At the recent Think Data conference by Google, our colleagues presented an interesting OLX case. Dmytro Konovalenko, Chief Strategy Officer, and Maksym Shaparev, GMP Lead, demonstrated that brand awareness advertising is not just about clicks and quick conversions. It’s about creating demand, expanding brand awareness, and establishing long-term presence in consumers’ minds.

About the Client

OLX is not just a classified ads platform, but a large-scale platform that unites different categories: from job searching to real estate purchases. Our task is not only to influence direct, targeted conversions but also to work on creating demand. We try to look a bit broader at how to build awareness that OLX is a platform that allows you to find a job, buy a car, apartment, or even simply exchange certain goods. Therefore, in our work, we don’t consider OLX as one large brand, but segment and classify it, taking into account the specifics of each category and country.

It should be noted that the brand is represented in quite a few countries, namely 13 countries worldwide, in three of which newage. works with them.

Google Marketing Platform Tools

The expertise of newage. in GMP lies in a deep understanding of how these tools allow our clients to achieve their set goals. It’s important to emphasize that the unique capabilities of GMP are key for effective planning, launching, and optimizing campaigns.

For effective measurement of OLX brand awareness campaigns, we use the ecosystem of Google Marketing Platform tools. Specifically: Campaign Manager and Google Analytics 360.

Campaign Manager

The first tool in our stack is Campaign Manager. The platform allows us to receive data from programmatic platforms such as Google Ads, DV360, direct placements, Meta, and generally from any platform where Campaign Manager tags can be used.

This tool allows us to receive data about views, clicks, post-click conversions. But what’s much more important specifically for brand awareness campaigns is getting data about post-view conversions, reach, and cross-channel attribution.

Afterward, we analyze this data from a conversion perspective. We don’t analyze just post-click conversions, because brand awareness advertising cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and therefore we work with data about the total number of conversions. We also analyze reach metrics and cross-reach between platforms to understand the level of audience overlap, as well as how effective their use will be.

It’s worth noting that Campaign Manager serves not only as a platform that receives data but also as one that sends it. We receive all metrics in a centralized interface, which allows us to evaluate advertising campaigns with one measuring stick.

Google Analytics 360

The second tool we use is Google Analytics 360.
This tool significantly facilitates our work with First-Party data. Given the specifics of working with OLX, particularly the number of their categories, we need a lot of events in analytics. Each category needs a separate event. Each marketing step and funnel also needs separate events. And that’s exactly why we use GA360.

Moreover, we need to create a very large number of audiences. And therefore this tool also helps us with this, because its audience creation capabilities are wider compared to Google Analytics 4.

Thus, by creating audiences for each step of each category, we can use them in media planning as well as when launching brand awareness campaigns. With these audiences, we also cross-categorically enhance OLX.

Deep Data Analysis

One of the key insights from working with OLX: only 1% of conversions are post-click conversions, everything else is post-view.

This confirms the thesis that brand awareness advertising cannot be evaluated in a “vacuum.” For a full analysis, the agency builds custom reports.

Delayed Demand Report

This report helps understand on which day after contact with an ad the user returns to the site and makes (or doesn’t make) a conversion. Based on this data, conclusions can be drawn regarding the optimal flight duration and the optimal number of days until creative “burnout.”

Technometric Brand Lift (Brand Awareness Effect) – BrandLift

Thanks to Google Analytics 360 and Campaign Manager, the team collects client IDs and divides users into those who saw the ad and those who didn’t. This allows comparing the conversion rates of these two groups, understanding how brand awareness advertising influenced other channels (organic search, social networks, direct) and evaluating the impact of campaigns on the client’s business as a whole.

Effective Frequency Report

This report shows at which frequency users create more conversions and at which frequency these conversions are cheapest. It turned out that for different OLX categories, different frequencies can be effective.

This allows for more effective media planning, implementing targeted frequency in various programmatic tools, saving the client’s budget by eliminating excessively high frequencies, and obtaining additional reach by redistributing the budget.

Data Visualization

In addition to obtaining and storing data, it’s also worth combining them. For this, we use another Google tool – Looker Studio.

Using API, we get data from programmatic tools Campaign Manager and Google Analytics 360, and combine them into one convenient dashboard.

In this dashboard, our colleagues can see deviant metrics regarding impressions, clicks, conversions, frequencies, reach, etc. And this helps them respond very quickly to this, rather than searching for this data in reporting tools of different platforms. On the other hand, this dashboard helps the client understand at what stage the campaign is currently at and what results can be expected from it.

Results and Conclusions

In this photo, you can see the result of our work with OLX over the last 6 months in terms of technometric brand lift indicators.

As you can see, there are positive and negative values, but the main thing is that GMP tools allow us to evaluate all of this and, most importantly, change and improve it.
An important conclusion is that it’s impossible to evaluate all campaigns with one approach. Depending on the goals and category, different metrics and their combinations need to be chosen.

Overall, using the GMP ecosystem allowed increasing campaign effectiveness by 30-40% when measuring results week-to-week compared to an approach based only on assumptions.

Recommendations for Effective Brand Awareness Campaigns

1. Conduct more tests and experiment.
2. Create more segments for more precise targeting.
3. Control frequency at all levels.
4. Use custom audience segments to increase the lower part of the funnel.
5. Optimize specific categories for your set of conversions using Floodlights.

A comprehensive approach using Google Marketing Platform tools allows for effective planning, measuring, analyzing, and adapting advertising campaigns at all stages of work, which significantly increases their effectiveness.