Campaign Overview
MAD About Digital (MAD), a digital marketing agency based in Cluj-Napoca, teamed up with the award-winning Electric Castle music festival to increase ticket sales through an ambitious, multi-faceted advertising strategy. Central to this strategy was the use of Digiseg’s innovative audience measurement solution, which allowed them to profile and track changes in Electric Castle’s visitors. Leveraging this audience knowledge, MAD expertly planned and executed the 2024 campaign, boosting engagement, conversion rates, and ROAS. This success underscores the power of strategic audience measurement in achieving consistent, predictable results and setting the stage for continued success.
Campaign Objective
The primary objective of the Electric Castle campaign, managed by MAD, was to optimize audience targeting and engagement for the Electric Castle music festival using the lessons from 2023’s campaign to further refine the advertising in 2024. The campaign aimed to confirm and quantify shifting audience profiles over time, refine advertising strategies in real-time, and ultimately improve the key performance metrics, eCPA, and Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).
The Challenge
Electric Castle, a diverse and highly anticipated music festival, attracts a wide range of attendees, from dedicated early bird fans to casual music enthusiasts who make last-minute ticket purchases. However, the distinct nature of these audience segments posed a significant challenge: maintaining effective and relevant advertising throughout the entire campaign period, from the initial launch to just days before the festival.
One of the primary challenges in this context was the limitation of traditional digital campaign measurement and analytics tools. Commonly used metrics such as sessions, time on site, clicks, referrer, and bounce rate provide only “web-based” statistics. While these metrics offer insight into user behavior on a superficial level, they fall short of revealing the underlying demographics and characteristics of the actual people engaging with the product. This gap in understanding who the audience truly is makes it difficult to tailor advertising content and targeting strategies effectively.
Furthermore, the most conventional methods for measuring audience profiles, such as panels or surveys, come with significant drawbacks. These methods typically provide data only after the campaign has concluded, acting as a “rear-view mirror” that offers little value in real-time optimization. By the time this data is available, the opportunity to adjust and improve the campaign has passed. Additionally, panel and survey data cannot be easily translated into actionable targeting strategies, limiting their utility in driving campaign performance.
The team at MAD hypothesized that the demographic profile of ticket buyers would shift significantly as the event date approached. Early bird fans were expected to purchase tickets early, characterized by specific demographic characteristics, while more casual attendees would likely buy tickets later, displaying different characteristics. However, without a way to accurately measure these shifts in real-time and understand the people behind the page views, this hypothesis remained untested.
The challenge, therefore, was threefold:
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- Overcome the Limitations of Traditional Measurement: Move beyond basic web-based metrics to gain a deeper understanding of the audience by accurately measuring demographic shifts and characteristics in real-time.
- Confirm the Hypothesis and Identify Key Audience Categories: Measure and analyze how the audience profile changes over time, moving from theory to actionable insights, while identifying salient audience categories such as income, education, and tech level.
- Adapt Advertising in Real-Time: Utilize these insights to dynamically adjust the targeting, creative content, and channel selection of the advertising to ensure it resonated with the right audience at the right time.
By addressing these challenges, the goal was to optimize campaign performance, reduce CPA, and improve ROAS, all while achieving greater traction across multiple audience segments.
Campaign Goals
Generate Traction Across Multiple Audience Segments: The primary goal was to increase engagement across diverse audience segments identified through measurement, thereby creating more stability in campaign performance.
Improve Stability and Reduce CPA: By effectively targeting the identified audience categories, the campaign aimed to achieve more consistent engagement, leading to reduced Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
Enhance ROAS from the Same Budget: Leveraging insights from 2023, the 2024 campaign focused on optimizing the use of the existing budget to achieve a higher Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) through improved targeting and content strategies.
Solution
MAD identified Digiseg as the ideal solution to test and quantify their assumptions about shifting audience profiles during the campaign. Digiseg’s technology offered a unique advantage because the same real-world demographic data can be used for both measurement and targeting. This approach not only surpassed the limitations of cookie-based segmentation but also provided insights that could be directly activated for targeting—an advantage over traditional panel data.
