bol.com Replaces 3rd-Party Cookies With 1st-Party Data to Increase CTR by 33%

The Results

• Increased audience reach by 109%
• Improved click-through rates for all brand ads by 33%
• Rebuilt new and existing audiences in just six weeks
• Millions of viewable impressions delivered monthly

The Challenge

Bol.com operates an extremely mature paid media business, selling ad inventory to thousands of companies. This includes everything from brand advertising, sponsored products, performance marketing, and even off-platform advertising outside of Bol.com.

The company collects petabytes of rich behavioral and transactional user-level data, but even with all of this information, the marketing team was building audiences using a limited data set from third-party cookies and pixels. With Google preparing to fully depecrate third-party cookies in 2024, Bol needed to act quickly to de-risk advertising revenue and enable the marketing team to activate the company’s existing first-party data.

This left Bol.com scrambling to find a new solution that could provide immediate value and one that wasn’t based on third-party data. Bol.com turned to Hightouch to rebuild advertising audiences directly from their first-party data, creating a Composable CDP.

The Solution

Activating First-Party Data with Hightouch

Bol.com has a mature data stack that houses data for over 100 million different products, hundreds of first-party attributes, and hundreds of web and mobile events. This data underpins many different data models, which are used to power an assortment of use cases, including keeping the product catalog up-to-date, building custom data science models to predict purchase behavior, or simply managing historical and transactional data. All of this information lives in a serverless data warehouse that acts as the company’s single source of truth.

Before Hightouch, the marketing team relied on a legacy data management platform (DMP) to power all of their advertising audiences. These audiences were very limited because the marketing team had no access to any of the data living in Bol.com’s data warehouse and could only personalize using basic data like page views and sessions. To make matters worse, this data was only stored for a limited number of days.

Since implementing Hightouch Customer Studio, the marketing team has fully decommissioned all of the pixels powering their on-site and in-app advertising campaigns and replaced them with Hightouch audiences powered by first-party data. This shift to first-party data has led to a 109% increase in total audience reach, which has driven a 33% increase in click-through rates for all brand advertisements.

With Hightouch, the marketing team can take advantage of all the data living in Bol.com’s data warehouse to deliver relevancy for both the customer and the advertiser. This ensures the marketing team can personalize product placement advertising and expose the right products to the right customers.

Creating a Composable CDP

Bol.com evaluated CDPs to try to create first-party advertising audiences, but the company quickly realized that no bundled platform could facilitate both the data and marketing needs of the organization. Instead, the marketing team turned to Hightouch to power the company’s most complex advertising use cases.

With Hightouch operating as an activation and audience manager layer on top of Bol.com’s infrastructure, the marketing team can self-serve and build custom audiences. Likewise, because Hightouch doesn’t actually store any data, the IT team doesn’t have to worry about compliance issues, and they can control exactly what data is exposed to Hightouch–all while ensuring the marketing team has access to the necessary and relevant information to power their campaigns.

What’s Next?

Bol.com is continuing to emphasize first-party data to power advertising for all on-site and in-app experiences. The company is in the process of building out thousands more custom audiences for all of their off-site advertising use cases as well.