McDonald’s taps into mobile app’s first-party data, driving 92% revenue lift

Leveraging first-party data to drive sales

McDonald’s, fondly known as “Macca’s” in Australia, wanted to drive sales of its affordable McSmart Meal with a digital campaign. As a brand committed to innovation, McDonald’s sought to modernise its media strategy by shifting from traditional contextual targeting to a more data-driven strategy.

Having partnered with its agency, OMD, and The Trade Desk for over seven years, McDonald’s turned to us again to help execute an innovative audience-centric targeting strategy for the campaign that leveraged its first-party data.

Boosting return on ad spend with a first-party data targeting strategy

Recognising the potential and value of first-party data in finding new customers, OMD recommended a trial campaign using our Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) solution, which creates unique, pseudonymous identifiers from hashed email addresses or phone numbers. This allowed McDonald’s to leverage their first-party data from over 2 million MyMacca’s app users, helping to enhance audience targeting in a privacy-conscious manner.

The campaign team uploaded its first-party data of email addresses of customers who have made purchases with the MyMacca’s app over the past two years to the UID2 service. These UID2s were then used to create lookalike audiences of consumers similar to these loyal customers.

McDonald’s targeted third-party data segments of consumers with an affinity for fast-food restaurants to evaluate the effectiveness of UID2 lookalike audiences. The results were impressive: UID2 lookalike audiences outperformed third-party data with a 66% higher click-through rate, a 92%* increase in revenue, an 87%* rise in purchases, and a 31%* boost in return on ad spend.

^{*Based on view-through conversions}

Discover how lookalike strategies using UID2 identifiers can help extend your campaign reach and drive sales. Contact us or reach out to your account manager to learn more today.