heycar

The challenge.

heycar initially approached us with a simple goal: maximise profitability and generate incremental high-quality lead volume across paid search, social, display, and affiliate channels.

However, this objective came with a crucial constraint – a shrinking budget. The challenge was further intensified by a difficult market environment featuring declining vehicle sales and rising interest rates, reducing consumer demand.

We navigated these complexities and crafted a data-driven strategy to achieve heycar's goals within a limited budget and a challenging market landscape.

The approach.

We’d love to tell you all the ins and outs, but that’s the secret sauce between us and heycar 😉

Here's a sneak peek into some of the work that led to game-changing results.

Laying the foundations.

We focused first on data hygiene, revamping measurement and integrating their internal data with a centralised reporting system to understand discrepancies between ad platform and internally reported attribution.

Then, we delved into research around market trends and consumer psychographics to provide clarity into creative direction and testing across paid social.

We undertook a full migration to SA360 templates and optimised the product inventory feeds to reduce errors, allowing us to programmatically build new campaigns, ad groups, keywords, copy and extensions at scale.

Migration to value-based bidding.

Previously, heycar had been utilising tCPA to inform bid strategies, whereas in reality, each conversion action value was significantly different.

We used internal data to determine the weighted value of these actions and built out a server-side solution for value-based bidding, whereby conversion values were calculated and set accordingly.

Alongside this, we implemented a tiered bidding strategy that mirrored our budget allocation. This meant aggressively bidding on areas offering the greatest commercial value while applying a softer approach to areas with lower demand.

Harnessing data and maximising platform capabilities.

We combined historical performance, industry sales trends, and heycar's inventory data to allocate budget across channels, maximising the number of leads whilst driving efficiencies, and aligning spend with both business priorities and market demand.

We unearthed under-supplied vehicle models throughout the UK where market demand was high. By segmenting and prioritising these models in our strategy, we capitalised on this market gap to drive performance where inventory was strong.

On Meta, we initially consolidated campaigns to help drive more learnings through single campaigns, testing singular broad audiences versus ad sets that were more segmented.

We then took this one step further in introducing and experimenting with Advantage+ Shopping. This was possible through combining multiple events through a singular bidding event, which opened up the ability to optimise towards both order and leads. Previously, this hadn’t been an option. We have continued to use Advantage+ Shopping and have continued to see this drive a strong performance across different campaign types.

On Google, heycar was chosen as an industry leader to participate in the "Vehicle Ads for Performance Max" beta program. This granted access to a vast inventory pool, significantly boosting brand exposure and driving action through shopping formats, as well as scaling to video and display channels to capture middle and bottom of the funnel traffic.

More recently, and due to the overwhelming success of the rollout, this has been setup across Microsoft Ads.

The results.

By leveraging our integrated paid media approach, Heycar was able to scale their marketing performance rapidly.

With the solutions implemented throughout 2024, we achieved the following:

• Spend - decreased by 38%
   
• Lead volume - increased by 54%
   
• Vehicles sold - increased by 351% 
   
• ROAS (Return on ad spend) - increased by 56%

(Source: H2 vs. H1 2024, excluding Brand.  Aggregated performance through SA360, Meta and Internal Reporting). 

While every campaign is unique, our commitment to data-driven growth remains constant. Explore how our performance marketing agency can help you uncover similar efficiencies in your own digital strategy.