bol.com Replaces 3rd-Party Cookies With 1st-Party Data to Increase CTR by 33%
Bol.com is the single largest e-commerce platform in Western Europe. The company sells products from over 52,000 different sales partners to over 13 million active customers across the Netherlands and Belgium. There are more than 100 million products available on Bol.com, and the platform operates as a marketplace where third-party sellers can list and sell their products alongside the company’s own inventory.
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.
Success for Bol.com is directly linked to our ability to create relevance for our advertisers, partners, and customers–and that means serving hyper-specific ads to granular audience cohorts.
Rick Assies
Group Product Manager Advertising
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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.
With the rapid end of 3rd-party cookies, we had to act quickly. Within 4-6 weeks under a POC, we were able to completely replace all of our existing audiences with first-party data using Hightouch.
Rick Assies
Group Product Manager Advertising
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Bol.com
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.
We have petabytes of data here at Bol.com. Moving this data out of our data warehouse and pushing it to a traditional CDP would have been completely illogical. Hightouch lets us build really complex audiences in minutes, giving us everything we need to run A/B testing, measure performance, and optimize them so we can drive value immediately.
Rick Assies
Group Product Manager Advertising
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Bol.com
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.
The true value of the Composable CDP architecture is that we no longer have to rely on a black box. We have access to all of the rich insights living in our warehouse, and this is key in optimizing our advertising campaigns.
Kai Kickuth
Sr. Product Manager
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Bol.com
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.
Hightouch has completely unlocked how we deliver relevancy to users across our website and our mobile app, but there’s also huge potential for us to monetize users outside of our domain.
Kai Kickuth
Sr. Product Manager
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Bol.com