In fact, Chinese consumers do a lot more online research before deciding to book test drives than most Western consumers. Our bespoke research with GEOTMT, one of the main Internet Service Providers in China, found that a typical decision period for a Chinese customer before booking a test drive was actually 30 days.

Renault was launching a new car, with the key KPI booking test drives. Our solution for Renault: find out what might have influenced the customers that previously booked test drives in that vital 30-day period: “The Missing 30 Days”!

Our strategy was to completely overhaul the current digital spending strategy for Renault China, and interact with consumers in the right places online!

Previously, Renault China had no choice but use an “unblocked” local 3rd party tracking tool, Miaozhen, which only used the last point of interaction as the key point of conversion for a customer to book a test drive.

Now we knew we were missing a whole 30 days of insights, we needed to analyse all channels and touchpoints across the entire 30-day online path for Renault’s customers. But it wasn’t that simple: in China attribution models aren’t the “norm” like other markets; there’s no automatically embedded system for analysis like elsewhere, and so they seem “out of reach”.

We had to go right back to data analysis at its core and create Renault’s first ever customized attribution model manually with log raw data from Miaozhen. 90,000 log data sets included the exact website at each interaction point, as well as the type (click or impression) and date of interaction.

We saw huge improvements to campaign performance!

• Reach increased by 40% in the next campaign while cost per reach decreased by 15%.

• Overall conversation rate increased by 8% while CPA decreased 12%.

Most importantly, our more focused and insightful model earned quality conversions! 75% of conversions (test drive/ online purchase sign-ups) were effective (real intent to purchase), far above the general level of 60%, and proving that the conversion quality driven by the data results was very high!

This wasn’t just a solution for a single campaign. We completely reinvented the way Renault allocated digital spend in China, educating them on the length of the decision journey and touchpoints that were previously hidden! Now, Renault can optimize smarter actions for the most critical decision period for their targets and drive quality leads to purchase.