How Bakeca.it strongly increases its website sessions: +25% in 3 months

+25%

website sessions in 3 months

-40%

cost per session

-9%

bounce rate

Bakeca is a free classifieds site that is among the top 100 most visited sites in Italy. Founded in 2005 by a group of friends, Bakeca.it today is a dynamic company that strives to constantly innovate in the competitive classifieds market.

Having a large, and ever-growing audience is key to Bakeca’s business model. With millions of announcements and 12 million visitors per month, Bakeca has an impressive database that it uses to attract advertisers. Solutions that could help them continue to grow quickly and cost-effectively were a must for the company.

Their particular challenge was to increase web visitors by 20%, but increasing the cost per click (CPC) to make that happen quickly became unsustainable due to heavy competition.

“Our goal was to increase the sessions and conversions while maintaining a very low acquisition cost,” said Simone Cornelio, Head of Marketing at Bakeca.it.

Shifting focus to reach goals

Bakeca was already using Criteo’s web traffic campaigns to re-engage existing visitors and users and bring them back to the site. AI technology, coupled with the world’s largest open commerce data set helped them deliver the right ad for each person, at the time when each was most likely to be interested.

To achieve their traffic goals while maintaining a reasonable CPC, Bakeca approached the campaign from a new perspective. Rather than optimizing the campaign to hit a specific margin, Bakeca switched to optimizing for clicks to the site plus one action taken on the site. This shift expanded the traffic- and lead-driving opportunities of the campaign while keeping CPCs down.

The result was a 40% decrease in the cost per session, a 9% reduction in the bounce rate, and a +25% increase direct website sessions.

“Thanks to the collaboration with Criteo we were able to work on bringing more sessions at a more contained cost that with the greater engagement later converted on our website. Criteo’s work was fundamental in the role of assisted conversion.”