The Debrief turned to atom42 when it needed to drive interest in its first seven months. Responding eagerly to the wants and needs of the Debrief Girl, it saw impressive surges in traffic and is looking forward to a bright future with PPC at the heart of its marketing strategy. atom42 tell us a little more
Brief
The Debrief, the newest brand in the Bauer portfolio, needed to achieve significant audience numbers in its first seven months, in order to be deemed a success. Ultimately, we needed to drive visits and subsequently grow and maintain a sociable community in order to generate ad revenue for Bauer.
Our PPC targets were 127,500 unique users and 318,750 page views in the first seven months. This would see it surpass its closest competitor: a site which had been around for nearly two years.
Strategy
We knew that in order to drive the numbers, we would need to adopt a fresh approach to PPC, leaning on growing areas of interest among our target audience. We also needed to use language in our ads that appealed to our audience; best practice wouldn’t cut it – we would need to think and speak like a Debrief Girl in order to drive them to our site. Our ads needed to deliver a new dimension to what had essentially become stale SERPs.
Getting users to the site was just half of the problem. We then needed them to engage with the site and, ultimately, make The Debrief part of their daily online routine. We ensured the editorial team were creating content around the areas of growing interest which were identified through search. Search trends were identified in real time, and the editorial team were then able to react quickly which, in turn, allowed us to drive traffic at a quicker rate than ever before.
The Debrief’s audience consists of young women who are driven and compelled by the most modern of conditions: FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). It is the plague of the social age. And it’s not just about missing out on physical moments – parties or events – it’s about missing out on knowledge too!
Initial research showed how FOMO drives search behavior and, most interestingly, the interplay of search and social. If a Debrief Girl encounters a trending topic that she doesn’t fully understand, then she leaps straight to search to arm herself with the social currency needed to partake in the conversation. At this age – the early twenties – it is all about displaying knowledge amongst social groups.
We decided to banish FOMO by using the latest relevant trends, from naked selfies to matchmaking mobile app Tinder. By keeping a close eye on Google trends and social buzzwords, we were able to work alongside the editorial team to ensure that we had content to provide a destination for users searching for these terms.
As a result of our decision to react quickly to trending topics, The Debrief became one of the first editorial sites to have content relating to breaking news and topics. We wrote ads quickly, with targeted messages to capture the attention of the Debrief Girl.
After researching the daily routine of the Debrief Girl, we were able to serve ads at the time that suited her, and on the device of her choice. FOMO was key to our messaging, resulting in our users coming to the site multiple times a day for their hit: being able to catch-up on whatever they missed, wherever they were.
Execution
We focused on ensuring that users could find what they wanted and, through some initial testing, found that the Debrief Girl thrives on choice, preferring to be directed to a list of relevant articles (tag pages), rather than being taken to the article we deemed as the most relevant.
Because we had liaised so closely with the editorial team, we could quickly introduce these topic-focused landing pages into our PPC campaigns. This helped improve pages-per-visit (this is 20 per cent higher when a user is given a choice of articles, rather than being directed to an article page), drive more brand loyalty and increased social sharing.
With very few competitors moving as quickly as we were to reach these surging areas of interest, we were also able to manage our bids to drive a top of page ranking at minimal cost.
Our fresh messaging ensured our users were compelled to click through. Asking them relevant questions like: “What would you do if your naked selfie was shared with the world?” and telling them to ‘banish irrelevance’ or ‘get the debrief’ were tactics that secured a high CTR, which has increased by 50 per cent since launch.
Result
By being at the top of the SERPs on trending terms and displaying ads which appealed to the Debrief Girl, we saw surges in traffic as new trends entered the lime light. There are too many examples to list here, but key successes included:
• Tinder
• Selfies/naked selfies
• The breaking news of Oscar Pistorius
• Coconut oil (if you don’t know about its magical qualities, you should check it out!)
Secondly, by driving users to tag pages (pages with multiple articles on each area), PPC became one of our most engaged traffic sources, exceeding the site’s PV/Session average by 25 per cent.
We far exceeded our target of 127,500 unique users and 318,750 page views in the first seven months, delivering 327,472 unique users and 1,258,173 page views.
That’s a 257 per cent increase on our target for unique users and a 395% increase on our target for page views.
We innovatively used search data to support the editorial process, ensuring that the content created was relevant to our users and in areas of strong growth, which would make a real difference to The Debrief’s stats.
PPC massively over-delivered in terms of volume, but still maintained an incredibly high site engagement, becoming one of The Debrief’s most important channels.
As a result, The Debrief were able to continue running past their initial six month test period, and are looking towards a bright future with PPC at the heart of its marketing strategy.