Productsup transformed the dynamics of performance marketing at AutoScout24

Case

AutoScout24 is the largest pan-European online car market for new and used cars. Its platform serves over 30 million users per month and is available in 18 different languages. It offers private customers, dealers, and manufacturers a marketplace for trading cars online. The marketing team at AutoScout24 aims to make it easy for consumers to find the car that best suits them, creating great customer experiences along the way.

The team is always looking for more innovative ways to get the right content to the right consumers at the right time. They regularly devise and implement new strategies to create and distribute product data. They cover the full funnel, delivering relevant information to potential customers – from curious shoppers to those who need a car right now. They are always careful to spread leads and conversion rates across all car traders on their platforms.

To continue their successful trajectory, the digital marketing team needed a new feed management solution to help them take advantage of digitization in the industry. They wanted to seize more opportunities and create a better experience for dealers and consumers.

Challenges

• Slow time to market
• Reducing manual work
• Few data insights

Although AutoScout24 already had the basics for their feed management in place, they were facing a number of challenges. Adding a new channel and getting it live was taking around 3 months. Experimenting with feeds was proving extremely time-consuming. Adding and changing information had to be done via a ticket system. IT worked on the tickets, but it was an inefficient process.

Working with 1.5 million listings made it impossible to keep an overview of the data the team had and the data they needed. They didn’t have any tools to analyze the feeds before they exported them. They had no automated means to discover what was missing from the feeds.

Their legacy feed management tool was purely operational and lacked any smart features, it wasn’t producing any actionable insights for the digital team.

Solutions

• Feed management
• Analyzing and reporting
• Image Designer

With Productsup, AutoScout24 now centralizes and automates its entire product data flow in one single platform. The digital marketing team can now test whenever they want and implement new routes to market with a few clicks. They have created a sophisticated channel mix that enables the team to launch new services such as the AutoScout24 smyle service, which makes buying used cars online as easy as regular ecommerce shopping.

Analysis and reporting features help the team take control of the vast amount of data and listings they manage. With the easy-to-use Productsup Image Designer, they create upper-funnel inspiring ads. They can be tested and pushed live in a matter of minutes.

Quick turnaround with high-quality ads means effective promotions that get consumers the kind of brands, designs, and experience to inform their purchasing decisions.

Results

• Quicker time to market
• System now both operational and strategic
• Enhanced data insights

After Productsup, the digital marketing team became more agile. They now create and change ads without support from other teams. The platform gives them insights that enable them to tweak the assets and test their impact before pushing the best ads live. The Productsup P2C platform enables the AutoScout24 team to take their performance marketing to the next level. They can now get a new channel live in a day rather than three months. New dealers also have their offerings live in two hours instead of the two weeks it used to take. Cost-per-Lead (CPL) was reduced by up to 25%.

Feed management software usually just supports organizations in their daily operations. At AutoScout24, the Productsup P2C platform helped the company fundamentally change the dynamics of its performance marketing efforts on operational and strategic levels.

The platform enables the digital marketing team to gather and analyze more data using the insights to optimize campaigns, improve the customer experience, and enhance the service they offer to dealers.

Future plans

AutoScout24 works with an unusual ecommerce business model because each product they sell is unique. They need to adapt algorithms on promotional channels as most channels are not designed to match the requirements for an online car market. Combining the new insights from their data with their own expertise, the digital marketing team at AutoScout24 continues to enhance the use of algorithms to benefit their performance. Supported by the Productsup P2C platform and working closely with their data science team, they introduce improvements. Most recently, they rolled out an evenly balanced allocation of distributor leads.