XM is a brokerage covering Forex and CFDs on Stocks, Stock Indices, Commodities, Metals and Energies. The company serves more than 1.5 million clients in 196 countries with support in over 30 languages. To take advantage of AdWords’ new pay-per-conversion pricing model, XM tested Smart display campaigns in a number of countries to see if the tactic would drive down cost per acquisition.
About XM
Brokerage covering trading in Forex and CFDs on Stocks, Stock Indices, Commodities, Metals and Energies
Founded: 2009
Offices in Cyprus, Greece, United Kingdom and Australia
About Agency JPP Marketing
JPP Marketing is an agency based in Cyprus offering SEO, PPC and Advanced Web Analytics services
Founded: 2008
Goals
Improve performance of display campaigns
Keep cost per acquisition under control
Approach
Tested Smart display campaigns using AdWords’ pay-per-conversion model
Results
28% reduction in overall cost per acquisition
To get started, XM simply used the same assets as their existing display campaigns and defined the target cost per acquisition as the average from the last 30 days. From there, the Smart display algorithm took control of the optimisation.
Over the course of the initial period, the total cost of all XM display campaigns in the test countries increased by 30% while conversions went up by 82%, representing a 28% reduction in cost per acquisition overall. More specifically, in XM’s Smart display campaigns using the pay-per-conversion model in these countries, the cost increased by 340% and conversions by 359%, amounting to a 4% reduction in cost per acquisition.
These success metrics – and the fact that the cost per acquisition was 25% less than all other XM campaigns including remarketing – ensured that the new approach gained XM’s trust. That led the team to expand its adoption from 24% to 82% of all the display campaigns in the test countries during this period.
Following this initial period, XM has expanded the use of the pay-per-conversion Smart display campaigns even more and is planning to use the pay-per-conversion model along with the AdWords Smart Bidding strategy tCPA in other campaigns.
