Redefining Online Success with MINI

Knowing your audience, and what drives vehicle purchases, helped unlock everything from customer engagement to elevated conversion rates.

Challenge

MINI challenged us to find a solution to the evergreen problem for the automotive industry: tying online consumer behavior to vehicles sales data.

Automotive brands face a unique set of challenges. A user’s online experience is distinctly separate to what actually happens in a dealership. There has been no way for brands to correlate a user’s online research, with how that directly influenced the sale of a vehicle.

Utilizing Google Marketing Platform (GMP) we gained understanding of what users do onsite, which channel drove them to the site, when they downloaded a brochure, or requested a test drive. However, any analysis was purely restricted to online, where a lead is considered as good as a sale.

Approach

We activated our MET-A data framework. Through the discovery phase, we identified that MINI send their customers a post-purchase email. By appending parameters to links in these emails and some advanced configuration in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, we identified consumers who had purchased a vehicle. Once we bring the consumer back on site, ID’s can be linked and we are able to understand the research each anonymized customer undertook prior to entering the dealership, as well as which vehicle was purchased.

Using Google Analytics 360, this rich data streamed into Google Big Query daily, allowing us to discover deeper insights. This new series of metrics enabled us to visualize the full consumer journey from beginning to end.

Results

22%

Increase in click-through rates through activation of dynamic creative strategy

Up to 90%

Accuracy predicting potential car buyers based on behavior

4.3x

Increase in conversion rates against high probability audiences

Over 60%

Of car buyer journeys linked from online through to vehicle purchase

Keys to success

Being able to greater understand vehicle purchases gave us a new way of optimizing media to best suit our audiences.
Leveraging this data through Google Cloud and utilizing a series of machine learning techniques to implement our targeting strategy.
Rebuilding all of MINI’s creative assets into a dynamic feed-based solution.
Leveraging Google Studio, we can now dynamically control the assets to suit the target audience.
Mapping geo-location and dynamic creative strategy to messaging.