United Overseas Bank drives 3x increase in applications with Google Marketing Platform

As one of the largest financial institutions in Singapore, United Overseas Bank (UOB) prides itself on its ability to deliver financial products and services that meet the specific needs of its customers. In recent years, the bank has prioritized the evolution of its digital marketing strategies, aiming to increase its advertising efficiency to help grow market share.

UOB wanted to take the next step in optimizing its marketing by serving customized ad creative at scale. If it could better understand the needs of its potential customers, it could reach them with a relevant message for the right product at the right time. This in turn could help drive an increase in product applications, helping UOB reach its business goals.

To pilot this new strategy, UOB chose to focus on one of its savings account products, an offering that helps customers save for future healthcare costs, and includes additional health and wellness benefits, such as complimentary annual health screenings.

UOB partnered with its account team at Google to analyze website actions throughout the savings account conversion journey. This in turn would help them identify what product each potential customer was most interested in. For example, if a potential customer visited the UOB webpage describing a specific benefit of a particular savings account, it was likely that the individual may have been interested in that product.

With a behavioral model in place to help understand the interests of its potential customers, UOB turned to Google Marketing Platform and their partner Kasatria, to help build its measurement foundation and ensure UOB had a robust tagging infrastructure in place.

First, Kasatria helped UOB use Google Tag Manager 360 to streamline the tagging setup on UOB’s website. This ensured a sitewide tagging solution was in place to measure touch points across the consumer journey on site. And this aligned with Google’s best practices on data collection, Tag Manager 360 does not collect any information about visitors to websites where it is in use, and its HTTP request logs are deleted after 14 days.

Zones, a feature in Tag Manager 360, also improved the bank’s tag management workflow by granting individual users access to publish certain types of tags on certain pages. This provided greater flexibility to members of UOB’s individual business units to manage their tagging responsibilities independently and reduce work, while also making ownership more secure.

With Tag Manager 360, UOB was able to quickly enable Analytics 360 across its entire website directly from the Tag Manager 360 interface. This meant that all its website activity would be automatically reported in its Analytics 360 account.

With its website data in Analytics 360, UOB could now create unique audience segments based on the specific product benefits that potential customers showed an interest in. Individuals were broken out into specific audiences based on their perceived interest in certain product benefits compared to others.

Next, UOB needed to produce data-driven creative that resonated with the audiences they had created in Analytics 360. For example, for people that demonstrated interest in the health savings account, UOB wanted customized messaging to highlight specific benefits for the savings account product.

The bank’s marketing team used Studio to construct its rich media creatives at scale, and imported those creatives into Campaign Manager 360 for ad serving. Finally, the creatives were assigned to a media campaign in Display & Video 360, where the media buying would take place.

To test whether the data-driven creatives delivered to the corresponding Analytics 360 audiences would outperform its previous strategies, UOB used the Experiments feature in Display & Video 360 to run two campaigns simultaneously. This allowed the marketing teams to create mutually exclusive testing groups of users and ensure a clean test.

In the experiment, both campaigns would serve ads to consumers who previously visited UOB’s website. However, only one campaign, the exposed group, would serve the bank’s new data-driven creative to the appropriate Analytics 360 audience. The other campaign, known as the control group, would receive default creative messaging not tailored to their previous website behavior.

When the experiment concluded, UOB saw that its data-driven remarketing strategy had increased application submissions by 300%. Return on ad spend for the data-driven remarketing strategy was also 100% higher than the control campaign.

UOB’s test showcased the value of building a robust digital marketing strategy with first-party data. By better understanding the needs of each potential customer and delivering relevant creative, the bank was able to drive meaningful business results.