McDelivery in Singapore is a market leader in the category and has been growing at 10% YoY. Sustaining business momentum, while being in a leadership position, is particularly challenging.

Established competitors like KFC and food delivery aggregators like Food Panda, Deliveroo and Uber Eats were never going to make our lives easy. Whilst serving to grow the category, they were also demonstrating the flexibility and efficiency consumers increasingly crave.

Our challenge was to demonstrate the agility required to maintain growth in such a competitive environment with the following objectives:

1. Drive more cost-efficient delivery orders. KPI: 10% increase in ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

2. Drive increased demand for delivery to restaurants that could accommodate additional demand. KPI: 2% increase in monthly delivery revenue attributed to paid search

1. Singapore is divided into more than 25 neighbourhoods using Google’s hyper-local targeting capability.

2. A real-time data feed (API) into McDonald’s nation-wide delivery management system is set up to access customer delivery wait time by neighbourhood every 5 minutes.

3. Using a custom-built coding script, neighbourhoods are then categorised as high, medium or low capacity in real time as demand fluctuates.

4. A set of capacity-based media activation rules in Google AdWords’ determine how aggressive spends would be in each neighbourhood and what messages would be served – all optimised in real-time. If capacity went up so did search spend levels and the creative celebrated a lower wait time. If capacity went down search spend levels dropped. Ads were paused altogether in neighbourhoods that were not able to deliver due to high demand.