2016 Silver Best use of programmatic

Agency Merkle | Periscopix

Client Watchfinder

Campaign summary

The right watch ad at the right time

Campaign overview

The brief was simple - introduce new users to the Watchfinder brand, capitalise on the influx of sessions on site, and achieve a positive return of investment.

This was to be achieved in two phases - raising awareness and capturing demand, encouraging users to convert via PPC.

Strategy

PPC is a fantastic channel for direct response for Watchfinder, but to expand reach, it was clear attention needed to turn to the awareness phase.

The campaign had to increase the number of new users to site and identify exactly what a ‘quality’ user, with the potential to purchase high price-point products, was.

A sophisticated strategy was needed. Whilst prospecting to new users is hugely important to the campaign, the first-party data accrued in phase one gave the opportunity to change strategy based on who had visited Watchfinder’s site without purchasing a watch.

The goals of the campaign changed to increase remarketing activity to allow the PPC team to fully capture all of this increased display advertising. The challenge here was to attribute this increase in the remarketing campaign, back to the early touchpoints of display. Furthermore, it was important that users clicked through the display ads and that the value of watches purchased contributed to a positive ROI.

Creativity

For the awareness phase, the campaign used soft branding to entice the user to the brand. A simple educational creative and a competition ad that captured email addresses for prospectives was used.

For every 10 impressions served, a user would see one competition ad. There were two components for reaching new users and the use of DoubleClick Bid Manager was essential.

The campaign used third-party data to target the user based on their browsing behaviour and carefully selected site content and contextual keywords relevant to the audience.

To select the right audience the campaign used Watchfinder’s Experian profiling tool to provide targets.

Using three months of data, they grouped users based on how far they engaged with the brand. For general page visits the campaign used a softer message to encourage users to return and for specific brand page visits changed the background image to represent that last page the user had visited.

Results

Programmatic activity has consistently achieved a CTR above a healthy 0.08% - with June peaking at 0.11%.

More than 70% of sessions brought in by post-click programmatic activity were new users - higher than any other digital channel.

The campaign generated 7,500 competition entries, capturing new email addresses and allowing Watchfinder to engage these users with email marketing. Post-click activity, six out of seven times, had double the return on investment and, when looking at post-view impact, the ROI reached as high as 160.

This is significant revenue, achieved by tactically bucketing users into various groups based on where they went on site, and changing bidding strategy in the programmatic auction. Users who fell out of the purchase stages saw a cost per acquisition as low as £2.50 when combining competition entries and watch purchases.

Team

Adam Richards (Senior Programmatic Account Manager)