How Alibaba Partnered with Adcash to Boost Leads by 150%

Alibaba was already a well-established brand in China, but needed to boost its recognition and customer base globally. Adcash went about solving this with a tailor-made digital advertising solution, combining its extensive global reach and cutting-edge technology to drive more than 100,000 enquiries in five months, all under budget.

The challenge

Launched in 1999, Alibaba.com is the leading platform for global wholesale trade, serving millions of buyers and suppliers worldwide. Alibaba.com brings people hundreds of millions of products in over 40 core categories, including consumer electronics, machinery and apparel.

Buyers for these products are located in 190+ countries and regions, and exchange hundreds of thousands of messages with suppliers on the platform each day. Although Alibaba is a global enterprise, there were regions where its brand awareness was not as strong as some of its local competitors. 

The main challenge for Adcash was to introduce the Alibaba platform in new locations, where brand awareness needed strengthening, while boosting conversion rates.

The solution

Adcash combined its cutting-edge digital advertising technology with manual optimisation and extensive marketing knowhow to build a complete, all-in-one solution to suit Alibaba’s needs.

This started with a mission to understand the types of customers being targeted, building an audience to reach. Once this had been done, the next step was to design creative and landing pages which were perfectly suited for the global nature of the audience.

Then, Adcash’s dedicated team of optimisation experts got to work; setting up the campaign using their custom-built ad platform and targeting traffic sources that had been identified as a solid match with Alibaba’s desired target audience. At the same time, the optimisation team ensured that all of the relevant tracking code was in place.

After this was all ready, the campaign was launched, allowing the machine learning capabilities to take over the bulk of the optimisation. 

The execution 

When the campaign was first launched, Adcash targeted a broad range of verticals. 

Fairly quickly the powerful Adcash optimisation engine determined that online entertainment and e-commerce (like price comparison sites) were performing the best. As a result, the campaign was dynamically adjusted to focus on these verticals.

Similarly, when it came to the best device types to target, the Adcash platform was able to quickly and efficiently identify what worked best and where. The system detected that while mobile users were engaging with the Alibaba campaign, they were less likely to convert than desktop users. 

As a result of this, the campaign was further optimised. Tailor-made CPM ads were served to mobile users to drive brand awareness at a low cost, while CPC/CPA ads were shown to desktop users. This dynamic device-targeting optimization meant that Alibaba received the best visibility and user acquisition rate for its investment.

After this, Adcash went about identifying traffic that was providing quality leads for Alibaba and blacklisting non-converting results. Thanks to Adcash’s advanced targeting capabilities, Alibaba was able to do this on a granular level; picking out device types, cities and browsers that were not providing desirable results and excluding them from the campaigns.

At the same time, through A/B testing landing pages and creatives, the campaign was monitored by the optimisation team to make sure the audience it was reaching was as relevant as possible.

Results

Thanks to the unique combination of technology, manual optimisation and digital marketing knowhow delivered by Adcash, Alibaba saw its leads increase by 150% within six months. In addition to this, the smart optimisation provided by Adcash meant Alibaba received a 100% increase in conversions during this same six-month period.

As a result of these impressive numbers, Alibaba launched several campaigns and maintains a strong partnership with Adcash.