The Trade Desk was Luxury Escapes’ ticket to activating Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), an industry-backed solution that enables greater personalisation in a privacy-conscious manner. This innovative digital strategy landed the Australian-based online travel agency with conversion rates above 276%, and a 78.3% lower cost per action.
THE CHALLENGE:
EMBARKING ON A JOURNEY OF FIRST PARTY-DATA
Luxury Escapes, an Australian-based online travel agency that offers its 7 million global members exclusive luxury travel experiences, is always searching for ways to continue its rapid growth. Luxury Escapes wanted to explore data-driven methods to reach net-new customers. It found that The Trade Desk was its go-to in leveraging its most valuable first-party data set – CRM data. The Trade Desk introduced Luxury Escapes to the industry-backed identity solution Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), an open-source identity framework that aims to give marketers more steering power over their data compared to third-party cookies and to give consumers more control over how their data is shared.
With UID2, advertisers create a unique, pseudonymous UID2 identifier built from hashed and salted email addresses or phone numbers, allowing them to maintain current media strategies without the use of cookies. This offered Luxury Escapes a solution that enables data portability; aims to provide greater personalisation in a privacy-conscious manner; and helps extend its reach across a wide variety of devices and the fastest-growing channels on the open internet, including websites, mobile apps, and streaming platforms that are integrated with UID2.
THE SOLUTION:
PAVING THE WAY FOR PRIVACY-CONSCIOUS LOOKALIKE AUDIENCES
By onboarding its CRM data with UID2 onto The Trade Desk, Luxury Escapes was able to use a strong seed audience – the brand’s – existing audience to chart a course for a lookalike (LAL) strategy, effectively reaching highly a relevant and net-new audience.
The LAL strategy was enhanced with The Trade Desk’s Audience Predictor, which uses its Koa™ artificial intelligence to identify data segments that share traits with Luxury Escapes’ first-party audience. The automation of LAL targeting was the team’s compass to pointing them toward a sophisticated, budget-friendly way to reach exactly the right audience of net-new consumers.
THE RESULTS:
THE AUDIENCE PREDICTOR AND UID2 TAKE FLIGHT
Luxury Escapes measured the effectiveness of UID2 by comparing two ad groups – one based on CRM data with UID2 and the other consisting of website purchasers based on pixel data.
By directly comparing these two groups across a variety of conversion metrics and countries, Luxury Escapes discovered that the UID2-powered CRM LAL audience performed better across the board.
Luxury Escapes UID2-powered CRM lookalike audience performance
In Australia alone, the company recorded a 276% higher conversion rate (CVR), 4.75 times higher ROAS, and 78.3% lower cost per action (CPA).
In addition to consistently better performance, the UID2-powered LAL audience delivered an aerial view of seed users across various platforms, including connected television. The solution also included users who took the route offline, providing a broader pool of seed audiences. And because active email addresses are persistent identifiers that don’t expire, it provided a longitudinal view of individual users.
These factors are like a first-class upgrade to using seed audiences based on pixel data to generate LAL audiences.
DIGITAL INNOVATION IS THE ULTIMATE DESTINATION
As the sun is expected to set on third-party cookies, the obvious next stop for Luxury Escapes is to continue future-proofing its business with a privacy-conscious identity framework like UID2.
This journey also enabled the company to optimise its first-party data by taking the road less travelled in the digital landscape. It grew its revenue and created valuable LAL audiences in a cross-section of international markets.
Given Luxury Escapes’ global success, more businesses should consider taking the same trip with UID2 to refresh their digital strategy.
‘Identifying data segments that share
multiple traits with our existing members –
The Trade Desk’s Audience Predictor
enables us to do that. And when tested it with UID2,
return on ad spend increased significantly. We’ve now got very promising outcomes
in our international growth markets.’
Emily Finlay
Digital Ads Manager, Luxury Escapes