➔ San Jose, CA
➔ Brand Awareness
➔ Foot Traffic
➔ Driving clicks on website
➔ CPC: $2.50 / CPM $7.00 (Meta)
➔ Because casinos are considered a sensitive vertical with added restrictions across all digital channels, the client and agency approached our AdOps Team at Conduit, seeking a solution to advertise the business in a way that was both cost-effective and performance-driving.
➔ One of the main focuses of the Meta campaign were CPC and CPM goals of $2.50 and $7.00. This was challenged and often put into a state of flux through implementation of new creatives, specifically holiday and promo based ads that were expensive due to seasonality and competition. Some examples include the Superbowl and March Madness creatives which are heavy sportsbetting events throughout the entire country. In addition, testing various audiences with these ads caused fluctuations in the strict cost goals, from sportsbetting, and nightlife interests, to various lookalikes and retargeting audiences.
➔ OTT, Display CPM, YouTube, Meta, Google Search
➔ Our AdOps Team determined that running a holistic campaign would generate the best-possible results for the client. It needed to be inclusive of top-funnel products to amplify brand awareness as well as consider intent-based strategies that would drive interested users to learn more. The primary demographics identified were nightlife enthusiasts, sports enthusiasts, and gamers.
➔ With the main focus of the Meta campaign centered around costs and maximization of awareness, we determined the best course of action was to break out the campaign into 2 separate KPAs: reach and landing page views.
➔ The Paid Search campaigns were set up to target both users searching for the client’s brand name being driven by higher-funnel tactics and non-branded traffic generally looking for casinos and games. We layered search ads with location extensions by linking the client’s Google My Business listing to the account and were able to serve ads on Google Maps to users looking for casinos near them.
➔ OTT did not see much success from its Geo-Fencing strategy due in part to cross-device matching despite seeing 32 location visits. Alternatively, Programmatic Display had proven highly effective in this regard, totaling 358 location visits after seeing an ad in the campaign’s 6 month duration.
➔ YouTube successfully increased its reach by 721% throughout its run compared to the previous period while becoming more cost effective through its 22% improvement in CPM to $4.85 vs. $6.23. The last three months of the campaign saw CPMs all well under $5 despite a $6 CPM threshold goal. CPC did increase slightly from the previous period to $3.09, but this was still well under the threshold of $5.
➔ The reach and LPV breakout for the Meta campaign allowed us to hit the CPC and CPM goals overall through balancing the campaign objectives against eachother. Reach campaigns typically have low CPM and high CPC, while the opposite is true for Landing Page Views. As the campaign progressed month over month, we were able to keep average costs well below these maximum goals. For example, the overall CPC of the campaign in the last 4 months of running (Jan-April 2022) was $0.66 with CPM at $5.84. Our lowest recorded CPM was achieved in the last month the campaign was active at $5.19.
➔ The Paid Search campaign’s had an overall CPC goal of $1.50 and a CPM goal of $275. Over the life of the campaign, we drove an average CPC of $1.44 and a CPM of $252.97. Being that driving awareness with a CPC cap of $1.50 was the objective, it was identified the automated bid strategies would make it difficult to stay on top of driving low CPCs. So, as part of a large-scale optimization, we changed all bidding strategies to Manual CPC which gives advertisers a much better grip on what they are bidding in the auctions at the keyword level. In the last month that the campaigns were running, we drove an average CPC of $1.01 and a CPM of $171.53.
