Spinny: Standardizing a Scattered Brand and Lowering Lead Costs

Spinny started out as an online marketplace for buying and selling used cars. Back in late 2015, it was struggling with high lead costs and inconsistent performance across marketing channels. The team didn’t have a clear answer on how to bring down CPL or position Spinny as a trustworthy platform in the cluttered used-car space.

At the time, AdWords and Facebook were the most common PPC lead generation platforms. Spinny relied primarily on AdWords to run paid media campaigns across Delhi NCR and Bangalore, with the core objective of generating quality leads.

One of the biggest factors influencing lead quality in PPC is the transition between ad and landing page. Since every ad click costs money, ensuring a seamless and consistent user experience post-click becomes critical.

But in Spinny’s case, the landing pages were not responsive for most screen sizes, and the ads and landing pages were being designed with entirely different visual approaches. This inconsistency made the brand feel fragmented and reduced trust.

To fix this, we started by introducing standardized brand guidelines. We locked in a core color palette and created a detailed Frontify guide that gave designers a clear direction. The brand now had its own recognizable colors, applied consistently across the website, landing pages, and ads. We also aligned on a common design language, moving away from abstract illustrations to more realistic imagery that matched the product offering.

This visual consistency alone led to a 10% drop in bounce rate within just two months.

But design was only half the story. The brand voice also needed definition. We asked ourselves, "If Spinny were a person, what would it say, and what would it never say?" After several rounds of iteration, we arrived at a clear communication style and crafted reusable messaging for posters, pamphlets, ads, and the website. This boosted brand recall significantly.

And eventually, we found the line that truly captured what the brand stood for: “Cars you will love to buy.”

Dynamic Remarketing

Spinny operates in a hybrid model, where the customer journey is split between online discovery and offline purchase. While test drives were being booked online, the final sale happened offline. This posed a key challenge — how do we not just capture leads, but actually guide users closer to booking a test drive using Paid Media?

We shifted focus to a new kind of landing page. Instead of asking for phone numbers up front, the page prompted users to select car specifications and then directed them straight to a relevant listing page, where they could book a free test drive. This small change had a big impact.

It significantly reduced the sales team’s time spent chasing unqualified leads and shortened the buyer journey.

Between November 2015 and September 2016, Spinny’s Path-Length report from AdWords revealed that first-touch conversions were nearly non-existent.

Users weren’t booking test drives on their first visit. This insight made it clear, we needed a robust remarketing strategy.

At the time, Spinny was operating in a C2C model, offering warranties, certification, and paperwork support for buyers and sellers. But we had no control over inventory. If a seller sold a car elsewhere, they rarely returned to delist it from the platform. This made dynamic product ads risky, since we often ended up promoting cars that were no longer available.

So we adapted. Instead of retargeting users with specific vehicles, we grouped cars by segment — hatchback, sedan, SUV — and showed users similar cars from the same category. This segment-based remarketing helped us maintain relevance without relying on fragile inventory.

For search, we rolled out RLSAs (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads), which helped us stay top-of-mind by re-engaging returning users through Google SERPs and improving brand recall.

However, remarketing to users with long conversion paths — often over 12 interactions — became expensive, with little return. These buyers wouldn’t convert again for another five years, if ever. So we needed a leaner solution.

We found it in QGraph’s website push notifications. These allowed us to replicate the impact of remarketing ads at a fraction of the cost. With trigger-based push notifications, we could target users based on their behavior — like visiting a product page or starting a test drive flow but dropping off.

For example, if someone browsed used sedans but didn’t book a test drive, they’d receive a relevant push notification bringing them back to that same segment. These messages achieved a CTR of 8–10% and a deliverability rate of around 60%, reducing our remarketing costs by over 25%.

Even better, users who had subscribed via blog pages weren’t just getting content updates. They were also being nurtured into car buyers through smart, behavior-based push campaigns.

Improved Lead Quality

One of the biggest challenges in PPC campaigns is understanding the buyer persona. At Spinny, we had two to work with — buyers and sellers. After a series of experiments, we uncovered several behavioral affinities that helped us build sharper personas for both.

One particularly effective affinity was “people interested in Real Estate.” We discovered that individuals browsing real estate and baby products responded best to our buyer-focused ads. These were typically people in their early thirties, newly married, settling down, and naturally thinking about their first car — a certified pre-owned vehicle was the perfect fit.

By combining this audience insight with remarketing and retention strategies like website push notifications, we boosted both ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and ROAD (Return on Audience Data) by over 150% within just 8 months.

This wasn’t just about more leads, it was about better ones. The percentage of MQLs and SQLs within our total leads significantly increased, validating the improved lead quality.

Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling

Like most ambitious teams, we invested in tools, consulted experts, and set up complex data layers. But the real challenge was always the same — figuring out where our returns were actually coming from.

For any marketing effort to work at scale, synergy between channels is essential. But with that synergy comes complexity in attribution. We needed a model that gave credit where it was truly due.

We implemented a time-decay attribution model as the starting point, which allowed us to account for multiple user touchpoints across channels. We customized it further by testing different weightage scenarios for Paid Media versus Organic.

The outcome was telling. Paid Media’s attribution share in lead generation increased by over 40%, confirming that many "organic" leads had actually engaged with our ads at least once before converting on Spinny-branded keywords.

Experimental Strategies

Setting up a winning paid media strategy requires more than just keywords and budgets. It demands constant experimentation.

Spinny’s AdWords branding campaigns were initially focused on cheap clicks but struggled with conversions. So we tested a unique combination: using “Maximize Clicks” as the campaign objective, paired with “Target CPA” as the bidding strategy.

This tactic helped the ad network balance between volume and efficiency — giving us lower-cost clicks without compromising on conversion rates. We rolled this out across all branding campaigns and saw immediate performance lifts.

We also restructured search campaigns by isolating high-intent keywords into separate ad groups. This gave us more control over ad copy and landing page experience. The result? A CTR of ~23% and Conversion Rate of ~12% — far above industry benchmarks.

Going Data-Informed, Not Just Data-Driven

We combined advanced web analytics with session replays, heatmaps, and funnel tracking to refine the user journey and improve conversion rates.

Using Google Analytics with custom dimensions, we separated user behavior by login state. We discovered that logged-in users were far more likely to shortlist and book test drives.

Working closely with the UX team, we identified key moments to show login pop-ups — moments that wouldn’t feel intrusive but would still prompt action. After a few missteps and some bounce-rate spikes, we hit the sweet spot. The result was a 10%+ increase in login rates, which directly improved conversion performance.

Where Spinny Stands Today

Spinny has since evolved from a C2C marketplace to a full-stack player owning its own inventory. Now valued at over $800 million, it operates across Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune, with plans to expand to India’s top 10 cities.

The shift away from the marketplace model solved inventory control issues, lowered operational costs, and delivered a smoother customer experience — built on the same growth foundation we helped lay.