Drive Travel Consideration by Leveraging Local Collaborations

The Brief

A travel and tourism client proposed a collaboration with a local chef to boost traveler consideration for their location. Using a cross-channel social media strategy, our teams saw strong results across Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest with below benchmark CPAs for this co-branded campaign.

 

Highlights

126
Tour Guide Downloads


800K
Instagram Post Engagements


2.47%
Facebook CTR

Challenge

Our travel and tourism client tasked Coegi with executing a co-branded, mid-funnel campaign to boost website traffic as well as increase awareness. We were given high quality ‘how-to’ video creative from the popular chef. By presenting this to targeted audiences in mid-funnel campaigns, we were able to drive travel consideration among key audience groups.

Solution

We used a multi-channel paid social media strategy to target each platform’s specific audiences. Pinterest encapsulated the ‘foodie’ audience, while Facebook and Instagram’s goal was to drive the large travel audience to their site. Both platforms included look-a-like and retargeting segments to reach engaged users. Success was based on key website actions such as landing page views and post engagement.

This multifaceted strategy provided strong results. The Instagram and Facebook campaign achieved a CPLPV of $0.67 that came in well below our benchmark of $1.83. In addition, we also saw a 2.47% CTR, well above the 0.90% benchmark. The Pinterest campaign, despite having a smaller percentage of the budget, generated nearly 1.7MM impressions with a post engagement rate of 1.27% including 1,365 pin saves.

Key Learnings

  • Well-curated and professional creative catches eyes. This pushed our audience down the funnel quicker than most – generating 126 Tour Guide Downloads.
  • By partnering with an authentic, trusted figure such as a local chef or celebrity, travel brands can boost their image and drive audience engagement. 
  • Using “how-to” style Pinterest posts have a higher likelihood of being saved. This ultimately drives site traffic and brand awareness.

3 Ways to Prevent Ad Fraud

Ad fraud is an essential, but often overlooked, part of the advertising campaign building process. At times, marketers focus so heavily on optimizing for a specific conversion that they fail to analyze the quality of media they are purchasing. The absence of protective inventory selection can lower the quality of placement and negatively impact performance.

“Without paying close attention to the digital environment, the journey to achieving extensive reach and rapidly building awareness can have a lasting negative impact on perception and category growth.”

Sean Cotton, President of Coegi 

How Can Ad Fraud Affect Campaign Performance?

Failing to put proper safety parameters in place creates vulnerability to online bots. This can project false conversions or views that skew performance data and cause media waste. Implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process is critical for minimizing fraud risk and creating results for your brand. 

3 Steps To Prevent Ad Fraud

1) Utilize Historical Data 

Leverage historical campaign data to identify domains with historical ad fraud issues. Also negatively target sites that have been deemed non-brand safe. Continually update this block list with low quality sites using tools such as MOAT to ensure you’re taking preventative measures. 

2) Apply Pre And Post-Bid Brand Safety Filters

Use bid exclusions for brand safety and suspicious activity filtering. Technology partners, such as IAS and HUMAN, provide bid verifications that block IP addresses that are known to be infected with malware and have bot activity.

3) Ensure You’re Compliant With Data Privacy Laws

While data privacy compliance is primarily in the hands of publishers, Coegi takes precautions and uses best practices to meet GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA compliance. Coegi has forged meaningful partnerships with a number of custom data providers in order to best accommodate our client’s needs, reach the right audience and keep ahead of industry trends.

By executing these strategies, brands can be confident their campaigns are safe from ad fraud and bid on the most effective ad placements. Ad fraud prevention is a top priority at Coegi and a focal point for every campaign build, which results in 80%+ average viewability and less than 1% ad fraud. This leads to better media performance and business results for our clients. 

Marketing in the Metaverse: Three Things to Know

If you’re reading recent marketing articles, or even watching the Super Bowl, then you are certainly familiar with the “metaverse.” But, do you understand what it means?

If the answer is no, don’t worry – you aren’t alone. The metaverse can be confusing. It isn’t tangible and it isn’t just one thing. It’s a collection of technologies, identities, philosophies, and experiences that all level up into a digital sphere, which in some way imitates real life. And consumers, especially digital natives, are quick to adopt AR/VR, social communities, and more. 

