SunExpress Airlines and Territory Media recently collaborated to update customer personas using an evidence-driven, household-based measurement approach. The goal was to confirm whether long-standing personas still accurately reflected the real people visiting and purchasing from the SunExpress website.
This case study demonstrates how household-based audience measurement can be used to validate and modernize marketing personas without relying on surveys or panel research.
The Challenge
While SunExpress had developed several personas using first-party analytics, these profiles became increasingly resource-intensive to maintain over time. In a fast-moving, automated international media environment, Territory Media required a seamless and cost-effective way to validate these personas to ensure targeting efficiency. The central question was: Do our existing personas still reflect the customers who actually buy?. Traditional research would have been too time-consuming, necessitating a quicker, more adaptable solution.
“Seeing the differences between visitors and buyers helped us update our audience strategy quickly and it now gives us a stronger foundation for planning and messaging future campaigns.” – Ines Pfab, Director Client Service & Data Analytics, TERRITORY MEDIA
The Solution
The team implemented Digiseg’s household-based measurement tags to profile two distinct groups:
- Browsers: General website visitors.
- Buyers: Users who completed a purchase and reached the “thank-you” page.
By utilizing household-level data, they generated demographic profiles for each group that could be enriched with additional data points beyond basic demographics. This approach was chosen because it is faster than manual persona building, simple to deploy via a single tag, and creates a repeatable framework for future validation.
“Digiseg gave us an easy, cost-effective way to validate our personas against real customer behavior.” – Alexander Blum, Teamlead Consulting, TERRITORY MEDIA
The Results
The analysis provided Territory Media with a clear picture of how visitor and buyer profiles differ and which household characteristics correlate most strongly with conversions. It also identified “outlier” audiences that might have been previously overlooked.
Validated Audience Understanding
SunExpress now possesses a modernized, real-world understanding of its customers that is directly actionable for programmatic targeting and audience planning. This methodology ensures that audience insights remain accurate even as traveler behavior continues to evolve.
“At SunExpress, staying connected to our passengers means moving beyond assumptions. By using household-based measurement, we’ve gained a modernized, evidence-driven understanding of our customers, ensuring our media strategy is built on a foundation of real-world behavior.” – Asu Erayda Akyuez, Head of Performance Marketing & Marketing Automation, SunExpress Airlines