McDonald's mobile-app in Turkey has grown significantly and is now second most popular in its category, despite competition from major players like DeliveryHero, BurgerKing, Dominos etc. It provides many special offers and deals thru in-app campaign series such as; games, seasonal campaigns, and loyalty programs, for different personas in order to catch its audience’s attention.

Mcdonald’s aim was to increase two KPIs; active app usage and 150K+ promo usage per month through reaching audience groups: University Students, High School Students, Mall Employees and White-collars.

However, we wouldn’t achieve KPIs over these target audiences due to hyperinflation in Turkey and rapidly increasing food prices.

Since such specific audience cannot be targeted using conventional tools and approaches. So we created a very innovative location intelligence approach to identify new target audience. Gathering mobile device signals among various apps in minute basis, we tracked/identified the people who visited mid-range restaurants in past and not visiting these restaurants any more due to inflation.

The location intelligence process uses micro-fencing technology with a precision of 1 meter to identify individuals who had visited mid-range restaurants on at least three occasions during the last six months of 2021 but had not visited such restaurants during the first two months of 2022.

Utilization of this technology help us to segment potential audiences (scalable) into three categories: Coffee drinkers, chicken eaters, and meat eaters.

We targeted the audience through Meta and Google panels. We created different campaigns for each offer and separated target audiences within ad sets to optimize which target audience was more suitable for discount campaigns offered by brand. As a result, the budget was distributed to target audience that showed the most interest in the campaign, and we optimized our ads according to people who were likely to convert with the 7-day click or 1-day view attribution setting. Thanks to the use of 3rd party data, we were able to reach McDonald's target audience with pinpoint accuracy.

We showed 19 app banners for 19 meal deals to new audience segments along with 4 main personas.

Our hypothesis is validated by Data! This campaign, which was successfully applied for the first time in the fast food market, aimed to direct target audiences to stores and encourage them to use the deals offer.

In 7 months, we achieved a 352.77% conversion rate and ₺3.41 CPA, using 600K+ campaign/discount codes in restaurants, yielding a 5x turnover of the investment with 5 ROAS. The McDonald's app saw 500K+ downloads at ₺5.03 per download.

Custom audience targeting reduced app download and promo usage costs by 8x compared to Google and Meta panel targeting. Targeting the right audience increased app awareness and led to repeat special offer usage, indicating customer loyalty. Downloads increased by 104% and in-app offer usage by 157% compared to the same period the previous year.

We generated an additional turnover equal to x5 of the advertising investment through 5 ROAS in 7 months, in addition to our advertising.

While the awareness of the application increased in parallel with the conversion rate, it reached the right target audience and raised awareness for the digitalization of restaurants in the market.