What Should Brands Do To Market To Their Target Audiences In The Metaverse?

  • Make digital experiences accessible and seamless
  • Select metaverse-related trends that are best suited for your customers and your brand
  • Drive innovation that’s focused on business outcomes

Making Digital Experiences Accessible And Seamless

There’s a reason why metaversal experiences are catching on: consumers are attracted to immersive environments. This is especially true when it comes to testing products, planning trips, and getting to know brands. Brands need to consider this as they explore their roadmap of digital development. Invest in ways to make your websites, social instances, and overall digital presence attractive for customers and drive affinity through positive virtual interactions. 

Selecting Metaverse Trends That Are Best Suited For Marketing To Your Customers

Brands are chasing after an impossible dream if they try to dive all at once into every new trend within the digital universe. Throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks is expensive, time consuming, and likely to confuse the consumer rather than drive them to your brand. Instead, it’s important to have a deeper understanding of your customer and identify what will actually increase brand value and improve customer loyalty. Maybe you don’t need a purchasable NFT or gamified shopping experience. It’s important to not be distracted by the novelty and instead focus on creating the best solutions for your brand and its customers. 

Driving Innovation That’s Focused On Business Outcomes

Many brands are knee jerk reacting to what’s capturing headlines and straying away from an overarching media strategy. But, testing innovative ideas without the end business goal in mind, or simply out of fear of missing out, does not result in greater brand affinity or revenue. Innovation must be grounded in doing something new that will fulfill a need of the consumer in a way that either excites or delights them. That’s what builds word of mouth and keeps them coming back for more.

The metaverse is going to grow and evolve as emerging digital technologies gain traction and improve through AI. Marketers need to stay up to date with these changes, while not losing sight of their business goals. Before diving head first into the latest metaverse marketing tactic, evaluate:

  • Are your current metaversal experiences optimized? 
  • Will adopting this tactic benefit your customer?
  • Will these time and monetary investments improve your business’s bottom line?

For more insights, view our webinar on-demand: The Metaverse, Crypto, & NFTs: What Marketers Need to Know.

The Metaverse, Crypto and NFTs: How Marketers Can Prepare

Confused as to why The Metaverse, Crypto, and NFTs are dominating the marketing conversation? You are not alone – many marketers are struggling to define these topics and understand their impact on their brands and overarching marketing strategy.

While the future implications are uncertain, all brands should start paying attention now. These trends are no longer reserved for only high tech brands as the metaverse is entering the day-to-day consumer experience. Like early investors in crypto who are seeing massive payouts today, first-adopters of these new technologies into their advertising strategies are likely to have a major advantage over brands that do not.

View The Metaverse, Crypto and NFTs: Webinar on-Demand:

Coegi and our guests from Wachsman and Pop Marketer explore the impact of these changes and ways your brand can be on the forefront of these emerging trends.

How to Drive Job Applicants for Healthcare Recruiting Campaigns

The Brief

A hospital client tasked Coegi with developing a digital healthcare recruiting campaign to drive interest and qualified website traffic for open job positions. Using a combination of social and display tactics, we were able to generate a significant increase in website visits and drive new job applications from a niche audience. 

Highlights

1,496
LinkedIn “Apply Now” conversions


10,000
page views from Display


0.63%
Facebook CTR

Challenge

The ultimate goal was to drive maximal website traffic. But Coegi understood it was critical to ensure the visitors were qualified potential applicants. Due to restrictions on employment-based ad campaigns, the team was creative with data usage across platforms, especially Facebook. Additionally, the client was recruiting for multiple positions, each with different qualifications. This resulted in separate creatives and messaging for each job position, adding a layer of complexity to campaign execution. 

 

Solution

We identified three primary channels for this healthcare recruiting campaign: LinkedIn, Facebook, and programmatic display. 

LinkedIn:

Linkedin was chosen to reach the job-seeking audiences while they were searching. Plus, because they could use job title targeting to be confident the intended audience was being reached. This tactic led to the highest number of “apply now” conversions.

Results: 1,496 application form submissions

Display:

Display was chosen to drive site traffic. Data segments allowed the team to reach niche job titles relevant to the target audience. Using custom data segments allowed for granular job title targeting, while also reaching a larger number of likely users. We ran all job titles in one campaign. Each ad set was targeting a specific job field driving users to unique landing pages. 

