Best in Class Marketing Analytics for the World’s Largest Genealogy Company
Ancestry.com, the largest for-profit genealogy company globally, operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and genetic genealogy websites.
Audrey Bower, Senior Director, Strategic Business Operations & Global Marketing Analytics
“Bonsai has been instrumental in thoughtfully assessing the current status of operations in Ancestry marketing, recommending solutions, and helping us implement them. I have been really impressed with the insights that Bonsai has shared based on meetings with internal team members.”
Shourya Malik, Director Marketing Analytics
We’ve seen great results from using Bonsai’s predicted Click Value model. Not only have we seen higher customer value and improved efficiency, but we also see higher intent and retention when our teams analyzed the types of purchases coming from our Google Ads efforts.
Corrina Englund, Vice President Marketing, Global Media
We saw great success with Bonsai’s pCV model and we were excited to roll the model out across our entire portfolio. This is a great solution for the growth drivers that we were looking for!
An Ancestry and Bonsai Engagement
Ancestry & Bonsai have had a years-long partnership, where Bonsai helped move Ancestry’s marketing measurement from third-party data reliance to a first-party strategy. The business was ready to move away from last-click attribution and was looking for high-growth, so they decided to pursue first-party multi-touch attribution where they would have clear visibility into marketing’s impact in the buying cycle.
At the same time, Ancestry’s mature US paid search program was seeing growth headwinds across Family History subscriptions and DNA kit purchases, and needed a solution for reaching valuable customers.
The Solution
Ancestry’s Marketing Analytics team partnered with Bonsai to build Unified Customer Measurement, enabling custom, multi-touch attribution, cost savings and revenue generation insights, and first-party data activation (Predicted Click Value – pCV) and audience buying.
UCM
Bonsai’s multi-touch attribution means that Ancestry could begin to see the full customer journey instead of relying on third-party reporting and last-click attribution, which didn’t tell the full story of how marketing channel’s were playing a role in gaining new customers. Bonsai’s MTA model uses first-party data with fractional crediting, so that the appropriate level of impact is being given to channels. In doing this, Ancestry can better understand channel-level and campaign-level ROAS.
Bonsai Analysts shared MTA-based insights from UCM with the Ancestry Marketing teams for an estimated $50MM in cost savings and revenue generation opportunities across Paid Search, Social Media, Cross-Sell & Affiliate Marketing.
Predicted Click Value (pCV)
Ancestry has adopted Bonsai’s Predicted Click Value (pCV) model to power their Google Ads campaigns.
pCV, Bonsai’s proprietary predictive buying algorithm for paid search, trains Google Ads Smart Bidding tROAS to buy incremental value – all without needing the Google Ads Conversion / Floodlight Conversion Tracking data. Instead of letting Google Ads determine conversion buying, Bonsai sends Ancestry’s first-party data back into Google Ads for better buying decisioning.
Bonsai ran 2 separate A/B tests using the pCV bidding model – Bonsai’s technology that retrains Google Smart Bidding AI using Unified Customer Measurement.
Ancestry’s pCV model acquired higher value customers – more likely to purchase a Family History subscription or DNA Kit as opposed to just wanting a free trial. These customers retained longer, and bought bigger subscription packages when compared to customers acquired from Google Ads Smart Bidding powered by Floodlight Conversion Tracking.
Ancestry saw an increase to Brand ROAS of +185% and Non-Brand ROAS +16% across their US paid search marketing program. Ancestry’s entire Family History paid search program now runs on Bonsai’s pCV model for bidding.
Results:
- pCV generated higher customer value (LTV) & improved Cost-per-Signup (CPS)
- pCV customers showed higher intent and retention
- pCV bidding resulted in higher paying subscriber volume despite sign-up headwinds
- pCV materially improved performance and drove Ancestry’s top and bottom line.
