Cars.co.za – Case Study: Scaling Profitably – A Back-To-Basics Approach

Cars.co.za – is one of South Africa’s leading online portals for buying and selling cars. 

Brand Summary

Cars.co.za is an online automotive platform which connects people who are interested in buying or selling cars in South Africa. It is currently the largest online automotive platform with over 1 million potential buyers and over 82 thousand cars for sale.

Objectives

The primary focus is to boost overall leads volume across the entire Cars.co.za ecosystem, this meant moving budget (i.e. cutting back UAC monthly budget by R100,000) to more efficient channels such as Search. With the additional Search budget we wanted to strengthen our foothold in the Car space further with the DS bid strategy by competing more aggressively with our keywords. Further to this, we wanted to explore new avenues such as Smart Display to see if we can supplement our PPC activity and bring in more traffic and lead volumes.

Target audience & strategy

The primary focus is to boost overall leads volume across the entire Cars.co.za ecosystem, this meant moving budget (i.e. cutting back UAC monthly budget by R100,000) to more efficient channels such as Search. With the additional Search budget we wanted to strengthen our foothold in the Car space further with the DS bid strategy by competing more aggressively with our keywords. Further to this, we wanted to explore new avenues such as Smart Display to see if we can supplement our PPC activity and bring in more traffic and lead volumes.

Implementation

1. Strengthening our foothold in the car space – By shifting more budget into Search it puts us in a better position to be more competitive in this space. With the help of the DS bid strategies and its forecasting tools, we were not only able to react more fluidly to competitor’s movement in the market, but also bid more aggressively across the account. We accomplished this by reviewing auction insight data with DS bid strategy forecasting tools to decide whether to push further on Search activity. 

2. Smart display activity – As Google introduced a new beta recently, we decided to explore this avenue to supplement Search activity. Smart display was set up in August with creative focusing on Brand set at a Target CPA of R80. Not only has we’ve seen an uplift in impressions, we’ve also managed to deliver additional leads on top of Search activity.

The Results

  • +12% Search Impression Share
  • +14% Click Through Rate
  • +33% Conversions
  • YoY Total Conversions Search (May-Oct) 17/18 = increased 53.00%
  • YoY Conversion Rate Search (May-Oct) 17/18 = increased 10.62%
  • Smart Display Leads = Delivered additional 0.98% of leads on top of total leads (i.e. 4,395 leads)
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