Semcasting's Smart Zones Outperforms Retargeting

Five Top Financial Services Institutions

Reach Up to 65 Percent More Qualified Consumers With Smart Zones

Five top retail financial services institutions approached Semcasting looking for an advertising solution to engage qualified consumers with credit card offers, brokerage services, mortgage refinancing and personal banking services.

The challenge was that each advertiser wanted to selectively target qualified consumers within ten miles of bank branch trade areas. Each advertiser had varying types and levels of products to promote, which pertained only to certain consumers of requisite affluence and/or home equity.

In practice what this meant was that each financial institution needed regional- or branch-level predictive models to identify and rank qualified consumers for each product by their propensity to respond.

Using Semcasting’s patented automated predictive modeling platform and Smart Zones’ technology, hundreds of online display ad and mobile audiences were constructed based on consumers who scored highly for each product being offered. Using Smart Zones, qualified consumers were clustered into neighborhood-level zones within each trade area. Because Smart Zones is not reliant on cookies or any other tracking technology, every qualified consumer within ten miles of each bank branch trade area was able to have custom-tailored messaging delivered to them if they were online.

Thanks to Smart Zones, these five financial services institutions were able to accurately target each audience with no use of cookies, inferred data or tracking, enabling them to reach nearly 100 percent of qualified consumers across any device. Smart Zones generated an average click-through rate (CTR) of .40 percent across 148 million-plus impressions for eight campaigns over a three-month period. Combined they provided an average 347 percent lift over cookie-based ad targeting and 168 percent lift over retargeting industry standard metrics.

Here’s how Smart Zones makes this possible:

• Reach & Scale: 100% reach and scale with no onboarding to 250 million-plus people and 18 million businesses in the U.S. and Canada
• Media Zones: Link audiences to their preferred sites, categories, ad sizes and day/time
• Device Independent: Access to all Internet-enabled devices (i.e. desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones)
• Cookie-Free Privacy: No use of cookies, tracking or inferred audience segmentation
• Data Rich: Over 750 data variables

To learn more about how Smart Zones outperforms retargeting at financial services institutions and more, visit our Financial Services page and download our overview.