Designing and manufacturing vehicles to meet the daily needs of its drivers has been Groupe Renault’s mission for more than a century. The company was founded in 1898 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, by brothers Marcel, Fernand, and Louis Renault. Over the years Groupe Renault has grown its presence around the world and today is part of the global Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance.
As the company has evolved over the years, so has the way people buy cars. In the past, people went to dealerships to get information and purchase their car. Now they turn to the internet to learn everything they can upfront, 92% of car buyers research online before they make their decision to purchase.1 But today, most people still visit dealerships in person to purchase their car.
This has changed the way that Groupe Renault engages with prospective car buyers. When people visit the Group Renault website and request details on a specific car or to schedule a test drive, that information is shared to a local dealership as customer leads. Then the local dealership will follow up directly with those leads which could result in a visit to the dealership and then car purchase.
Connecting online and offline insights
To help drive more car sales, the marketing team at Groupe Renault wanted to do two things. First, the team wanted to have a better understanding of which online campaigns led to the most offline car sales. With this information the team could invest more in campaigns that reached its goals. Second, the team wanted to bring the right people to its website. If the online campaigns could bring people most likely to purchase, those people might become leads sent to the dealership, and then eventually car buyers. The team wondered if insights from previous car sales at local dealerships could help.
“The challenge for us was that our offline insights, for example which visits were resulting in car sales at the dealership, were in Salesforce Sales Cloud. And the insights we were using to build audiences to reach people online were in Google Analytics 360. We did not have a way to connect these two platforms and share insights between them,” explains Global Campaign Performance Tools Director, Laurent Laporte.
Group Renault turned to its global data partner, fifty-five, for help. fifty-five suggested using the integration between Analytics 360 and Sales Cloud. With both connected, Groupe Renault could use its offline insights from Sales Cloud to develop a more accurate attribution model that could account for offline car sales and improve the way it was building audiences in Analytics 360.
Enriching the attribution model
Before linking the two platforms, Groupe Renault’s multi-touch attribution (MTA) model was only able to account for customers’ online journeys from Analytics 360. This meant it was only able to optimize for online leads, not offline car sales. But once the two platforms were linked, the model was able to view customer journeys that started with a digital ad and ended with a car sale at a dealership.
Now, the model was able to attribute various touch points along the customer journey to offline car sales and help Groupe Renault more efficiently allocate its marketing budget. fifty-five built a campaign performance monitoring tool using Google Data Studio, which used insights from the MTA model to report the number of online leads versus offline sales each campaign drove.
Taking Analytics 360 and Sales Cloud for a test drive
The Analytics 360 and Sales Cloud integration also enabled fifty-five to create segments in Analytics 360 using milestones from Groupe Renault’s Sales Cloud account. fifty-five first built a segment based on customers who bought a car at a local dealership. Then, that segment was used to create an Analytics 360 audience.
With the audience built in Groupe Renault’s Analytics 360 account, it could then be used in other Google advertising products that the account was linked to. Groupe Renault decided to use this audience in its Google Ads account because Google Ads Similar Audiences could help expand this audience and reach new people with similar characteristics to their previous car buyers.
Groupe Renault needed to select a market to activate its strategy and chose to focus on the Brazilian market. Brazil is one of Groupe Renault’s top five countries for revenue worldwide and the local dealers in Brazil expressed a strong interest in exploring sales efficiencies through new technology.
In Google Ads, Groupe Renault launched search and display campaigns that reached the new audience of similar users in Brazil. When reviewing the performance, fifty-five found that these campaigns had a 12% lower bounce rate and a 30% lower cost per lead compared to Groupe Renault’s other campaigns. And using the campaign performance monitoring tool from fifty-five, Groupe Renault adjusted all campaign budgets running in Brazil to optimize for campaigns that were driving the most sales at dealerships.
The new campaigns and budget optimization helped drive a 9% increase in car sales from digital leads for a Groupe Renault Brazilian subsidiary. All of this success was achieved without needing to increase the marketing budget.
Groupe Renault knows the success of this campaign was due to its close partnership with fifty-five. Moving forward, Groupe Renault plans to continue working with fifty-five to replicate this strategy in its Display & Video 360 campaigns. The brand also wants to see how it can improve its website experience for visitors using Google Optimize 360, based on insights from Sales Cloud.
Unblocking collaboration across teams
In addition to campaign success, bringing online and offline data together in Analytics 360 made it easier for Groupe Renault’s different departments to work more effectively. Groupe Renault’s marketing team started to collaborate closely with the dealership team. The dealership team was able to help the marketing team better understand which offline customer actions were important to local dealerships and the marketing team was able to inform the dealer sales team what offline information they needed in order to better optimize their marketing campaigns.
With strong partnerships across the board and powerful technology, Groupe Renault is excited to build on its legacy of innovation and adventure.
1Google/Kantar TNS, U.S., The Drive to Decide Survey, n=500 recent car buyers, 2018.
