VodafoneZiggo makes creative thinking count with Multimedia Ads

Background

As the Paid Search Lead for The Netherlands’ largest Telecom business, Jerry Jacobs balances two equally crucial objectives: Meeting the demanding KPI targets that are set for VodafoneZiggo’s campaigns, while also finding time, space, and budget to ensure that the business stays at the cutting edge of opportunities in search.

Tracking the full impact of search ads

This twin focus on performance and innovation has given Microsoft Advertising a key role within Jerry’s paid search strategy beyond the direct sales that it drives. Spending time catering a specific strategy to the Microsoft Advertising audience pays off in the long run. For Jerry, that means a test-and-learn approach focused on finding new ways to grow the impact of search ads.

“We’re looking for more ways to steer more budget towards Microsoft and exploring ways to generate more traffic or more visibility—and that’s because our media mix modeling tool shows that Microsoft Advertising contributes to attributed sales,” explains Jerry. “Search is our primary sales channel, and we’re always driving towards that and looking at cost per acquisition (CPA)—but visibility, awareness, and impressions are important KPIs for us as well. We see a lot of opportunities within Microsoft Advertising at the moment—and that’s really cool.”

Taking paid search beyond text blue links

When Jerry heard from Microsoft Advertising about the Beta program for Multimedia Ads, she recognized an opportunity. “It’s something really unique—something that Google doesn’t have,” she says. “Having a banner on search, like a homepage takeover, makes it a real search opportunity. It’s so much more visual for a person looking for our brand—and that fits with the visual way that people navigate the world. It’s a chance to show our brand as we want it to be: Not just with a picture of someone using a mobile, but through creative design.”

When Jerry and her team started testing Multimedia Ads, it delivered an instant impact despite the highly competitive nature of the keywords being targeted. “We took a ‘lean mean’ approach to setting things up, using the imagery we’d already developed for the Ziggo Sprinters campaign,” she recalls. “We conducted an A/B test and found that the Multimedia Ads delivered 45% more impressions than the original campaign. Our cost per click (CPC) dropped by 9%, and we saw an 85% increase in conversions, basically doubling the impact. The really interesting thing for me is that we already had a 99% impression share on these keywords—and we were still able to find a way to increase visibility and impact.”

For Jerry and VodafoneZiggo, it’s further proof of the value of exploring the unique opportunity on Microsoft Advertising—and expanding the role of paid search within the marketing strategy. “I really value Microsoft as an advertising partner,” she says. “I have four specialists on my team, and we have a lot of different budgets and accounts to work with so a partner that helps with ideas and setting up campaigns—that makes a big difference. It’s great to have access to a product like Multimedia Ads, and we’re really enthusiastic about the experiment we ran. It’s so much more interesting for our strategy to be able to do something innovative and take paid search beyond just blue links.”