Velotric powers cross-platform audience strategy with data-driven targeting

Racing to evolve with the U.S. market, Velotric, an electric bicycle brand, needed to increase brand awareness and conversions among customers. To power their full-funnel campaign, they geared up with a data-driven, cross-platform audience targeting strategy on The Trade Desk – driving 74% ROAS lift, 9x conversion rate lift, and much more. Find out more in the case study here.

“To lift brand awareness in the U.S., we needed to be able to accurately target the right audience and measure results. Using The Trade Desk allowed us to not only precisely target our preferred audience, but also access an abundance of valuable audience insights that we can leverage across other platforms to make future campaigns even more successful.”

Liam Yu

Digital Marketing Manager, Velotric

Gaining traction in an ever-growing market

With improved technology and growing environmental and health concerns, electric bicycles (e-bikes) are surging in popularity. In the U.S. as of 2022, the e-bike market was valued at USD$1.98 billion, and it’s expected to grow 15.6% year on year.*

E-bike manufacturer Velotric wanted to evolve with the U.S. market, increasing brand awareness and conversions. Going forward, the team knew they needed better audience targeting and enhanced cross-channel reach capabilities, particularly across Connected TV (CTV). They also wanted to optimize performance with advanced measuring tools for more detailed insights.

So Velotric and its agency, Sinointeractive, chose to use our programmatic demand-side platform to work towards crafting a cost-effective full-funnel campaign.

Unlocking deeper insights with a data-driven targeting approach and advanced measurement tools

Step 1: Velotric’s strategy relied on our platform to programmatically deliver ads across multiple channels and drive consumers down the sales funnel. The company tapped into our marketplace of premium inventory across the open internet – including CTV, over-the-top (OTT), and display channels.

By advertising programmatically on the open internet, Velotric connected with more potential customers that they were not able to reach within ‘walled gardens’, such as social and search platforms. The team also gained greater transparency and control over their campaign when running on the open internet.

To optimize its budget, Velotric activated our advanced cross-channel frequency controls, which reduced ad duplication while reaching more consumers. Overall, Velotric saved and reinvested 15% of its total budget.

Step 2: Velotric’s mid-funnel strategy included activating our Inferred Brand Intent (IBI) solution. This mid-funnel measurement tool gave the brand insights into how its ads influenced consumers’ desire to research content related to e-bikes. Whenever a consumer was exposed to Velotric’s ads on a website, IBI analyzed the URLs of the webpage and looked for keywords that Velotric had previously selected, including competitor brand names, ‘bikes’, ‘e-bikes’, and ‘electric bikes’.

Step 3: Velotric used universal pixel tracking to accumulate first-party data. This data was crucial for measuring lower-funnel results and optimizing targeting to users at key points on the conversion journey – including ‘add to cart’, ‘checkout’, and ‘thank you’ – and on other platforms. Using cross-platform conversion analysis, the team was also able to measure the campaign’s impact on conversions across social and search platforms.

Next, Velotric activated our Audience Insights tool. By comparing the audience interest relevance score with users already on a conversion journey tracked by the universal pixel, the team was able to identify untouched and highly relevant audience interests. Meanwhile, they could evaluate audience overlap among media platforms by comparing the audience interest relevance score of users from other platforms. This, in turn, helped the company improve the performance of its advertising across channels.

Step 4: Lastly, Velotric used our content signal targeting to access data about the content its target audience is most interested in. The team found that sport and adventure were most relevant to their audience.

Increasing brand awareness and conversions with an audience-centric full-funnel campaign

To complement media metrics and measure the effectiveness of their campaign, the Velotric team ran a brand lift study (BLS) with our partner Lucid Marketplace to help independently verify and provide deep insights into how the campaign increased brand awareness.

Overall, the campaign achieved a 1.7% lift in brand awareness, 8400% above TTD benchmark. This increased to 9% for consumers exposed to the company’s ads via OTT platforms. The campaign also resulted in an 8% ad recall among consumers exposed to ads via OTT platforms. Meanwhile, brand awareness increased by 3–4% and ad recall increased by 2% to 3% in the all-important 18- to 44-year-old demographic.

By implementing audience insights obtained from our analysis across other media platforms, the company also achieved a 74% lift in ROAS, from 3 times to 5.21 times, and reduced its cost per click by 60%. The website subscription rate also increased by 50%.

Velotric’s programmatic approach gave the company unparalleled insights into how advertising through our platform can significantly help improve conversion performance across other platforms and channels. For example, the conversion rate for users shown a social media ad by us was 9 times higher than when a user was exposed to just one channel. Meanwhile, the conversion rate for users shown a search platform ad by us was 4.5 times higher than for users exposed to one channel. Velotric’s results show that running brand campaigns on CTV and OTT can effectively engage and influence target audiences – and utilizing our platform can help you save money while you’re at it, too.

^{* Source: Grand View Research, U.S. E-bike Market Size, Share And Trends Report, 2030}

Interested in finding out how to activate an audience-first full funnel strategy on The Trade Desk? Fill out this form to learn more.