Summary
Getting a good deal on a much coveted product can make anyone's sale experience feel worth it. Instead of advertising thousands of deals available on Amazon on Prime Day, we helped people choose to take the plunge by serving them a custom ad for the product they in fact did intend to buy. Now that's called making someone an offer they can't refuse!
Challenge
Amazon Prime day is an exclusive members-only event that gives Prime members access to some of the biggest launches, offers and discounts of the year. Generally, when members shop Prime Day, they tend to have a list of things in mind. But often, they go in blind, not really knowing whether the specific items they're looking for are available at great discounts or not. Someone may see an ad showing a great discount on a blender, when what they actually want is a juicer for their new diet. This meant that our CTRs on previous Prime Days were in effect, the result of a mix of people seeing ads for things they perhaps didn't want, without necessarily being shown the right deals on the right items. They were by no means low CTRs, but we knew they could be made better. To do that, we took a step further
Objective
Our objective was simple. Get Better CTRs. To do that, we needed to do a few more things first: Build on the awareness and excitement around Prime Day Tell people about not just the great deals and discounts across categories in the Prime Day sale, but the great deals and discounts on items that they wanted And eventually, lead people to the landing page of different products To achieve these objectives, we also needed a more strategic approach to our targeting methodology.
Strategy
If you want to give people what they want, first you need to know what they want. We conducted a survey of our core audience supplemented by social listening and secondary research to demystify user behaviour around the sale period. We realised that for our users, any big/significant purchase is held off until the sale period, both offline as well as online. And even then, they check multiple platforms, for deals, offers and reviews, before actually making the purchase decision. With an audience that does a lot of research, to ensure they get the best products for the best price, and a sale that was offering the best deals on the widest range of products, it became a question of communicating the right deal to the right set of individuals. It was not enough to simply communicate that Prime day has the biggest deals and offers on a wide variety of products. To grab every individual's attention and lead more people to Amazon during the sale, we needed to get sharper with our targeting. So we came up with a campaign that tracked the audience's intent to purchase a product, and served them a highly relevant ad of that particular product on offer during Prime Day. Considering the intent of purchase via google search, this campaign leveraged high volume keywords that our audiences frequently searched for. Our strategic aim was simple: to get the right ads in front of the right set of people. This would aid their purchase decision, and help us acquire customers.
Data
People always save products in their wishlist and carts holding on to their items till a sale comes along. This means they intend to buy these products and hence rather than reaching out to these audiences through various targeting methods we decided to target through intent. Intent data showcases where the buyer is in their current purchase journey and with the right messaging we can nudge our customers to the final purchases. - Youtube data highlighted that campaigns that use intent-based targeting on mobile devices have 50% higher brand awareness lift compared to campaigns that only use demographic targeting. - YouTube campaigns that use intent-based targeting on mobile devices have 20% higher ad recall lift compared to campaigns that only use demographic targeting. - 80%+ brand metric lifts for intent-based targeting compared to demographics-based targeting alone.
Solution
First, we curated a list of products that were on offer during the Prime Day Sale. Then, we used the Google search history of our audience that had given cookies permission to Amazon to see which users were researching/considering buying what product during that period. We created individual pre-rolls, each using intent-based targeting, based on the search terms entered on Google. On the basis of the keyword entered into the search bar, our campaign algorithm served a specific pre-roll to the user any time they logged in to YouTube, to watch a video, regardless of which video it was. For instance, if the user searched for ‘OnePlus 9' on Google, and later opened YouTube, we could serve them an ad that showcased the Prime Day offer on the OnePlus 9, as a pre-roll, before their Youtube video. Each pre-roll only featured the product link to what was previously searched by the user, thus making each ad a completely seamless fit to the user. The campaign was highly scalable, lending itself to a wide range of search keywords.
Results
The campaign was based on custom intent targeting, wherein anyone who was interested enough in a particular product to do research on it on Google, was led to that same product available at an irresistible price, through a YouTube pre-roll. This meant that we essentially enabled them to take the plunge, with a great deal. And the strategy paid off in spades. While the industry benchmark for CTRs is 0.2%, and our own past Prime Day campaigns usually saw a 0.3% CTR, we managed to achieve a 66% jump in our CTR, and achieve a CTR of 0.51% for our Prime Day sale this year. This meant we saw over 208 million clicks! Overall, we received: Impressions : 306,807,453 Views : 1,579,463 Total clicks : 208,203,666 CTR : 0.51%
