Microsoft partnered with retailers to run an advertising campaign promoting Microsoft products, with the retailers' online shops functioning as the point of purchase. The campaign faced challenges due to a minimal monthly budget being shared among more than 10 retailer partners. The solution involved rotating banners across retailers in a third-party system rather than the primary platform, and focusing retargeting on any banner rather than the same one, to make the most of the limited budget and drive sales on the best-known retailer sites. This approach reduced the cost-per-acquisition seven times below expectations while achieving a positive return on investment.

1. MSFT RTB Case
gemiusHU 2015Q1
www.gemius.hu

2. MS Case – Brief
• Brand: Microsoft
• Brief:
– MS made a cooperation with their retailers. MS
paid for the campaign but the landing where you
could buy the products were at retailers’ shop
– Shops should agree to put codes into their sites
and pass back the value of the conversions
• Main challenge:
– MS had more than 10 partners but around
minimal budget / month

3. MS Case – Mechanism
If somebody clicked on a banner he arrived to a matched designed but common landing
page. Then he could move to retailers’ shop to buy the products. Later we missed this
common landing and performance went higher.
Banner 1
Banner 2
Banner X
Landing 1
Landing 2
Landing X
Partner 1
Partner 2
Partner X
Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you!
Banners MS landing
Partner
sites
Thank you
pages

4. MS Case – Solution
1. Money should split equallybetween shops
2. Products and prices were same for all shops
3. In DataXu system it’s not allowed more than 3 banner sets for one tacticto rotate
Because of reason #3 and #1 we rotated the banners in gemiusDirectEffect (gDE) not DataXu. And because of
the budget limitation and reason #2 we shouldn’t serve the same banner for retargeting. It was enough just
serve any of them. We could rotate banners for retargeting in gDE as well so there were just two tactics in
DataXu: one prospecting and one retargeting. That’s how we could reserve some money and we could solve this
campaign from the briefed budget.
Shop 1
Shop 2
Shop X
Retar-
geting
Pros-
pecting
…

5. MS Case – Result
• Overall CPA was 7 times less than the
expectation
• ROI was positive (value of purchased goods
was much higher than the investment)
• In this way we could serve a more then 10
partners campaign for the same, low budget
• Good learning was that whatever banner
people saw the most sales realized on the
best known e-shop

6. Thank you!
www.gemius.hu
Ambruszter Géza
Country Manager
+36 20 221 8939
Gemius Hungary
Budapest
Szép utca 5.