Behind the scenes video shows how Google revamped Hertz marketing

Feb 3, 2016 | Online advertising, Search engine marketing

Over the past year, Hertz partnered with digital agency Forward 3D and Google to identify its key challenges and devise a step-by-step strategy for improving its marketing and sales operations. A series of behind-the scenes videos shows how Google worked with the vehicle hire company to identify how its display ads were undervalued by a […]
Over the past year, Hertz partnered with digital agency Forward 3D and Google to identify its key challenges and devise a step-by-step strategy for improving its marketing and sales operations. A series of behind-the scenes videos shows how Google worked with the vehicle hire company to identify how its display ads were undervalued by a massive 400%.


Case study summary:
• Vehicle hire firm looks to boost ROi from its analytics, mobile, search, display, video and programmatic spend
• Hertz brings in Google team to analyse data
• A study of the first 30 days of attribution modelling data showed that display ads were undervalued by 300-400%
The challenge
The plan embraced multiple data sources and digital streams, including analytics, mobile, search, display, video, programmatic and more. To make the plan more manageable it was structured into stages that could deliver quick, medium-term and long-term wins. This meant progress was measurable, proof of concepts could be validated and learnings could feed into the next stage.
Priorities for the project included:
● Boosting mobile capability
● Using contextual information to tailor Hertz’s marketing so that messages are device-appropriate for the different stages of the customer journey
● Geo-targeting for smart segmentation
● Gaining insights from cross-device attribution data
Each of these work streams generated valuable customer insights from the amassed data. However, to create messages optimised for specific customer segments, such insights had to be collated in one place.
Hertz decided that the only way to do this was to have a Single Customer View: a cohesive, one-stop data bank for both customer insights and data gathered through advertising.
However, Hertz’s data lived in various places across the company and gathering data from different internal departments and numerous customer touch points in one place presented its own complex challenges and needed careful management.
The solution
Key executives working on the projectl provided their insights and the results that prove digital transformation provides business growth.
The “Digital Transformations With Google” series below shows how Hertz worked with Google to identify


The results
Google Analytics Smart List-targeted search ads are now driving a search click-through rate of more than 34% and a cost-per-acquisition that is less than 10% of overall search CPA.
A study of the first 30 days of attribution modelling data showed that display advertising was undervalued by 300-400% when last click was the only metric applied.
Paid search was found to be undervalued by 10% when results were based purely on last click and brand traffic (defined as website traffic from visitors who included the Hertz brand in their search terms).
Thanks to data-driven attribution, Hertz can now measure the efficiency of upper-funnel marketing much more effectively. In the case of display prospecting, Hertz measured 45X more conversions and optimised budget allocation accordingly.
Conrad Doyle, Director, Brand & Direct Channel Marketing, Hertz, said: “Having all the data in one single repository could be very powerful. We could suddenly have a single view of the customer, which is increasingly important these days.”

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