Implementation in the Campaign
Starting in 2023, MAD placed Digiseg measurement tags on key events on the Electric Castle website, allowing the team to measure and create demographic profiles of website visitors and specific actions, such as purchasing a ticket. By monitoring these actions, MAD was able to measure how the audience profile evolved throughout the campaign, from winter and spring through to just days before the festival started.The data collected through Digiseg not only confirmed the hypothesis of shifting audience demographics over time but also provided a detailed breakdown of key audience categories, including income, education, and tech level. These actionable profiles were crucial in understanding who was engaging most with both the advertising and the festival’s website, particularly in terms of completing valuable actions like ticket purchases.
Real-Time Adaptation and Targeting
The unique nature of Digiseg’s data allowed MAD to go beyond mere measurement. The same demographic profiles created through website tagging were directly integrated into the programmatic advertising strategy. This meant that the advertising could be dynamically adapted in real-time, with targeting, creative content, and channel selection all adjusted based on the evolving audience data.The insights into audience segments directly influenced the strategic decisions in media buying and creative development. For example:
- Education and Tech Level: These insights led to the decision to include Reddit in the media mix, as it resonated well with tech-savvy and educated users. Additionally, the campaign targeted the IT segment specifically through channels frequented by this audience.
- Lifecycle: Understanding the lifecycle stage of the audience informed the inclusion of Snapchat in the media plan, which was particularly effective for reaching younger audiences.
- Price point: As the audience’s income levels varied throughout the year, the creative team decided to include price points directly in the ad creatives to better appeal to those with varying levels of disposable income.
Armed with a deep understanding of how audience profiles were likely to shift over time, MAD was able to refine their strategies for 2024. This allowed for more consistent and predictable results, ultimately achieving improved ROAS, reduced CPA, and higher overall engagement.
By using Digiseg’s innovative technology, MAD not only measured and confirmed audience shifts but also strategically applied these insights to optimize every aspect of the campaign. The ability to directly target the identified segments using the same data in a DSP ensured a seamless and highly efficient execution, setting a new standard for data-driven festival marketing.
Results
The Electric Castle campaign, executed by MAD, delivered strong results that directly tied back to the initial objectives and challenges identified. The primary goals were to achieve greater traction across multiple audience segments, generate more stability in performance, reduce the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and ultimately improve the Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) using insights gained from the previous year’s campaign.
The campaign successfully met and exceeded these goals:
- Improved Cost Efficiency
The effective Cost Per Acquisition (eCPA) declined by 30% from the beginning of the campaign in January to the end in July. This significant reduction highlights the improved efficiency and effectiveness of the targeted advertising efforts, allowing the campaign to capture conversions at a much lower cost.Additionally, the eCPA remained more consistent and predictable during different phases of the campaign compared to the previous year. This stability ensured better budget management and more reliable forecasting for campaign performance. - Increased Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)
The campaign saw a 16% improvement in ROAS from the previous year. This increase in ROAS indicates that the refined targeting and creative strategies, informed by the 2023 insights, were highly effective in driving higher returns on the advertising investment.
Average Order Value (AOV) also increased by 12% from the previous year.
By using Digiseg’s measurement solution to optimize targeting, creative, and channel selection, the campaign was able to achieve a higher return on the same budget, maximizing the impact of every advertising dollar spent.
Strategic Impact
The insights into audience segments, including income, education, and tech level, allowed for more precise targeting and creative adjustments. This led to higher engagement rates and ultimately more conversions, contributing to the overall success of the campaign.The ability to maintain a lower and more stable eCPA while simultaneously improving ROAS underscored the campaign’s success in balancing cost efficiency with performance effectiveness.
In summary, the campaign MAD ran for Electric Castle not only confirmed the hypothesized shifts in audience profiles but also translated these insights into tangible, measurable improvements in key performance metrics. The strategic use of Digiseg’s demographic data to measure enabled MAD to deliver a highly successful campaign, driving better engagement, reducing costs, and achieving a significantly higher return on investment compared to the previous year.
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