Founded by two brothers with a passion for brewing delicious cups of coffee, Costa Coffee is the biggest coffee chain based out of the UK with thousands of stores across the country, spread across 37 other countries, with over 3,800 locations total.
Costa Coffee wanted to build on this rising demand by highlighting their stores as “Your next destination” on Waze. Understanding that this presence on the Waze platform would generate visibility and drive footfall to Costa Coffee locations.
The team at Costa Coffee was focused on incrementality, so Waze proposed Google’s Geo Experiment model, which would split locations into test and control regions, allowing them to figure out the pure impact of their campaign on navigations.
Finding an innovative partner in Waze
The coffee industry is a competitive space, so Costa Coffee wanted to go the extra mile to boost store traffic and increase their market share. This got Costa Coffee thinking about their broader customer journey, with a focus on Drive-thrus. Working with the Waze Ads team, Costa Coffee developed a strategy that would use Waze Pins and Sponsored Search to reach drivers as they went about their days to encourage drivers to visit a Costa Coffee location.
“Waze is a really innovative and creative platform,” says Harriet Granville-Jones, Global Digital Propositions & Innovation Manager at Costa Coffee. “So for us, we could use Waze to reach customers and increase familiarity and awareness of our brand.”
Measuring the pure impact
Crafting a campaign on Waze was only one piece of the puzzle. Costa Coffee also wanted to be sure they were measuring the impact of this campaign. By using Google Geo Experiment model, Waze was able to split the advertising equally into test and control regions, to deliver detailed insights about campaign effectiveness.
“This isn’t just a campaign, this is also a learning experience for us,” says Granville-Jones. “Because it’s not just about how many consumers you drive to the store — it’s also about uncovering insights that improve customers’ lives.”
We’re always learning from our Waze campaigns, and applying these lessons to the next campaign, and the next. That’s what really stands out about this partnership.
Harriet Granville-Jones, Global Digital Propositions & Innovation Manager at Costa Coffee
Turning valuable insights into action
The results of the Waze partnership exceeded Costa Coffee’s expectations. They saw a 50% incremental uplift in navigations to test versus control locations, as well as a 6.9% growth in market share. Most importantly, the campaign gave them a wealth of actionable insights that they could keep using on subsequent campaigns. Now they had the data they needed to optimize creative and fine-tune campaign length and timing going forward.
“We’re always learning from our Waze campaigns, and applying these lessons to the next campaign, and the next,” says Harriet Granville-Jones, at Costa Coffee. “That’s what really stands out about this partnership.”
These actionable insights from Waze have also gone a long way in terms of earning buy-in from key stakeholders on the Costa Coffee team. “The amount of data you have just appeals to so many different business areas in our organization,” says Granville-Jones. Looking forward, Costa Coffee is excited about creating more campaigns that build on Waze’s ongoing innovations.
