Santander Consumer Bank is part of Santander Consumer Finance, the consumer lending arm of Banco Santander. It provides auto loans, consumer credit, and point-of-sale financing across multiple European markets, under the same strict compliance standards as the wider Santander group.

This story was written in collaboration with Víctor Caride Sáez, Digital Marketing Leader, Santander Consumer Bank

The challenge: optimizing for clicks, not for outcomes

Before getting started with Tracklution, Santander Consumer Bank was running advertising at scale but could only see the surface: ad views and ad clicks. 

Everything that happened after the click, the page views, lead generation, and actual sales from their campaigns, never made it back to the advertising algorithms.

In short, a few things stood in the way:

• Strict compliance and customer data handling requirements
• Limitations around loading ad platform pixels client-side (the tracking code that fires in a user's browser)
• A need for greater control over what data was collected and shared
• Maintaining reliable measurement and optimization across campaigns

Combined, these made it nearly impossible to understand and optimize the real business impact of ad campaigns.

And when algorithms aren’t fed reliable data, they can't isolate the conversions that generate revenue from clicks that never convert. As a consequence, algorithms end up optimizing for clicks instead of real business outcomes.

What Santander Consumer Bank needed most: total control over its data

For Víctor and his team, the ambition wasn’t to track more. In a highly regulated industry, it was to stay in control and have full transparency for their entire tracking setup.

The team needed to know exactly what was being collected from the websites and shared with each ad platform, and they needed to ensure they respect customer consent at every step along the way. 

As Víctor put it:

In short, Santander Consumer Bank’s brief was quite specific, with a need to: 

• capture the full funnel,
• send accurate conversion data to the ad platforms, 
• never let a single event leave without respecting the customer's choice first.

Which leads us to …

…why Santander Consumer Bank chose Tracklution over other players

Santander Consumer Bank is a demanding organization with a complex setup, and that's exactly where the evaluation focused.

With that in mind, they chose Tracklution because of: 

• how far the product could bend to fit their highly complex setup, rather than forcing their team to find workarounds.
• their compliance requirements 
• Its ability to scale across multiple websites and countries

"We are quite demanding, and you've been incredibly flexible," Víctor said, pointing to "the way Tracklution shaped the product to work with complex companies like Santander." Because the team could configure events, watch what was flowing, and adjust as they went, the whole process felt manageable instead of opaque. 

What’s more, the team appreciated how user-friendly the Tracklution platform is.

That's what made the level of control Santander Consumer Bank was looking for possible in the first place.

The implementation: smooth, even with bank-grade requirements

The technical implementation of Tracklution wasn’t a bottleneck for Santander. As Víctor puts it, “the experience held up. It wasn't plug and play per se, but almost. From our perspective, it was easy, super smooth."

Of course, for an organization the size of Santander Consumer Bank, implementing any software requires involvement and validation from multiple stakeholders.

"We had to go through internal data-flow validation, discussions with all the different stakeholders, all of the technical, data, and compliance requirements," Víctor recalled, on top of the certification requirements and security sign-offs that come with any enterprise rollout.

Did you know? The median implementation time for Tracklution is 16 minutes, across all platforms. Learn more.

Now that the algorithm could see what was genuinely working, it was able to target customers with real buying intent instead of just chasing for clicks that led nowhere.

A positive effect on customer acquisition cost

That’s where things get even more interesting.

Víctor and his team put Tracklution to the test. They ran side-by-side test campaigns from their legacy tracking and Tracklution’s, and observed that campaigns tracked via Tracklution saw a decrease in CAC (customer acquisition cost).

A big strategic shift: rebuilding how budget gets allocated

The deeper change wasn't any single metric, though. It was strategy.

"Before Tracklution, we had a lot of upper-funnel, brand-awareness channels, and no way to track conversions. After the implementation, we're relearning from scratch the way we should allocate our budget across different platforms. It's the biggest change."

For a bank, the compliance side carried just as much weight. 

Being able to demonstrate exactly what leaves the building turned tracking from a liability into something Santander Consumer Bank could stand behind. "We can confidently provide security proof of what data flows via the tracking setup," Víctor said. "Tracklution is our shield to show how we deal with this data, in real time."

“The better the data, the better the results”

Víctor’s takeaway for anyone running ads at scale is clear: "You're missing a big piece of the cake when you run your advertising. Even if it takes some effort to start the discussions internally, server-side tracking is incredibly profitable once you get it up and running”

And if there's one priority he'd put above the rest, it's the quality of the data feeding the platforms.