How behavioral ad targeting lifted online campaign results for Snapple
When ad placement in the obvious online venues is pricey for a fledgling product, digging deeper into the behavioral attributes of consumers to find interested audiences elsewhere can yield some surprising —and less expensive—opportunities. That’s what beverage brand Snapple found out when launching an online campaign on behavioral targeting advertising network Tacoda Inc.for its new “Good for You” green tea line
The tea had the highest levels of a key antioxidant, making an informed, health-conscious audience a natural target for online ad efforts aimed at building awareness of the new product and its benefits. But contextual inventory relevant to this segment—content and sites where it would make sense to place ads for the new product—was limited and expensive to place contextual ads in.
Tacoda’s network serves online ads to and tracks the response from about 80% of all U.S. Internet browser users, says its chairman, Dave Morgan. To identify other audience segments—and potential ad venues for the new product—Tacoda mapped characteristics of 364 different behavioral segments and tracked how the segments responded to the ads by the volume of clicks the ads received from those groups. Because Snapple wasn’t actually selling the tea on its site, click-throughs from ads to get more information from the site was the key metric.
As expected, initial results showed that the ad campaign had fared well with health-conscious consumers, and those who’d recently viewed food-related content online. Unexpectedly, it also did well with other consumer segments including consumers interested in arts and literature, business, travel and news. Surprisingly, it did poorly with consumer segments defined as playing sports, sports fans, family, shopping, gaming and IT. Going forward, the campaign was optimized for the better-performing segments.
Data captured by Tacoda technology on the Snapple site and cross-matched with Tacoda’s database of unique users as represented by all the browsers to which it serves ads, showed that visitors to the product site—whether they got there through the ad campaign or not—indexed highest for the art and literature segment, followed by the beauty and real estate segment. That means that of the audience segments defined, the number of visitors from these segments exceeded the number initially projected to visit by the largest margins. Health came in fourth.
Finding a high number of site visitors from the consumer segment identified as being interested in real estate was a surprise, according to Tacoda, since this group hadn’t responded particularly well during the ad campaign. Tacoda speculates that the high index from this segment may relate to some underlying life stage, such as getting married or becoming a parent, which ties in with one of the more obvious segments.
During the two-month campaign, the product site’s index of health-conscious consumers increased by 30%, meaning that relative to all web users, the likelihood that consumers from the health-conscious segment would visit Snapple sites increased by 30%.
Among insights gained from the campaign, Tacoda determined that Snapple Green Tea had value in audiences beyond the obvious health-conscious segment. That insight could be used to inform future online targeting of ad campaigns by continuing to target ads to the strongest audiences, while seeking to grow segments showing potential interest in the product; that is, consumers who had responded well to the ad campaign but hadn’t visited the product site in high numbers.
Snapple Green Tea’s experience demonstrates that the use of advanced behavioral targeting in an online campaign can yield media planning insights that may become even more important than the results generated by the campaign itself, with the likelihood that those insights apply to media planning offline as well, according to Tacoda.
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