How Bonzai’s NearBuy strategy helped Wavemaker exceed all KPIs for a major auto retailer’s mobile advertising campaign

Bonzai’s NearBuy solution is a unique, mobile-first, first-in-market ad solution developed for Wavemaker that not only delivered exceptional results, but exceeded any benchmarks or KPIs that its client, a leading auto retailer, had experienced in the past.

Challenge: An unprecedented task

Wavemaker’s client was a leading Australasian automotive industry retailer, which offers an extensive range of tyres across suburban and regional stores.

The auto retailer would normally run offers to drive Australian customers to their website. Once on the website, customers would either use the ‘directions’ feature or call the national number to locate their nearest store.

However, in mid-2018, the auto retailer began to see:

• Waning use of ‘directions’ to locate their stores via their website;
• Drop in relevance of their national number with customers preferring local numbers to reach stores near them

As indicated by Google My Business Data, this meant customers were opting to use Google to search for directions instead, leaving open a window for competitor search bidding.

The auto retailer wanted to arrest this issue and asked their media agency, Wavemaker to find a better way to target their audience and improve their CPA.

Our client was a major auto retailer, so their prospective customers were anyone and everyone who owned a vehicle. With such a wide target base, they didn’t want to be limited by walled gardens. They wanted an ad unit that could provide dynamic information from Google Maps listings without being ‘boxed into’ a closed network like Adwords or a specific publisher, Wavemaker’s Keaton Hulme-Jones said.

Solution: Building a first-in-market approach

In order to meet the auto retailer’s task, Wavemaker realised nothing was available in the market, and reached out to Bonzai for a more customised solution.

With their premium publisher integration and API coding skills, Bonzai created an integrated creative solution for Wavemaker that dynamically plugged-in Google My Business into a rich-media banner, already approved to run across all core premium publishers in Australia, Keaton said.

By leveraging Bonzai’s NearBuy solution, customers could see the ad and take multiple actions like finding the nearest store, making a call, checking for directions and more – all within the same ad unit. This meant the auto retailer now had 100% ownership of the sales funnel from ad exposure to the relevant conversion points, without the risk of competitor search bidding.

Result: Exceeding all previous benchmarks and KPIs

The NearBuy Ad Solution not only delivered exceptional results, but exceeded any benchmarks or KPIs that the automotive retailer had in the past.

• 330% increase in post click conversion rate
• 82% decrease in CPA 
• >60% ROI on campaign

NearBuy is a high-impact ad unit that removes friction, provides relevant information and operates like a utility in a way that puts most mobile advertising to shame. It provides a branding element as well as performance, making it the ultimate ad that covers both conversion needs as well as branding, Keaton said.