2023 Winner

Can-Am Off-Road is an all-terrain vehicle manufacturer with aggressive targets, they had to increase sales by +45% YoY and gain 6 points of market shares. Their website is not transactional, so the agency had to redefine what performance is to optimize the media investments and support them in their business objectives.

As a manufacturer without a transactional website, Can-Am Off-Road’s business model relies on independent dealers to sell its vehicles. As it’s the case for most players in the industry, the success of performance-driven marketing initiatives, have been solely focused on one specific objective: generating leads on the website.

The vehicle shortage across the industry had an important impact on the customer journey. Year-over-year, lead form submissions on Can-Am Off-Road’s website have decreased, while actions with the intent of visiting a dealership went up.

This important shift in consumer behavior made us re-question the importance that dealer-oriented actions should have versus lead forms. By doing additional research, they found that from all website visitors, only 20% of them completed a lead form before buying a product.

This was the signal that they needed to rethink their approach. The agency had to make the best of all the technical knowledge they had acquired over the last few years to better support Can-Am Off-Road in their ambitious business objectives.

The game changing approach they have introduced to their search campaigns is based on a fundamental key concept; each website visit is unique. Every person that visits the website has a different mindset, performs different actions depending on where they are in their journey and therefore, brings a different value to the business.

For example, a user that customizes a vehicle on the website and visits a dealer, has a considerably higher propensity of becoming a customer than someone who would only read a product description. Keeping this key concept in mind, they had to define what a valuable website visit is.

To achieve that, they have created a new performance indicator, the B-Value.

Based on the actions performed by a user on the website, the B-Value allows us to determine the quality of a website visit. The higher the B-Value, the more relevant the actions performed by the user are and the more relevant they are for Can-Am Off-Road’s business.

Finally, the B-Value allows us to optimize their search campaigns to generate website visits that are the most likely to perform high value actions on the website that are correlated with sales. To help Can-Am Off-Road reach their ambitious targets, they had to make sure that each dollar was invested on users that had the highest B-Value. In other words, users that based on their website actions were the most likely to become future customers.

By using the sales and website data of the last 4 years, they have built a regression model to identify website actions that were the most correlated to sales. To come up with a model that was as accurate as possible, many factors were taken into consideration: seasonality, holidays, impact of the lockdowns caused by Covid-19 and the delay between website actions and a sale.

Based on the correlation of each action with a sale, a value between 5 and 100 was assigned to each action. The more correlated the action was with a sale, the higher the score attributed. The score assigned to each action are the ones they use to calculate the B-Value.

The next step was to assign the value to each action in Google Ads and Search Ads 360. Before launching the test, they had to wait a period of 4 weeks, so the platforms could understand that there was a value assigned to each action.

Then, all the work that they have done previously is paying off. The agency reviewed the automated bid strategy of Can-Am Off-Road SEM’s campaigns to integrate the B-Value as the optimization action. This change had a massive impact on the way they buy keywords on search engines and significantly impacted their campaign results.

To precisely measure the impact of optimizing their SEM campaigns using the B-Value, they did multiple A/B tests. Thus, they were able to conclude without a doubt the impact this change
had on the performance.

This approach is completely new in the industry and it’s something that has not been really tested before. The B-Value has given us the opportunity to review the way they look at performance to be more aligned with the customer journey.

To have the courage to challenge old hypotheses and has paid big dividends. When they look at the performance, the results are highly convincing, average value per session, return on dollar invested and visits to a dealership were all metrics on the rise.

Based on the latest marketing-mix-modeling report produced for Can-Am Off-Road, digital media campaigns are contributing to 40% of the global sales. Thus, by using the B-Value on even more SEM campaigns and eventually other channels, the effectiveness of their media investment will be drastically improved. This will play a critical part to support Can-Am Off-Road in their mission to become the market leader in their category.

The results are extremely positive. The average value per session is +53% higher and the return on dollar invested +60%. Visits at a dealership exploded with a +111%, which has allowed Can-Am Off-Road to reach their sales objectives of +45% and gain 7 points of market share.

Undeniably, these results have massively supported the client to reach their business objectives. With the success of this campaign, they will continue to improve the actual model, scale on more campaigns, and test the same approach on other channels.

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