Driving Toyota's brand performance with attention optimization

Improving Visibility in Digital Ads for Toyota Sweden  

​Toyota Sweden wanted to increase customer awareness and action for their digital advertising campaigns, improving overall ROI.  

Our ambition 

Ensuring viewability is crucial for the effectiveness of ads. It is a standard metric in digital advertising used for optimization. However, being visible does not guarantee being seen, and up to 65% of all ads on desktop go unnoticed by consumers, especially in display campaigns.  

Our goal was to help Toyota Sweden generate consumer awareness and drive action through a campaign focused on promoting the electrical range of their hybrid electric car models. But a major challenge was that the majority of viewable display ads went unnoticed by online users. ​ 

Our solution

We teamed up with The&Partnership, Xaxis and leading eye-tracking company Tobii to build a performance algorithm that considered the likelihood of attention and powered a performance display campaign for Toyota. Through a statistically representative online panel of 1600 people, Tobii collects data on what users are looking at on their screens and, more specifically, which ad placements get the most attention. ​ 

This is how the Attention Algo was born – a bid modifier algorithm that adjusts each bid in real time based on the probability that the user will see the ad. ​By working closely with Tobii, we made Toyota’s data directly usable for programmatic optimization.​ The data showed that the fixation rate of certain ad placements varied during the week and time of day, as well as depending on ad size​.  

We built the algorithm to take into account the day of the week, time of day and ad size when evaluating each bid request​. Thanks to this algorithm, Toyota could achieve better results with the same investment.​ 

Our results

To measure the effect of the algorithm, we set up A/B testing. Our brand lift study demonstrated that the results can be 100% attributed to the attention algorithm: 

116% increase in ad fixation rate**​ 

77% lift in click-to-conversion rate**​ 

23% increase in conversions**​ 

64% higher ad recall**​ 

60% higher consideration**​ 

23% higher campaign attribute perception**​​ 

**compared to control group exposed to ads not optimized on viewability ​ 

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