Award-winning automation with DB
Helping Deutsche Bahn automate its optimization strategy to improve marketing performance and media buying on Microsoft Advertising.
The challenge
Working across a range of partners and platforms to support its search engine advertising, Deutsche Bahn was struggling to manage its campaigns, creatives, and bidding optimization approaches across its wide range of products.
Microsoft Advertising for Bing was a key platform for the transportation and logistics provider. But using Microsoft Advertising’s singular customer journey to optimize its campaigns failed to give it the granular insights needed from the attribution data to analyze them at the product and customer journey levels. There was also a lack of automation which meant obtaining relevant results was resource-heavy, requiring a great deal of manual intervention by Deutsche Bahn’s campaign managers.
The solution
Deutsche Bahn approached Exactag and adopted its attribution platform, including its Attribution Push module. For each click Exactag tracked, it fed the corresponding performance measure directly into Microsoft Advertising. By considering the performance of each customer journey touchpoint, Deutsche Bahn gained an enhanced insight into the marketing performance of all its channels. From this, it could align the conversion data automatically with its bidding algorithm and drive more effective bidding, removing the need for manual intervention.
The results
Deutsche Bahn discovered that upper-funnel were the true driver of buying decisions. By adjusting its bid optimization and focusing more resources on these, it improved conversion ratios and reduced the number of lower-funnel contacts, which were failing to add anything to the customer buying decisions. In doing so, Deutsche Bahn freed up marketing spend which was reallocated to activities that drove performance. It also used its deeper insights into cross-channel performance on Microsoft Advertising to develop more effective and relevant future campaigns.
Using Exactag’s proven data-driven attribution approach, Deutsche Bahn can also adapt to change dynamically. This means algorithms that identify its top performers will automatically update each day to reflect the exisiting situation, such as Covid or the re-launch of marketing campaigns in the travel vertical.
About Deutsche Bahn
Deutsche Bahn is a world-leading transportation and logistics provider that runs the German railway system. It employs 400,000 people worldwide, serving over 100 million travelers in continental Europe and generating nearly €50 billion in revenue.