Display Results: Nearly 10,000 recruitment page views

Facebook: 

With Facebook, we navigated targeting limitations since employment is a special ad category. This forced a more general targeting strategy focused more on consideration, driving scale for the campaign. Like display, this was primarily used to drive site traffic and make job seekers aware of open positions. 

Facebook Results: 0.63% CTR, 5,650 interview page views, 8,783 career page views

This cross-channel strategy allowed us to target niche job titles and drive high site traffic, despite limitations. Healthcare and pharma brands often defer to brand awareness campaigns due to restrictions in targeting sensitive audiences and compliance laws. However, this campaign showed how health-focused brands can shake that mold and achieve out of the box, lower-funnel goals, such as recruitment, using strategic digital media plans.

How Curiosity Can Improve Your Data Analysis

Efficiently analyzing data and providing ongoing campaign optimization recommendations is critical for driving the best results for our clients. However, the complexity and rigidity of data sets can make the most meaningful insights difficult to accurately uncover. In order to elevate your analysis and provide better insights for your campaign performance, you must stay curious, using knowledge and creativity to bolster your approach. 

Moving from Data Analytics to Data Insights

Analytics and insights – they are closely related, but not the same. Analytics is a way we approach a problem that is standardized and repeatable. But what we’re really after is turning these numbers into insights. For instance, you might see that a lot of people clicked on your ad – analytics. But going further to ask ‘What does the high click-through rate mean? and deciding how are you changing campaigns based on that knowledge – that’s insight. 

In other words, analytics are repeatable, standardized processes to understand data and gain information. Insights are what we do based on that information. 

When running a campaign, there are often thousands, sometimes millions, of data points to analyze. Even when campaign goals and KPIs are clearly defined, it can be difficult to immediately identify the more subtle and complex insights hiding within the numbers. That is where curiosity and creativity come into play – we start looking for whatever stories the data can tell.  

The Benefits of Using Curiosity in Your Data Analysis

Asking thoughtful questions and keeping an open mind about what you see in the data helps identify unexpected opportunities and avoid pre-existing biases in your analysis. This allows patterns to appear in the data and provide beneficial insights for future campaigns. No matter what kind of data you are working with, there is always a learning to uncover.

For example, perhaps you have a channel that is unexpectedly driving better sales numbers than others. Instead of broadly accepting the success of the campaign, investigate why that channel did well so you can apply those learnings and build on that success. Stretch your mind to stretch your data and let it come alive for your brand.  

Avoiding Analysis Paralysis

Anyone deeply entrenched in data analysis will know it is all too easy to get buried, and even lost, trying to extract every bit of intel from the data. And while we want to glean as much insight as possible, it can be difficult to know where to stop once you start down a rabbit hole in an effort to get every morsel of information. At some point, the return on that time investment will diminish and you’ll start coming to the same conclusions, just from different angles. 

It’s critical to strike a balance, understanding when it’s valuable to take more time to really dive into the numbers, asking a variety of questions before taking action on the insight. Quarterly reviews, post-campaign reporting, planning phases – these are all times when deep analysis and questioning of the status quo is beneficial. 

Guide Curiosity with Measurement

When you start to dig, the data can seem like an endless hole if you don’t know what you’re searching for. But if you root yourself in your overarching measurement strategy, centering on your business goals and each channel’s role in helping achieve that success, it will become much easier to determine if your media is working or not. 

It is always best to spend more time upfront talking through the strategy as a whole before you begin analysis. Then it will all come into play and be very easy. The amount of time you spend should be way more upfront than it is actually building out final data visualizations and dashboards. 

Key Takeaways

Curiosity and data analysis – yes, they do go together. Applying creativity and allowing space for human intuition and insights is key to data storytelling. But to be an effective and productive data analyst, you need to balance the art and science. Keep in mind what is and isn’t reasonable. Live for the data. Explore it and search for the stories that it weaves together. But, avoid investing your valuable time on a dark rabbit hole that leads nowhere.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0oazN9M1wEDclax3GipHM0
Data Strategy Podcast Episode

How to Prove ROI for CPG Brands Using Loyalty & Purchase Data

The Brief

Bahlsen partnered with Coegi to relaunch their brand across six geographic locations in the United States. Partnering with Catalina, a consumer data company, the teams were able to target, measure, and optimize CTV and display campaign results in real-time across multiple platforms. This resulted in significant incremental sales lift and an increase in new buyers and repeat purchases. 

