Mumbai: With social commerce evolving to play a bigger role in the consumer journey than ever before, leveraging social media platforms is an important part of attracting and generating qualified leads. With increased competition across dominant social platforms like Facebook, resulting in a higher cost per lead (CPL), ŠKODA AUTO India approached PHD – its media agency partner and part of the Omnicom Media Group network – to optimize campaign efficiencies and generate a higher number of average daily leads at reduced CPL from its Facebook campaigns.
ŠKODA AUTO hoped to reach a wider and more profiled set of audiences via Facebook – car owners, first-time car buyers and enthusiasts alike, to generate qualified leads that can be converted down the consumer journey. The automotive brand faced a challenge with its objective of optimizing performance in terms of cost per lead efficiently. Maneuvering on Lifetime Budgets at CBO instead of Daily Budgets at ABO was a hurdle it was looking to overcome whilst optimizing daily lead count and maintaining scale.
To streamline efficiencies across campaigns, ŠKODA AUTO and PHD collaborated with Pixis – whose powerful AI infrastructure helps make marketing effortlessly intelligent, agile and scalable for brands. Pixis deployed its Governance AI system, which uses AI models trained with billions of data points to dynamically allocate the bid budget on a daily basis.
With its data-driven recommendations, Pixis’ AI supported PHD Media in delivering sharper results on ŠKODA AUTO’s KPIs – helping the auto brand make the leap on its performance marketing campaigns. Upon implementing the recommendations to optimize lead generation, ŠKODA AUTO India was able to reach the desired high-quality audiences at the right time, thereby improving the quality of the test drive leads that were assigned to the dealers.
Not only did the results outperform the quality of leads coming into the system and increase savings in terms of prospects, but it also increased the average daily leads by nearly 17% for ŠKODA Superb and improved the CPL by approximately 10%. Similarly, the campaign around ŠKODA’s avant-garde Octavia also witnessed a 28% increase in average daily leads with Pixis’ AI infrastructure helping scale the campaign by almost 25%.
Speaking of the collaboration, Bharat Khatri – Chief Digital Officer, Omnicom Media Group APAC, said, “With innovation and creativity at its core, PHD Media believes that the key to a cookie-less future lies in leveraging the right technology stack and interpreting a combination of different approaches to support all the key tasks around audience selection, targeting, governance, personalization, and most importantly, measurement. This is where AI & ML help us process a wider multitude of signals & use advanced predictive techniques to combine and interpret patterns of digital audiences in delivering better outcomes for our clients. With Pixis’ AI, we were able to bring down our acquisition cost drastically while maintaining scale. Pixis’ easy-to-use AI plugin helped our team deploy advanced people-powered, supervised AI & ML models that improved our cost per lead by 10% & also increased average daily leads volume by 17%.”
Pleased with the campaign performance and effectiveness of the AI-driven approach, Tarun Jha – Head of Marketing, ŠKODA AUTO India, said, “Applying machine learning and a data-driven approach to our lead generation campaigns really helped elevate the quality of leads we generated whilst improving on customer acquisition spends. With an infinite number of customer touchpoints today, reaching out to the right people at the right time remains imperative. We’re pleased with the campaign results and look forward to exploring more such opportunities with Pixis, guided by the counsel of our partners – PHD Media.”
Speaking of the collaboration, Neel Pandya, CEO – Europe & APAC, Pixis, said, “We’re extremely happy to see how PHD Media leveraged the Pixis AI infrastructure to garner incredible performance on ŠKODA AUTO’s latest marketing campaigns. It’s a moment of true excitement and honour to continue working with PHD to facilitate greater business growth for ŠKODA, and other clients, through our AI systems.”
