Immowelt finds full-funnel success with video and display

Immowelt is a leading classified marketplace for those in search of a place to rent or to buy in Germany. Thanks to strong relationships with real estate agents, Immowelt boasts a unique and exclusive set of listings that can’t be found elsewhere.

Everyone needs a place to live—which means that Immowelt’s audience is broad, with a wide range of customer behaviors and lifecycles. Their challenge was to strengthen brand awareness and favorability within that large target audience in the most efficient way possible.

A top to bottom strategy

To help them reach their marketing goals, Immowelt took a full-funnel approach, partnering with Criteo on campaigns that would shepherd users throughout their journey from awareness to conversion.

Marisa Kaden, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Immowelt explains, “It depends on your budget and strategy, but in the long term, if you are looking for growth and a relevant market share in your segment, you cannot only retarget users with product ads. At least a mid-funnel campaign should be running as well to keep your potential customers close to your brand.”

Immowelt’s strategy included upper-funnel video campaigns that included both online video and OTT placements and featured high level awareness messaging. They paired this with dynamic display ads with consideration and conversion messaging to move users from video view to website visit, and ultimately, to a signup. The key was tapping into Criteo’s ability to activate a vast commerce dataset to focus their ads on those most likely to be in-market for real estate, rather than broadcasting to a large, mostly uninterested audience. This helped Immowelt expand their reach and build awareness efficiently.

According to Marisa Kaden, “When we decided to expand our budget in video advertising we did this step by step, analyzing the channels, to see where to get best KPIs in terms of VTR, but also CTR to move users into the next funnel step. We were quite confident that Criteo could be a good complement within our marketing mix, because of their great amount of user data and wide range of ad formats and placements.” Immowelt also ran a brand lift study on their campaign and achieved a significant uplift in ad recall on their brand awareness.

Immowelt understood that a complete campaign approach like this required more than just a KPI focus. Success was also measured by their ability to reach users outside of social media platforms and deliver the right message based on where each user was in their consumer journey. “This is a good combination of all our learnings from brand and performance campaigns,” said Marisa Kaden. “It brings a positive impact on all our KPIs.”