OLX is one of the leading online classifieds marketplaces, represented in more than 40 countries. MarTech agency newage.has been working with Ukrainian OLX since 2013, and during this time we have developed a brand awareness advertising system specifically for such a large platform. In 2020, we launched 14 campaigns for OLX in Ukraine. In this article, Project Manager of newage. digital agency Bogdan Bezugly will describe the most striking OLX brand awareness case studies in 2020.

The Challenge

OLX marketers work great with all channels and collect targeted queries from a hot audience. We were warming up the cold audience and filling the top level of the sales funnel. At the same time, it was important to build an analytics system that would objectively evaluate media impact, because brand campaigns cannot be measured by simple post-click data. This is where the experience of a media agency and our approach to post-view and cross-device analytics came in handy.

All campaigns can be divided into three large groups of tasks.

1. Promotion of the OLX brand, benefits and capabilities of the platform itself.
2. Promotion of certain product categories among buyers.
3. Promotion of OLX as an ad platform among private sellers and business representatives.

These tasks were solved, in particular, with the help of brand awareness advertising. We focused on media metrics, which were evaluated using performance metrics. The main ones in all campaigns were:

• MAU, monthly active users;
• MUR, monthly unique repliers.

We also used metrics specific to a particular campaign: the number of new ads, responses to ads, visits to certain sections of the site, etc.

In building strategies, we focused on the client’s brief and past experience with him. We developed new settings for each campaign, measured the effectiveness of each campaign, and optimized the promotion, as we will describe below using specific examples.

Tools We Used

We used our developments and advertising campaign analysis system for OLX campaigns. It was based on the Comprehensive Analysis of Display Advertising. It consists of:

• data quality control;
• evaluation of media indicators;
• evaluation of post-click, post-view and cross-device reactions to advertising;
• agile approach to campaign optimization.

Comprehensive analysis of the client’s journey

When working with OLX, simple tools were not enough, and we were always looking for solutions in new advanced products. As one of the few agencies certified as a Google Marketing Platform Partner, we used the products of this ecosystem:

• Google Analytics 360;
• Campaign Manager 360.

These products integrate seamlessly with each other, so we could compare the behavior of those who saw and did not see the ads. That is, we could track exactly how brand awareness advertising affected those who saw it. For example, the impact of the ads on visits or conversions at each stage of the funnel.

We used standard platforms for advertising:

• Google Ads;
• Facebook Ads;
• Display & Video 360.

To bring together the data from the ad accounts, the auditor, and web analytics, we developed a dashboard for Comprehensive Analysis of brand awareness advertising. The information was transferred to it automatically, so our specialists and the client could monitor the campaigns in real time.

Read more about Facebook post-view attribution in our article “How to Evaluate Ad Campaigns“

Each campaign acquired a new twist, and it was a direct optimization for the client’s business goal. By collecting all the numbers in one place and having detailed analytics, we were able to optimize campaigns in terms of frequency, effective creative, targeting, and many other parameters.

Who Worked On The Campaigns

OLX team:

1. Egozha Nikita — Performance Marketing Manager
2. Sergiy Bezverkhy — Performance Marketing Manager
3. Maryna Bril — Performance and Product Marketing Team Lead

newage. team:

1. Lyudmila Belyavska — Senior Traffic Manager
2. Bogdan Bezugly — Project Manager
3. Maxim Tereshchenko — Head of Strategy and Mediaplanning
4. Oleksandr Rolsky — Client Service Director

Brand Campaigns

One of the important directions in the promotion of OLX is building the company’s brand, promoting the platform itself and its services. For example, let’s take a look at the OLX Delivery campaign, which described the benefits of the service to users.

OLX Delivery allows you to buy and sell on a bulletin board as securely as in an online store. When a buyer places an order, the service creates an invoice, and the seller only has to send the goods and receive cash on delivery. This is a safer, more convenient, and more reliable way to buy and sell than personal communication with the seller. There is no need to send an advance payment to a stranger or use incomprehensible messengers.

The OLX Delivery campaign consisted of four 10-second videos describing the safety of the service.

