How Granular Audience Segmentation Unlocked 36x ROAS for Generali

In short:

Delve Deeper helped Generali, a leading global insurance provider, move beyond a single broad CRM activation and replace it with a tiered audience strategy built around recency and value signals.

The program surfaced a clear efficiency gradient across Generali’s owned audience base — revealing which segments were actually driving performance, and where budget needed to go.

The challenge:

Generali needed to re-engage existing customers efficiently. The default approach was a single, broad Customer Match activation in DV360. But “existing customers” is not a single, uniform group — it includes everyone from recent buyers to customers who haven’t engaged in four or more years, each representing a fundamentally different level of intent and potential value.

Blended into one line item, that difference was invisible. High-performing segments couldn’t be identified, budget couldn’t follow efficiency, and the team had no way to know which part of the audience was actually converting — or at what cost.

The question wasn’t whether segmentation would help. It was how granular it needed to be to surface the signal.

The approach:

Delve Deeper designed and activated a tiered audience strategy in DV360, breaking reactivation into seven distinct audiences — each structured to reflect a different level of intent and recency.

One pixel-based pool was built on recent transaction signals, capturing the highest-intent visitors. Six Customer Match cohorts were then split by recency and by value, creating a clean structure that could expose efficiency differences across the full owned-audience base.

Standard DV360 attribution ran throughout, ensuring performance could be measured consistently across every segment and that budget allocation decisions were grounded in comparable data.

Summary:

Intent-based audience segmentation
Clear efficiency gradient across owned audiences
Precise budget allocation by recency and value

Delve Deeper Results:

The granular structure revealed exactly what the blended approach had been hiding. The pixel-based pool — built on the freshest transaction signals — delivered a $9.74 CPA, 36.34x ROAS, and 4.92% CVR, the strongest performance of any audience in the study.

Among the CRM cohorts, ROAS declined steadily with recency: from 4.6 for the most recent customers down to 1.63 for those lapsed four or more years. The pattern was consistent and actionable.

Most tellingly, the two most efficient audiences had been running on the smallest budgets. The segmentation didn’t just surface performance — it exposed exactly where the team had been underinvesting.

Lowest CPA
$9.74
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ROAS
36.34x
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Conversion Rate
4.92%
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Platforms used:

Display & Video 360
By restructuring Non-Brand search around donor intent and aligning messaging to each segment, Delve Deeper helped UNICEF achieve 3.6x ROAS growth, nearly 4x the donation revenue, and a 3.2x increase in average gift value, all without increasing spend.