DIY Network's marketing director shares their secret to the success of a complex online marketing plan.
Many companies talk the talk about how much more effective online campaigns can be than traditional media. But here is how one media company's online campaign walked the walk by driving online traffic and television viewing, outperforming all expectations.
DIY Network recently launched a two-month internet-only marketing campaign designed to drive DIY Network tune-in via targeted impressions, and drive DIYNetwork.com clickthrough for relevant content. We enlisted 360i to help us develop a campaign that would explicitly target the desired audience, and we also worked very closely with Scripps Networks Interactive to develop highly compelling, actionable creative that corresponded to precisely targeted landing pages.
The setup
A variety of online vehicles and placements were leveraged in this complex marketing plan, including the following:
- Site-specific banners (including contextual image ads). Site-specific banners were targeted to deliver more than seven million impressions to an audience with a 38/62-male/female composition. These banners were to run on FamilyFun.com, iVillage, PopularScience.com and ThisOldHouse.com.
- Banner ad networks (including rich-media units). Banners were run on the Advertising.com ad network, for a total of 27,000,000 impressions. Sites in the network included ABC.com, About.com, AOL, MarthaStewart.com and Parenting.com. Point-roll rich-media banners delivered 20 percent of the total site targeted banner impressions, and had a significantly high brand interaction rate-- 34 percent higher than the average rich-media banner interaction rate within the entertainment industry. In fact, over a third of the audience who interacted with a rich-media banner completed watching the video displayed within the banner. Due to the success of the rich-media banners, additional impressions were allocated to the 728 x 90 placement, in order to get more rich-media impressions for the DIY campaign.
- Contextual technology. Bullseye, a contextual technologies network, used targeted ads based on user behavior and site content, delivered through a permission- based desktop application in the form of pop-up, pop-under and full page targeted visitors. The ads appear while users are visiting sites and increase traffic delivered directly to the chosen conversion page. Bullseye proved effective at driving a high volume of impressions, as we logged in over 125,000.
- Blog advertising. Blog advertising was placed via blog ad network Pheedo and included RSS feed text ads and blog text ads targeted to vertical content areas, such as home renovating, woodcrafting and gardening. Sample sites include: Houseinprogress.net and Designsponge.blogspot.com.
- Paid search. Paid search generated a significant percentage of the overall traffic to the site, as well as the highest page views per visitor of any other media vehicle at 7.26 PVPV, indicating that the campaign drove a high volume of quality visitors with a high propensity to tune in. Additional attack fund dollars were allocated to Google Search, which increased both impression and click volume over the remainder of the campaign.
Source: DIY Networks
The payoff
The campaign was measured against two primary metrics: impressions for site specific banners only, and clicks for all other media. Additional measures were made available for rich-media banners, including interaction rates such as mouseovers, clicks to start or stop audio/video, interaction time, average seconds of video played and frequency of banner exposures.
The campaign generated over 67.9 million impressions and drove more than 580,000 clickthroughs. Of the total visitors that were driven to the site, 80 percent were new to DIYnetwork.com and visited an average of seven pages!
The banner campaign delivered all of its contracted impressions. Rich-media banners performed very well, with average interaction rates around 10 percent, consistent with the targeted content vertical benchmarks. Additionally, clickthrough rate for the paid search programs increased 183 percent during the campaign, reaching 4.25 percent for the last period of the campaign.
Despite a decrease in media spend during the second part of the campaign, total campaign clicks still increased five percent throughout the course of the campaign. The search media clickthrough rate continued to improve, reaching two percent by the end of the campaign-- a 33 percent increase from the start of the campaign.
Michelle Borja, director of marketing for DIY Network, is responsible for building the consumer brand awareness through promotions and advertising. She has developed successful print and online campaigns that have increased awareness for both on-air tune-in and online traffic for the convergent DIYnetwork.com site. She has initiated a number of successful initiatives for DIY, including brand extensions into DVD sales and book promotions. She handles the development of all brand promotional materials and works with advertising and affiliate sales to ensure a coordinated marketing approach across the network.