The main campaign metric was orders through the built-in functionality. The goal of the campaign was to increase the number of users. During the campaign, conversions increased by tens of percent. After the campaign, although there was a decline, more people started using OLX Delivery.

We used Google Analytics 360 to separately analyze the actions of those who saw and did not see the ads. Those who saw the videos chose OLX Delivery almost 6 times more often than other users. And they were four times more likely to complete the order.

Last year, in a similar campaign, the growth in deliveries was more dynamic, but this year we managed to stimulate much more deliveries in absolute terms.

Promotion Of Product Groups

OLX periodically runs campaigns that promote specific products or services. This way, ad creators get an additional boost – more interested customers come to the site. And it’s easier for buyers to find what they want.

The creative was aimed at buyers, so the indicators of effectiveness and engagement for us were: written messages to sellers, viewing phone numbers or, best of all, purchases through OLX Delivery. The client calls all these interactions the “Reply” metric, and it was key in our media campaigns.

In 2020, OLX started treating product categories as separate products. The main challenge here was to link campaigns to visits to specific sections. That is, if a person saw an ad and visited the site, it was necessary to understand whether they entered the target category; and in general, number of visits to users of the advertised category increased. Whether the ad worked and how.

To solve this, we set up separate Campaign Manager auditor counters on the category pages, so that we could track clicks to each subsection separately and compare the actions of users who saw the ad and those who didn’t.

Fashion

The Fashion campaign ran in November and promoted winter wear ads on OLX. The category, like any product, has seasonality, and our task was to contain the seasonal subsidence. The campaign consisted of bumpers, banners and discovery ads.

The campaign audience consisted of the following segments:

• visitors to the category in the last week;
• those who used search queries related to winter clothing;
• audiences of interest related to winter clothing;
• visitors to competitors’ websites.

Each segment was collected from separate groups based on requests or interests, so we were able to optimize the campaign at the targeting level and show ads only to the most active users.

Those who saw the ad were 2.5 times more likely to visit the target section. They were almost five times more likely to reply, and this ratio remained until the end of the funnel.

As a result, we managed to smooth out seasonal fluctuations. But a couple of weeks after the campaign, the category returned to its performance. That is, thanks to the campaign, we again motivated hundreds of thousands of people to sell and buy winter clothes, which was profitable for the client.

If you’re interested in the effectiveness of brand awareness advertising and want to learn more about its impact and measurement methods, we recommend checking out this article

Increase In The Number Of Ads On The Platform

Another big goal for 2020 is to attract new authors and new ads. Our task was to remind Ukrainians that they can sell things on OLX.

C2C

March 2020 was unstable. People’s plans were falling apart, it was not clear how the next week or month would go. During this period, OLX decided to remind people of a traditional, proven source of income – selling unnecessary things.

The main metric of this campaign was new ads. And here brand awareness ads also were useful, even though it was a set of activities, but we’ll talk about the impact of media activities. We compared the behavior of those who saw and did not see the ads. The performance indicators were almost twice as different, and naturally, those who did not come into contact with the ads had a lower rate. Given that OLX is in the top ten most visited sites in Ukraine, this is a significant increase.

Looking at other campaign metrics, those who saw the ads were twice as likely to post ads as those who didn’t. In addition, they were three times more likely to respond to other people’s ads, although we did not pursue this goal.

In parallel with this campaign, a similar B2B campaign was running. It targeted offline entrepreneurs. Accordingly, the message of the advertisement was: “We are transferring the business to online mode.”

Conclusions

1. Brand awareness campaigns work.
2. An audience that has seen brand awareness ads interacts with the company better. At all stages of the funnel, its performance is higher than that of people who have not seen the ad.
3. The effectiveness of brand awareness advertising can be measured both globally for the brand and for individual products or targeted actions on the site.
4. We used Google Marketing Platform tools to promote OLX: Google Analytics 360 and Campaign Manager 360. Thanks to them, we were able to compare the behavior of users who saw and did not see ads, as well as track activity in individual product categories. Thus, we were able to see the impact of advertising campaigns on the client’s business performance.

We had a similar case when we created advanced measurement of ad campaign’s impact for our client Bodo. This method helped us understand how effective Bodo’s ad campaigns really are.