Highlights

28%
Sales Lift


38%
New Buyer Base


8%
New Buyer Repeat Purchase Rate

Challenge

Measuring marketing campaign ROI can be complicated for CPG brands. Data from online and in-store sales combined with the cyclical purchasing habits of consumers can significantly blur the lines of marketing attribution. It can also handicap a marketer’s ability to make informed optimizations throughout. Without these insights, a true understanding of campaign success can be out of reach for most brands without the assistance of advanced measurement. 

 

Solution

We knew the key to success for Bahlsen was gathering real-time sales data to inform quick optimizations and gain feedback on sales lift. It was also important to reach audiences across multiple channels to facilitate consideration and keep the brand top of mind. 

We looked to Catalina to assist with this challenge. With almost 40 years of consumer data and one of the largest in-store media networks, Catalina has built an activation, measurement and attribution model. This allows CPG marketers to build and target hyper-focused niche audience groups across multiple channels. 

Using Catalina’s measurement technology and data, we developed and activated highly segmented first-party data lists across CTV and digital display platforms. These audiences consisted of current customers, lost/lagged customers and potential consumers. These rich targeting segments were more likely to engage with and purchase the product than the broader U.S. population. This set the foundation for campaign success. 

However, the real key to driving results for our client was in the cross-channel targeting of these lists to keep the brand top of mind at point of purchase. To do this, our team activated CTV and display campaigns using Catalina’s in-house network. Simultaneously, we were targeting the same audiences on Facebook and Instagram. 

The seven week campaign resulted in an incremental sales lift of 28% (16% benchmark) with a 38% increase in new buyer base and a repeat purchase rate of 8% in those new users. For CPG brands looking to prove advertising ROI, prioritize collecting high quality customer sales data to accurately track and measure sales lift throughout campaigns. To amplify results, use segmented audience lists with a cross-channel strategy to increase reach and frequency among key consumer groups.

Retail Media Advertising Explained: Connected Commerce

What Is Retail Media Advertising?

Retailers are becoming ad publishers. They’re transforming their data and online platforms to sell valuable audience data along with advertising spots. Retail media advertising buys can be executed on retailer sites or programmatically on social and display channels. This data enables consumer brands to reach online shoppers. It can be activated by targeting ads based upon keyword searches, purchase history and other data collected via SKUs, purchase scans, and loyalty programs. 

The recent growth of retail media advertising has been astronomical. Amazon Ads alone is expected to reach $32 billion in revenue by 2023. Although many players are entering the market (Best Buy, Target, Kroger, Walmart etc.), Amazon still dominates with an estimated 76.2% of US ecommerce channel ad spending in 2021. Brands are leaning into this trend with 76% of marketers planning to frequently utilize point of sale data in 2022. With the CPG clients I’ve worked with at Coegi, we recognized the emerging trend of retail media and made sure we were incorporating this must-have tactic into our connected commerce strategies.

Reach Your Customers Wherever They Are With Retail Media

Retail media advertising empowers brands to be exactly where your customers are and deliver personalized experiences on and offline. 

  • How can you reach customers in-store? 
  • Where can you reach them when shopping online? 
  • How can you reach audiences when they’re scrolling through socials? 

Retail media lets advertisers be more data-driven and provides a reliable targeting solution. Targeting these shopper audiences creates the opportunity to deliver an efficient, personalized experience. The icing on the cake (or should I say cookie?) is that most retail data is cookieless. So, we are able to utilize it not only now, but into the future. 

With the landscape becoming increasingly cluttered, most CPG brands won’t have the budget to be present on every retail media platform, nor is that in their best interest. To make the most impact, brands need to research and test where their audiences are spending time. After making your selections, it’s also important to have unique strategies for each retailer. Your messaging and execution should look different on a Best Buy audience dataset versus a Wal-Mart audience. 

