REFINITIV Case Study – REBRAND & RESTRUCTURE – SUSTAINING EFFICIENCY AT SCALE FOR A NEW BRAND

Refinitiv – formerly the Financial and Risk business of Thomson Reuters – is a global provider of financial markets data and infrastructure.

OBJECTIVE(S) & TARGETS

  • Expanding all accounts across all regions covered by the client.
  • Rebranding of Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk division to Refinitiv.
  • Generating growth in spend from $100K a month to $150K while maintaining efficiency.
  • Increasing leads from 300 to 900 a month.
  • Restructuring the Refinitiv account in order to simplify the day-to day management of digital marketing operations.
  • Expansion into Bing, Yandex and Baidu.

Results Highlights

37 – 157 Conversion increase

4K Improvement on Top Products

$384K Spend – Surpassing the target of $150K

SUMMARY

TMI is an independent, performance-driven digital media agency. We have been working with Thomson Reuters/Refinitiv since June 2018. Last year we focussed our efforts on the expansion of the AMERs region and this year we were given increased budgets in order to take on the challenge of global expansion of the Refinitiv Brand.

Managing this transition was a major operational triumph given that the project is so immensely large in scope and long-term in its orientation. Not only did it involve a restructure of the account but also rebranding of Refinitiv which was formerly known as Financial & Risk division of Thomson Reuters. The project focussed both on improving efficiency and increasing performance as well as familiarising consumers with the Refinitiv brand.

We were tasked with making MoM efficiency improvements throughout 2019 whilst scaling Lead volume. We have more than achieved this goal, increasing Leads by 5-fold and decreasing CPL by 70%. As a result, budgets doubled for Q4 2019 and for the start of 2020.

BUDGET

We had initial $3M yearly budgets which were then increased to $5M in February and we have recently been given a $1.1M Q4 boost, doubling our Q4 budgets.

TARGET AUDIENCE & STRATEGY

  • Our target audience are financial professionals, B2B companies, business owners, senior management
  • In terms of sectors these include corporate treasury, hedge funds, investment banking investment management, private equity, research, and wealth management.
  • We inherited rather messy and muddled accounts structuring from the previous agency so whilst our strategy involved expansion on both a global and language scale, we were unable to do this without a full-scale restructure involving new accounts and a new campaign structure.
  • Our strategy for growth included geo expansion, engine expansion, language expansion, rigorous keyword testing for current products and expansion in number of products advertised.

IMPLEMENTATION & CREATIVITY

  • Restructuring of the entire account was one of the largest tasks that we encountered this year. In doing so it allowed for more efficient management of day-to-day operations in the long term and gave us a platform to effectively scale the accounts.
  • We split top revenue generating locations/territories into their own accounts and grouped smaller geos by incorporating them into their regions of proximity. By also grouping finance and risk into single accounts (previously split out) we managed to cut the number of accounts from 72 down to 27. We separated brand terms that were previously combined with generics and campaigns were broken down by product.
  • Additionally, we took advantage of the increased reach of each match type and deprecated Phrase match terms to just run the more conventional BMM & Exact match types in order to reduce CPC cannibalization and decrease CPCs.
  • All accounts were migrated to the third-party bidding platform SA360 to improve the ease of reporting, optimization and bid strategies across engines.
  • Geographical expansion throughout the year has seen us go from advertising in 36 high priority countries to 172, each driving incremental volume.
  • Generating translations using in house and Google’s translation capabilities of entire accounts in order to expand landing pages into a larger variety of languages, including but not limited to French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian and Korean.
  • Engine expansion including Bing, Yandex and Baidu has allowed us to deliver additional efficient volume. Bing accounts have replicated our Google builds and with the use of daily imports, we have massively expanded from advertising in 3 countries at the beginning of the year to now running in 172 on Bing.
  • We started the year mainly advertising the top products and a few secondary ones and had a push early in the year to roll out campaigns driving traffic to over 100 products and massively expanding our keyword coverage.
  • From a post rebrand, unoptimized site, we had another push early in the year to build out PPC specific landing pages with testing of dynamic headlines for the search keyword and an embedded form in the landing page (to remove steps in the user journey).

Results

  • Overall the restructure saw a significant increase in performance and efficiency. Spend exceeded expectations by surpassing our target of $150K with a $384K spend in September 2019
  • Conversions improved from 258 conversions in the month of January 2019 to 1618 conversions in the month of September 2019, while our original target was 900 conversions a month. Furthermore, we maintained a significant increase in efficiency as cost/ conversions dropped from $823.01 in January 2019 to $235.41 in September 2019
  • PPC-specific landing pages drove improved CVR and yielded up to 4x improvements on our top product – eikon. http://solutions.refinitiv.co m/eikon-trading-software
  • Bing (Microsoft Advertising) spend increased from $25,000 in January to $82,000 last month with conversions increasing from 37 to 157. Average CPC dropped by 26.77% after removing phrase match in the restructure.
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