HP needs no introduction: renowned for their origins as a hardware company from when they were more commonly referred to as Hewlett-Packard, the firm has come a long way since 1939. Today, their main business lines are in retailing electronic products, parts and accessories, selling both through their reseller networks and their owned e-commerce channels.

HP came to us in February 2021 with the principal objective of expanding their e-Commerce customer base, specifically in the LATAM region (Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina).

While HP is a household name, the consumer electronics market is rife with competition: players who own considerable share of the market include Microsoft, Acer, Samsung and ASUS, to name a few. More specifically, HP’s issue was also in contending with the fact that many e-tailers in South America already sell their products––over time, e-Commerce giants like Mercado Libre and Amazon have gained the upper hand through amassing 1st party data from their loyal online shoppers. In HP’s media strategy, the struggle was in truly getting out there and finding the relevant audience segments to include in retargeting efforts.

The goal was to retarget users, but HP first needed to broaden their campaign audience segments to include more potential customers who would find their products relevant.

Our solution was therefore to, quite simply, go fish. Together with our affiliate marketing partner Awin and each of HP’s LATAM media teams, we ran Prospecting campaigns based on carefully constructed audience segments in order to find users that were more likely to be interested in or consider purchasing HP’s products.

In order to ensure users reached were as relevant as possible, we used Google’s Custom Audiences to segment based on keywords and URLs. From there, we were able to model different audience sets based on Lookalike targeting, making sure to filter traffic both in pre- and post-bid through Brand Safety and Ad Fraud prevention partners like IAS and Double Verify.

Our Prospecting efforts allowed us to then successfully run Retargeting campaigns, ensuring that our audience sets were sufficiently widened while keeping the relevance (Intent targeting) to a maximum. Some examples of audience segmentation include how we combined different sets of keywords in order to cross-target shoppers who sought desktop computers or laptops with gamers and technophiles (eg. specific searches of competitors’ analogous or relevant products by model name), or self-employed professionals who required equipment like printers and toner cartridges.

Customizing our strategy and changing our audience segmentation targeting for every single season (eg. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Mother’s Day) has paid off––throughout the LATAM region, HP has consistently run Prospecting and Retargeting campaigns with us, time and again, reaching metrics as impressive as Click-through-Rates of 0.65% (average industry benchmark: 0.35%) and optimizing Cost-per-Unique-user to $1.45 (industry average: $4).

We were also able to avoid, through using IAS and DoubleVerify, a staggering amount of invalid clicks (-22%), and reduce SIVT* (Sophisticated Invalid Traffic) by -19%. For every 1000 impressions, we averaged savings of 0.24$, getting HP more value for their media budget over time.

*SIVT (Sophisticated Invalid Traffic) is defined as difficult to detect situations that require advanced analytics, multi-point corroboration/coordination, significant human intervention, etc., to analyze and identify