Connected Commerce Strategy

Connected commerce strategy is a concept developed by Skai. It means thinking about how you can connect all points of the customer commerce journey together. As retail media networks become more sophisticated, we are seeing more full-funnel implications. The Trade Desk reported that 39% of marketers surveyed use retail media advertising to drive brand equity scores and 44% use it to track sales growth. Take advantage of ecommerce site and programmatic placements to find prospecting audiences and track them through the funnel. 

For example, you could target an upper funnel retail media audience on social and display and then serve them a retargeted ad when they are actively shopping. Or, you could use Facebook conversion ads to drive to your Amazon product page and then develop a retargeting audience. For best results, I recommend strategically flighting media together and not having a standalone retail media strategy. Having supportive media across channels improves results for our clients at Coegi compared to solely running onsite retail media buys. 

Additionally, we recommend utilizing Amazon as a point of discovery along with Google Paid Search. When people start researching products, almost 75% start with Amazon. They are exploring, reading reviews, and connecting information to make a purchase decision. It’s important to look at the whole ecosystem of commerce and make sure all those puzzle pieces are connected. Understand what channels can help each other to incorporate a true connected commerce strategy. 

“Retail media presents retailers with an opportunity to better personalize their e-commerce sites, improve discoverability of products, and better monetize their first-party data. Likewise, it offers brands an opportunity to better reach their end customer and access more granular insights into marketing performance and effectiveness..”

Forrester Now Tech: Retail Media Solutions Q2 2021, Colin Colburn

How To Measure Retail Media Advertising Success

The primary drawback to retail media, currently, is the segmentation from publisher to publisher. Wal-Mart data lives in one silo, Target data lives in another, and so on. Marketers have to be very mindful of where to invest for maximum impact. Using a trial and error method to test and learn is necessary. This allows you to see where your customers are responding because we do not see integration across channels with retail media. 

Look to outside partners who can aggregate data sets from multiple publishers and measure the big picture impact. Coegi works with partners so we can directly tag our in-market media and measure the direct impact of media on sales. These partners feed back real-time information so we can make optimizations and improve business outcomes. 

“For marketers wanting to take full advantage of retail media’s potential for reshaping attribution, and their overarching strategies for guiding consumers through the purchase funnel — or true “closed-loop marketing” — managing across retail data environments will be key”  – The Trade Desk

A more sophisticated approach is needed to ensure every dollar is spent wisely and effectively. This advanced insight from provides the competitive edge needed to maintain efficiency in this competitive market with rising costs and influx of demand. 

Key Takeaways

Retail media allows brands to: 

  • Utilize 1st party shopper data to reach customers wherever they are
  • Consider and understand the full shopper experience from discovery to purchase
  • Be data-driven and track closed-loop measurement, prioritizing cookieless solutions whenever available
  • Clearly understand the impact of ads on consumer behavior and sales 

At the end of the day, retail media is a must-have tactic for CPG brands, especially for challenger brands looking to break through. Explore connected commerce strategies for your brand to maximize the impact of your media spend and efficiently drive customers through the purchase funnel. 

Recommended Reading:

AI Optimization – The Paperclip Theory

Paperclip Maximizing: Machine Learning And The Problem Of Instrumental Convergence

What do paperclips have to do with digital marketing and machine learning? Admittedly, pretty much nothing. The ‘paperclip maximizer’ thought experiment comes from Nick Bostrom at Oxford University. In essence, it looks at the idea that if you tell a machine to optimize to a specific goal it will do so at all costs.

If you told a machine to maximize the number of paperclips it produces the machine would eventually start destroying things like computers, refrigerators, or really anything made of metal to make more paper clips once other sources of metal run out. This concept has been coined as instrumental convergence. 

Paperclip vs Pay-Per-Click

If you transform the idea of paperclips into the idea of paying per click this becomes very relevant to digital marketing. Nowadays, almost every platform touts some version of AI or machine learning to revolutionize campaign performance, which is a boon to everyone.

By releasing control to machines, media buyers can focus on more strategic tasks such as identifying deeper insights for reports and understanding clients’ goals while campaigns continuously improve themselves. They do this by finding and optimizing for what works while avoiding the things that are not driving performance for the brand. 

