Case study
HDFC Life runs an awareness drive during the India Premier League
Safeguarding the family's financial future
HDFC Life is an award-winning leader in the life insurance industry in India. With 54 million customers trusting the company with their life insurance needs in the last financial year, HDFC Life is committed to helping secure people’s financial future, offering an unparalleled 98.66% claim settlement ratio.
The strategy of combining multiple powerhouse features on the Microsoft Advertising platform has helped us drive awareness and reach potential customers at optimum costs during the India Premier League (IPL) rush. While we primarily looked at awareness as the core objective, we’re delighted to see the search campaign deliver incremental results with quality conversions.
— Vishal Subharwal, CMO – Ecomm & Digital Marketing, HDFC Life
Branding with search during the IPL
IPL is a dream come true season for cricket fans in India. Millions of sports enthusiasts cheer for their favorite team during IPL, which makes it a golden opportunity for brands to gain customer attention and make a real difference in product or service adoption. As brands increasingly leverage the IPL season through search, there’s a substantial increase in the volume of keywords used and, consequentially, a definitive surge cost.
As the cost of search advertising increases during the season, brands must make smart choices to achieve their objectives while being cost-efficient. HDFC Life decided to leverage Microsoft Advertising’s solutions to run a brand campaign targeting IPL viewers to encourage them to consider the life insurance brand.
Microsoft Advertising remodelled the brand's search campaign by coupling two powerful product features—Automated Bidding and In-market Audiences. While In-market Audiences facilitated an intelligent trajectory for the brand to reach high-intent, ready-to-buy users, the automated bidding strategy optimized the bids for higher efficiency by maximizing the number of clicks and enhancing cost per click (CPC). Microsoft Advertising helped the brand gain a competitive advantage by showcasing a single brand ad per page through Multimedia Ads, amplifying the visibility and securing the spotlight on the search engine results page (SERP).
Delivering a clear hit with optimization
Despite heavy competition from other advertisers during the IPL season, Microsoft Advertising’s owned and operated channels enabled high conversions for HDFC Life. Additionally, the campaign benefited from extended reach and visibility through further optimization across Microsoft Advertising’s syndicate network.
By leveraging Microsoft Advertising’s Responsive Search Ads (RSA), the advertiser was able to create further efficiencies by relying on the platform’s automated optimization to create the best match for the campaign’s headline and advertising copy to reach the target customer effectively.
The campaign on Microsoft Advertising delivered 850,000 impressions, with an impressive 1.1X click-through rate (CTR)* delivered during the IPL season. HDFC Life also achieved a highly-effective 30% reduction in CPC during the competitive IPL season.
*Compared to benchmark CTR during IPL campaigns in India
A great partnership is always advantageous! Despite the high competition throughout the IPL season, the Microsoft Advertising platform provided excellent results for HDFC Life by leveraging and strategically combining two powerful capabilities—Automated Bidding and In-market Audiences, thereby amplifying the visibility and securing the spotlight on the SERP.
— Vinod Thadani, Chief Digital Growth Officer, Dentsu Media & CEO iProspect
