Real-time cloud based ML to predict user behavior and increase conversions

The challenge

A leading European automobile manufacturer and its international distributors offer free test drives to visitors to their global and regional websites. With the goal of increasing the conversion rate for test drives, the automobile company wanted to target website visitors with pop-ups offering instant registration for the test drives. However, this came with the added risk of losing potential customers if the wrong visitor was targeted at the wrong time, leading them to end their journey on the website. In 2020, the company decided to move towards integrating web personalization as a core component of their retargeting efforts.

Partnering with Optimics

The automobile company partnered with Optimics to design a custom-tailored solution utilizing a machine learning algorithm that would calculate a user’s propensity to submit a Test Drive form in real time. Consuming various events as input (such as number of pageviews, events, scrolling depth, time spent on the site, device type, time during the day, and many more – it calculates a score representing the user’s potential interest in a test drive.

The solution

The team at Optimics developed a cloud-native solution that consumes Google Analytics data to learn user behavior and apply its learnings real-time to generate a score for each visitor. Based on their usage patterns, a pop-up would be triggered if their score would cross certain thresholds. The solution was an amalgamation of various Google Cloud Platform services, VertexAI, Google Tag Manager and Google Optimize. Optimics’ solution made it possible to target the right people at the right time by segmenting audiences based on their past behavior, and scoring new visitors in real time.

The results

Thanks to the machine learning capabilities offered by Optimics’ cloud solution, 5 of the company’s international distributors requested access to run pilot campaigns, generating over 900K+ pop-ups in one year. Even though only 4.3% of visitor sessions triggered a test drive pop-up, those sessions led to 29% of total test drive registrations. This meant that collaborating with Optimics for this challenge helped the automobile manufacturer increase their test drive conversion rate by 42%.

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