How Did McDonald's Hong Kong Catalyse In-App Orders?
CASE STUDY: McDonald’s Hong Kong partnered with Google Analytics 4 to personalise its ads, which increased in-app orders by 550% in two months.
Topics
In the last few years, quick-service restaurants have been forced to shift from traditional to digital infrastructure to keep up with customer demands and competition – McDonald’s Hong Kong wasn’t behind the race. The restaurant chain integrated the capabilities of GA-4 into its in-app campaigns to drive user engagement and orders with personalised recommendations at scale.
Challenge
With rapidly changing dining habits, quick-service restaurants, including McDonald’s, saw foot traffic drop and high demand for online orders. However, adapting to the rapidly changing customers’ cravings for their favourite food was a challenging task. Customers found it difficult to make choices while ordering their favourite food, and in this scenario, a recommendation-based model is the game changer.
In order to stand by its objectives of making scrumptious food easily available, McDonald’s wanted to offer hassle-free mobile ordering to its millions of customers in Hong Kong.
With this vision, the McDonald’s marketing team decided to uplevel their app user experience and optimise the path to conversion via real-time customer insights in their in-app ad campaigns to drive orders.
Here are a few goals McDonald’s Hong Kong wanted to achieve:
- Enhance customer experience that leads to a significant surge in app-based food orders
- Leverage the capability of machine learning technology to predict the behaviours of their in-app audience
- Harness real-time consumer insights to reach the right customers with its mobile order campaigns
Process
- Integrated Google Analytics 4 properties.
- Leveraged the capabilities of predictive audiences tool to engage likely purchasers.
- Utilised real-time customer insights to tailor messages for boosting app campaigns engagement and conversions
After consulting the technical team from its data analytics partner Media.Monks, McDonald’s marketing team implemented Google Analytics 4 to gather data from its app.
From there, McDonald’s turned to predictive audiences, a tool that allows marketers to predict purchase behaviour based on automatically forecasted ecommerce insights. The predictive audience tool helped McDonald’s marketing team leverage the capabilities of the purchase probability metric, enabling GA-4 to showcase the highest likelihood of ordering food in the next seven days.
As explained on Google Marketing, this feature enabled McDonald’s to test a handful of ready-to-use predictive audiences that met its custom prediction-modelling prerequisites. McDonald’s utilised these insights to create personalised app campaigns to engage audiences via Google ads.
Result
Due to the industry’s nature and high repurchase rate, the “likely 7-day purchasers” audience drove the most ROI for the restaurant chain, which decided to focus its ad investment on that segment in just two months.
- Enhanced conversions by 550% for “likely 7 day purchasers.”
- Decreased cost-per-action by 63% for this audience.
- Increased revenue by 560% for the same group.
Showing his contentment with McDonald’s campaign success, Kai Tsang, Senior Director Digital Customer Experience, McDonald’s Hong Kong, said, “Google Analytics 4’s machine learning capabilities allow us to transform our digital advertising strategy efficiently and effectively by leveraging its out–of-the-box solution.”
Read the complete case study here.
