Bupa

Bupa

61% ROMI boost in branded search marketing

the background

Date: 2016

Due to a reliance on traditional measurement methods, Bupa had been struggling to understand the performance of their digital marketing budget and how to improve their Return on Media Investment (ROMI).

Bupa did not track all the different digital touchpoints each user interacted with on their path to purchase nor did they measure or weight the importance of each touchpoint. They had no clear reporting tool that recommended where to invest their media budget based on ROMI and no way of linking the impact of their digital advertising to offline sales.

Bupa engaged Datalicious to implement a tagging, marketing attribution and ROMI framework across health insurance and international businesses to deliver informed digital media performance insights and to demonstrate the impact digital marketing activity has on both online and offline sales.

the objectives

Custom Tagging

Custom Tagging
Custom Tagging

Implement custom tags using a tag management solution to gather Bupa digital marketing and website data effectively.

Media Attribution

Media Attribution
Media Attribution

Build a custom Media Attribution model that could process all relevant data, identify purchase paths, apply weights and classification to all of the touchpoints. 

Complete view

Complete view
Complete view

Deliver a complete view of media spend across Bupa’s online marketing, to help agency partners drive better performance. 

Real time view

Real time view
Real time view

Present a real-time view of the impact of digital marketing activity on online sales through automated reporting. 

the solution

Bupa touchpoint data (web, display, social, mobile, SEO, SEM, eDM) was gathered using independent DataCollector tags deployed via SuperTag, an enterprise tag management platform developed by the Datalicious team.

Bupa’s data was processed and analysed, with the results displayed in the OptimaHub Media Attribution platform. The OptimaHub platform helps marketers understand how each channel, campaign or placement impacts sales both online and offline. OptimaHub also integrates additional data sources including classification and cost data from the media agency and offline sales data from Bupa, to build an accurate marketing attribution model and ROMI simulator. 

A Bupa specific attribution methodology was devised for this solution. Here’s a sample of the parameters included in this methodology:

  • All channels involved in the attribution process: display media impressions, display media clicks, all site traffic sources.
  • Channel-based touchpoint exclusions: no credit is given to ’direct’ touchpoints if they occur after other channels in the path to conversion.
  • Time-based touchpoint exclusions: no credit is given to touchpoints older than 32 days before conversion.
  • Impression de-duplication: successive impressions served within three hours are only counted once.
  • Impression frequency exclusions: no credit is given to the 39th de-duplicated impression and beyond in a path. Each de-duplicated impression also receives diminishing credit.
  • Weights: weights are applied on a per channel tactic basis; meaning some channels get more credit than others if they are both in the same path. Weights are calculated using Logistic Regression analysis of converting and non-converting paths. Weights reflect the average efficacy of a channel.

After initial analysis and reporting, Bupa data was integrated into the OptimaHub Media Attribution platform, where near real-time dashboards provide Bupa’s digital marketing team with contextual and relevant insight into true digital marketing performance.  Not only has this data impacted Bupa’s decision-making process when it comes to media spend, but it has also affected internal changes, with adjusted KPIs that are more relevant to Bupa’s marketing goals. The way Bupa remunerates media agencies has also changed.

the results

As a result of Datalicious’ recommendations, Bupa was able to attain an incremental gain in ROMI on the same overall level of spend as before the engagement. Here are the details:

  • Achieved an increase in ROMI of 61% in branded search marketing.

With the custom marketing attribution algorithm developed by Datalicious, Bupa was able to use an optimal media pacing plan at a daily level that resulted in a much higher ROMI than was possible from their traditional media planning insights.

For one month, the overall ROMI of branded search was 204.0% but for the following month – which is also one of the months with the highest SEO competition from the market – the ROMI was 264.3% using our recommended pacing plan. This change represented an increase of 60% in ROMI in a pre-post analysis of the media pacing plan. It’s a huge difference, considering the Datalicious pacing plan combined with the ideal short-list of branded keywords resulted in a media-efficiency of almost $250K for just one month.

  • A multiplier of 3.3 was developed to help Bupa measure the actual impact of digital marketing on offline sales.

By sending welcome emails to both consumers who purchased both online and offline, Datalicious was able to add in online digital touchpoints for people who consumed digital advertising online but purchased offline (phone, direct).

This online-offline stitching helped quantify the value of online digital marketing on both trackable online conversions and indirect offline conversions.

