Major Swiss bank reduces cost per page view by 44% with Decentriq’s tailored lookalike audiences

With the end of third-party cookies quickly approaching, a major Swiss bank had to rethink how it could reach new prospective customers in future campaigns.

Spurred by a new product launch, the bank initiated a digital campaign which had the goal of driving awareness and consideration across its Swiss market. They needed to address all users regardless of their browser or device — in a way that didn’t rely on cookies.

The bank’s customer acquisition goal focuses on the Swiss market, so it was important for them to advertise with local publishers who target audiences in Switzerland. For that reason, they opted to collaborate with Goldbach, a premium publisher who reaches approximately 90% of the Swiss population through its various publications.

Because first-party data provides insights into the actual behaviors, preferences, and interactions of their existing customers, it was a logical next step for the bank to use this data instead of third-party cookies to inform their targeting strategy. This approach also offers greatly improved precision and performance when compared with traditionally purchased segments from a publisher.

However, since banking is a regulated industry, any solution used to activate this sensitive data needed to be able to deliver certain guarantees around security and confidentiality.

To ensure this collaboration would produce the desired results without risking exposure of the bank’s data, they chose Decentriq’s Lookalike Clean Rooms. These data clean rooms use AI to extend the reach of brand campaigns beyond simply where a brand’s first-party data overlaps with a publisher’s (in this case Goldbach’s), and instead select users from the entirety of a publisher’s audience.

With this solution, the bank could rest assured that no one involved in the collaboration — not the publisher and not even Decentriq itself — would be able to see or access any of their data. The same applied to Goldbach’s data as well.

The bank relied on their digital marketing agency to run a five-week campaign based on their first-party data. To launch the campaign, the agency used DV360 as its programmatic media-buying tool. To assess the performance gain of using Decentriq, they ran an A/B test by splitting the media budget between Decentriq generated audiences and traditionally purchased audiences. The activation was carried out on the publisher’s inventory of up to 8.4 million users.

Next, the campaign results were extracted from the agency DSP and analyzed by the agency. Most notably, the campaign using Decentriq’s solution resulted in a 129% increase in CTR. Additionally, increased accuracy could be observed from an increase of 57% in page views rate and 33% in qualified visits rate.

The bank also reported lower cost per engagement with the use of lookalikes, citing a 44% decrease in cost per page view and 31% decrease in cost per qualified visit — even including the cost of the data clean room itself.

These success metrics have resulted in the bank’s commitment to using Decentriq for all their future brand and awareness campaigns with local premium publishers. This way, they have a set cookieless strategy in place and are well-prepared for the post-cookie era.