“Mobile first” has become the standard for food orders

Whether it’s India, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, or Hungary – Berlin-based start-up company foodpanda connects restaurants, delivery services, and customers via its open online marketplace. Founded in Singapore in 2012, foodpanda provides a technological infrastructure to its over 26,000 partner restaurants worldwide, including giant food chains like McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, and Starbucks as well as trendy local places, so they can quickly serve their hungry customers. Customers, on the other hand, benefit from a large culinary selection to pick their favorite food on the Internet or using a mobile app.

This approach ensures that orders are delivered on time and in approved quality to customers in currently 20 countries. “About 70 percent of orders are placed using a mobile device, and the growth rates are impressive. The total volume increased by 117% in just one year,” says Engin Yilmaz, Senior SEM Manager at foodpanda GmbH headquarters in Berlin and a member of a team of around 50 people that manages the young company’s online marketing program.

Foodpanda strives to gain a market-leading position in every country it operates in. Its financial contributors, which have invested over 310 million venture-capital dollars so far, include big names such as Goldman Sachs and Berlin-based business incubator Rocket Internet.

Given the fierce competition on the food delivery market, foodpanda wants to differentiate itself from its competitors by ensuring timely delivery, high quality, and great service. In order to achieve that, the company developed its own delivery service technology and standardized its operations which also work in complex markets and big cities and scale just as easily as its business plan.

foodpanda’s preferred marketing strategies include search engine marketing (SEM) and campaigns aiming to increase the number of mobile app installations and usage. The company relies on Adobe Advertising Cloud Search for efficient SEM management with currently more than five million active keywords in nine languages.

Automated bidding helps improve SEM results

In order to receive more orders from mobile Android and iOS apps, foodpanda ran tests for different SEM campaigns in one of its target markets in 2015. The goal was to both promote app installations and increase the number of orders. One of the tactics employed was to reach out to Google Display Network customers that had just installed the mobile app or already used it to place orders.

“The Adobe tool allows us to automate most of the process, from campaign creation to bidding to continuous optimization,” says Yilmaz. The team can extremely efficiently handle all SEM activities worldwide and in all relevant languages, including selecting the right keywords at the portfolio level, improving campaigns on a constant basis, and finding the most efficient bidding strategy that gets the most out of local SEM budgets.

“Manual bidding is more time-consuming and always yields poorer results than Adobe’s bidding engine with its advanced self-learning algorithms”, says Yilmaz based on his experience. A comparison with other automated bidding solutions revealed that Advertising Cloud Search is second to none in the market. “After introducing Adobe Advertising Cloud Search in all countries we are active in, we saw an increase in sales and a decrease in costs everywhere,” says Yilmaz.

One of the solution’s big advantages is the granular portfolio segmentation of campaigns based on multiple key performance indicators (KPIs), such as cost per order (CPO), return on investment (ROI), and repeat order rate. Other pluses are the ability to use first-party data right within the tool and the professional and responsive support services provided by seasoned search experts with Adobe in Germany.

Linking SEM data to in-app data

In order to further optimize campaigns, foodpanda was faced with a major challenge. “Unfortunately, SEM tracking within the mobile app was almost blind,” states Yilmaz. So in coordination with Adobe specialists, they looked for a way to link captured SEM data to in-app data and then leverage that integration to continuously optimize campaigns that aim at increasing app downloads on both Android and Apple devices.

Information from various sources is compiled and swiftly tied together, e.g. app installations and app-based orders as well as clicks, impressions, and the cost of relevant ads. “We use Adobe Advertising Cloud Search redirects and adjust/eventcallback parameters in the URLs,” says Yilmaz. After a three-week data collection period, the campaigns are ready for automated bidding optimization in Advertising Cloud Search.

SEM installation campaigns provide promising results

Moving forward, foodpanda is planning to use other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager. Also, they will turn to Advertising Cloud Search, which has been used only for mobile SEM installation campaigns so far, for engagement campaigns, which are expected to boost mobile food orders considerably.

The SEM installation campaign results are already very promising. By late November 2016, for example, the number of orders was 428% higher than in the same period in 2015. Revenue grew by 518% in the same period, with the costs per order declining by 50%. “Adobe Advertising Cloud Search has been a major contributor to these outstanding results. We are very happy with the tool and the service provided by Adobe. I can strongly recommend the tool to fast growing businesses,” says Yilmaz.

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