Datalicious calculated an online-offline multiplier of 3.3. In other words, for every 1,000 online conversions driven by digital marketing, 3,300 equivalent offline conversions could be attributed to the same digital marketing. This multiplier was also provided at a product, channel, campaign and even day-of-week level to understand better how digital marketing can assist in targeting consumers who may make an offline purchase.

Understanding the actual impact of digital marketing also helps secure an adequate budget and justify the importance of online marketing to executive teams.

  • New and untested digital strategies could be measured accurately.

Bupa and their partner agencies wanted to try out new display marketing strategies on Pandora and Spotify. Interestingly, there were very few campaigns in the past and very little spend on these channels.

Thanks to the OptimaHub platform, Datalicious was able to derive the exact impact of Pandora/Spotify on the overall customer journey and from there quantify the dollar value of every single touchpoint from these new digital marketing strategies.

Datalicious came up with a regression equation that predicted that every 100 Pandora/Spotify ads drove an incremental revenue of $34. This change not only helped quantify the value of these new channels using accurate methods but also helped define marketing strategies and future budgets.

  • The actual impact of display advertising outside last click attribution could be measured.

The attribution model used for Bupa tracked the impact of display advertising outside basic conversions directly from clicking on the ad. The power of display advertising for Bupa was confirmed with a 5.35X increase in the number of conversions that were drawn from a user seeing a display ad, and then later going on to search for Bupa products compared to users who only clicked on a display ad.

Find the solution to your challenge

Datalicious have been instrumental in the development of our overall website ecosystem and strategy at Cancer Council NSW. Brian Do, Datalicious' Technical Consultant has displayed true resilience in the deployment of our solutions across very complex journeys and has become an extended part of the team. His Google expertise has enabled us to take our data capabilities to a new level and we look forward to continuing the great work.

Sarah Calderwood - Digital Marketing Manager, Cancer Council – 2019

Datalicious have done a fantastic job at stitching our online and offline data together using Google BigQuery. This has seen HUGE change for our business due to being able to track online leads as well as offline revenue data on tour bookings, which we couldn’t do previously. 

As a result, we're changing our business focus and hiring new candidates that specialise in content and SEO to help attribute the right channels to drive more traffic and revenue for us. 

Lina Jimeno, Business Solutions Consultant and Parth Vasoya, Web Analyst from the Datalicious team have done a great job linking multiple data sources together and helping us solve our challenge by closing the loop on data silos for our business. We couldn't be happier!

Marius Wenning - Digital Marketing Strategist, Chimu Adventures – 2019

Thanks to the Datalicious team for the endurance you’ve all shown to date which has delivered a fantastic outcome. Getting the code implemented with quality and delivered on time provided us with advice around the new implementation and testing. Great teamwork all around. Well done!

Seth Wibisono - Channel Manager, Bupa - 2013

Awesome result! Attributed figures before and after media optimisation show a double-digit percentage increase in sales with a reduction in cost per sale at the same time.

Michael Waymouth - Media Strategy & Planning Manager, IAG - 2015

Datalicious’ tag management and Digital Attribution among other vendors’ capabilities helped to enable real-time media buys in digital media channels based on Telstra’s next best offer models and real-time site data, a world first in terms of the depth of complexity and extent of real-time data integration. Datalicious went out of their way to ensure this trial could go live successfully and delivered an outstanding result.

Scott Thomson - Senior Marketing Manager, Telstra - 2013

Google Analytics provides some pre-configured reports to work with, but the ability to customise and build our own reports from scratch is what allows us to gain truly valuable insights from the tool. Thankfully, Datalicious experts have taken the time to create a customised dashboard and make them available for WittyFeed. This is a huge time saver as we have got access to the reports used on a day to day basis just a click away.

Aditi Kothari - Business Development Executive, WittyFeed - 2017

I would love to say that we increased the HI test volume from 30% to 80% because we followed your same rationale; the truth is we increased because we could see next to no volume after we ceased the SEM/PPC test. Good to know that our decision can be backed up with numbers - thanks!” 

Luke Durante - Digital Marketing Manager, Bupa Australia – 2014

The Datalicious guys are great to work alongside and to have on your team. Their ‘no stone unturned’ approach to finding solutions to challenges, their knowledge and passion for web analytics and best of breed web optimisation was second to none. Big thanks for all your help on our account and for pushing us and our agency partners to keep projects moving. 

Craig Amanti - Digital Performance Manager, Vodafone New Zealand - 2015

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