Citibank partners with Facilitate Digital to drive increased online accountability from their online marketing activity

Background

Citibank, one of the largest banks in the world and one of the biggest online advertisers in Australia, wanted to understand precisely how much value was being generated through their investment in online media. Measuring the number of Acquisitions (or ‘Conversions’) through on site tracking in itself was not enough. Many applicants would not meet the strict criteria in place and would subsequently have their applications rejected by the banks internal systems shortly after the submission of the application was initially recorded. The bank wanted to acquire a more meaningful dataset.

Citibank operates a multi-channel model and has a clear objective to ensure that each additional $ spent on acquisition marketing delivers bottom-line impact. It was critical that the solution put in place functioned across any online channel employed whether it was Search, Display, or Affiliate.

Challenge

The challenge was to generate a solution that would provide Citibank with a true understanding of the ROI generated from their online marketing activity; one that illustrated the source of Approved Online Applications, one that filtered out those applications that were unsuccessful from which no revenue is derived

The Facilitate Digital Consulting team collaborated with the key technical people within Citibank to collectively devise the solution implemented.

Solution

In summary, the solution functions as follows:

• Facilitate Digital’s Fusion technology de-duplicates in real time all potential new customers at the point of application submission. The parameters for de-duplication were set up using Citibank’s rules meaning that Customer Acquisitions were only attributed to the online activity if they met these criteria. As a result of the extensive number of parameters available within Fusion, this immediately resulted in cost savings not achievable through any other technology
• At the point of application submission, an application ID is generated by Citibank’s internal systems. Simultaneously, Fusion captures the Application ID using one of the UDP (User Defined Parameter) fields in its Post Click Tracking (PCT) Tag
• Citibank’s internal systems monitor the applications’ progress. Each night, an automated data feed transfers this information to Facilitate Digital’s systems
• Facilitate Digital integrates the Citibank data with its own data set, so that the precise status of each application generated can be appropriately applied to every line in the Media Plan
• The associated reporting is distributed daily to all key stakeholders at Citibank and within their Media Agency. This, coupled with the fact that Fusion de-duplicates data in real time, allows for highly reactive budget allocation and campaign optimization

Results

The solution has been in place since 2007. In summary, Citibank acquire a number of distinct advantages over their competitors:

• They have a uniquely detailed understanding of their ROI, enabling them to optimize their budget allocation by channel accordingly. During the course of activity 2008-10, approximately 75% of applications were rejected. Citibank knew in detail which activity was responsible for generating the 25% successful applications. In other words, they know how to invest their money in order to reach a higher quality audience
• Their Media Agency use the data set generated to sharpen their pencil in their negotiations with publishers, an ongoing process of demanding a greater value per dollar invested
• Due to the undisputed success of the project, Citibank and Facilitate Digital are in the process of rolling out the solution across the Asia-Pacific region during the course of 2011