the last 6 months, Display Ads on the Microsoft Audience Network has delivered around 10 percent of the total leads we generate from display ads—and most importantly for us, the cost per lead (CPL) is among the lowest of all our channels. The goal now is to scale this channel.”
 
Silvia credits the support available from Microsoft with helping to drive such immediate results—and enabling the experimentation that’s a big part of Würth’s approach. “We had great support—more so than with other advertising networks we’ve worked with,” she says. “We optimize our campaign every day and test different creative approaches, images of people versus images of product, and images with or without text. We found that product images perform best because people can see exactly what they want.”
 
Testing different approaches to targeting on the Microsoft Audience Network helped to set out the most effective strategy for Würth—one that aligns with its large addressable audience and interest in lead volume. “We tried different things, but we found that the best results came from not trying to over-optimize or over-target our campaigns,” says Silvia. “A broad approach gave us the best volume and the best results—and it enables us to keep testing and optimizing creatively to see what works. That’s something we’ll be putting even more budget behind over the next year.”