See this in action on Our Work page

Defining Performance

What exactly is ‘performance?’ The easy answer is whatever your KPI may be. It could be clicks, it could be video views, it could be any trackable metric. However, this is already a simplified goal. If you are running a traffic campaign, the marketing goal should not just be to “get more clicks”.

The goal should be something designed to move the needle for the business – brand affinity growth, sales lift, etc.  For instance, driving qualified users from a target audience to an advertiser’s website and increasing brand favorability is a strong goal. This is something bigger than a single metric. A KPI can be a stepping stone and an important indicator of success, but it is not the final objective.

A truly successful campaign will not simply be the campaign that drove the most clicks at the cheapest price point. Success lies in the campaigns that drive true performance towards core business objectives.

Looking for a partner to harness AI technology and drive marketing performance? Reach out to Coegi for a discovery call today.

What Machines Lack

Context. Context is something that a robot has not yet mastered.

As a marketer, I know that increasing clicks, directionally, should push me closer to my goal. The machine knows this too, but this is all the machine knows. It will endlessly optimize to a single goal.

Maximizing the number of clicks given a fixed amount of budget. This can lead to unintended consequences – think back to the paperclip example.

A machine might say only run display banners and forget about high impact formats such as video and CTV. The machine might push 100% of impressions into in-app environments. It would say never buy another out of home ad again. The machine would never know to build brand awareness, because there is no optimization point it can use. 

Machines Need Guidance

We understand the role of the media buyer is not going away, but it is morphing. There is a new symbiotic relationship between buyer and machine which empowers them to maximize your brand as a whole. Successful media buyers do not need to spend 80 hours per week finding every winning media combination.

Most of these tasks can be done through harnessing technology and freeing up time to look at the media plan from a higher level.  These benefits of using AI go directly to our clients in the form of more time dedicated to listening to client needs, smarter digital media plans, and ultimately higher performing campaigns. 

How To Incorporate Smart AI In Your Media Buying

  • Release media optimization controls to AI machines and spend time on strategic campaign elements. 
  • Define performance success beyond the metrics by establishing meaningful campaign goals 
  • Use context to avoid instrumental convergence and potentially harmful optimizations from unattended machines.

Click the button to view our full YouTube playlist on AI for Marketers.

Driving Leads Through Consumer Education for Finance Brands

The Brief

Coegi partnered with a financial services brand to develop an education-based approach to lead generation using downloadable guides for home buying, auto financing and growing a business.

Highlights

240,227
Impressions


0.079%
Conversion Rate

Challenge

Making the decision to apply for an auto loan, mortgage, or even open a new checking account requires a significant lift on the consumer in terms of research and compiling information. Many institutions lean towards offering financial incentives for opening an account or emphasizing low interest rates. 

While offers such as receiving $200 for refinancing or opening an account can act as a compelling call-to-action, the consumer needs to be educated on the process ahead of receiving this messaging for it to be effective. Offering monetary incentives to an uneducated audience can lead to abandoned applications and a higher cost per lead. Educating your target audience with branded collateral positions your brand as an industry thought leader. This also builds trust with your audience and leads to greater conversion activity, and ultimately higher customer lifetime value. 

Solution

This financial services client regularly offers e-books on various financial topics. They observed the benefits of this educational approach to campaign messaging. This client promoted guides on home buying, auto financing, and growing a business. Coegi adjusted their target audience based on the topics to ensure relevancy. 

The campaign uncovered that paid ads related to e-book downloads outperformed campaigns focused on monetary promotions. In Q4 2021, their Fall Homebuyers ad was given a quality ranking by Facebook and served more frequently than its counterparts. Users were 125% more likely to download the guide and request more information compared to messaging offering a discount. This campaign positioned the client as an expert in their industry and built trust among their target audience. 

Messaging Homebuyer Guide Closing Cost Discount
Impressions 240,227 14,417
Conversions 190 5
Conversion Rate .079% .035%

Education-based advertising is often viewed as an upper funnel marketing tactic utilized to build awareness and inform potential users. However, this campaign showcased the down-funnel impact educational materials can have on conversions. Our client was able to use educational guidebooks to empower their customers when making financial decisions. It was effective in building trust among the core audience and leading them to request more information.  Brands in the financial services sector should prioritize educational materials to create trusting consumer relationships and efficiently nurture leads.

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