Entertainment Case Study:

Overview

Spain... On The Road Again is a culinary and travel television series produced by Frappe Inc that airs weekly on PBS during the Sunday primetime hours. The show follows celebrity chef Mario Batali and his co-stars actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Spanish actress Claudia Bassols, and NY Times food writer Mark Bittman throughout their travels in Spain. Each episode covers a different region of Spain as the foursome explores the country's culinary traditions and history.

Situation

With the launch of the TV series, Frappe Inc also launched SpainOnTheRoadAgain.com, a website that supplies additional content related to the series and also provides an outlet for people to purchase the companion book, Spain... A Culinary Road Trip, the series DVD, as well as iTunes episodes.

Frappe Inc came to DA Search looking for additional marketing channels that would provide high ROI for their onsite sales, and wanted an agency that would be able to not only implement a solid search strategy, but also help them track the return on all their online marketing initiatives. Their primary goal was to achieve a low CPS or cost per sale for their online book and DVD sales.

Challenges

Since the onset of the campaign, Frappe Inc needed to educate prospective viewers and buyers about the new show and the additional media items associated with it. They wanted to not only encourage these prospective viewers to tune in and watch at a later date, but to instill enough interest in the show for people to purchase the expanded media that was offered.

Branded keywords, such as "Spain On The Road Again TV show" weren't receiving the amount of traffic that was desired by Frappe, especially prior to launch. The biggest challenge for the campaign, therefore, was to utilize different terms that would connect with individuals searching for related topics. In addition, ad creative had to be consistent with the overall messaging of Frappe's other media ventures.

Sales of the books and DVDs provided somewhat low margins for Frappe Inc. DA Search faced the challenge of making sure that the effective CPS of the campaign was well under the sales margins that Frappe makes on selling the expanded media while dramatically increasing the volume of sales.

Strategy

To capitalize on buzz generated by Frappe's other marketing initiatives, and to unlock latent demand for the new show, DA Search developed a three-part strategy that was broad enough to cover as much situational traffic as necessary, yet, specific enough to allow for only the highest quality of traffic to run through to the site.

Keyword Expansion

Because branded keywords weren’t generating enough traffic to really promote the television show, DA Search expanded the keyword universe of Frappe to include the names of the cast members as well. Because all four of the cast members were already popular stars that generated their own traffic, drawing on their existing fan bases allowed for good, targeted and high quality traffic to be sent to the SpainOnTheRoadAgain.com website. In addition, other keyword groups such as those including cooking shows, and topics on Spanish food were used to the same effect. Keywords in all groups were optimized to ensure that only those that provided the highest ROI’s for Frappe would be used.

Quality Score Optimization

Because the primary goal of Frappe, Inc was to increase book and DVD sales while lowering effective CPS, DA Search used our proprietary methods along with the DAS Suite, our technology platform, to decrease average Costs-Per-Click for all keywords, while at the same time, maintaining top position. Doing this made sure that Spain…On The Road Again lost no keyword traffic, but paid less for it. DA Search worked to increase the quality score of all keywords in the campaigns, and managed to increase the quality score of most of the high traffic and high converting keywords to 9 or higher in Adwords.

Ad Copy Optimization

To further ensure that all traffic going to the website would have the highest chance of converting into a book or DVD sale, DA Search ran comparison tests on 8 different sets of text ads and multivariate tests on landing pages. As each ad-group targets a different segment of consumers, the ads are optimized on an ad-group level to guarantee the highest possible level of optimization.

Results

With our innovative and proprietary methods, DA Search was able to lower the effective CPS for Frappe Inc on book and DVD sales for Spain…On The Road Again by 75% while average CPC’s decreased by 65%. The campaign was able to generate an increase of over 1,000 sales per month, in addition to over 2,000 iTunes sales per month. Click-Through-Rates for the ads increased from under 2% to over 20%, signifying that each ad had a more significant impact with each impression.

DA Search also provided Frappe Inc with fully detailed statistical reports. These reports allowed Frappe to see the effectiveness of their other marketing sources, including how they were converting and at what cost. Reports were also provided on user paths and conversion funnels to point out areas of improvement to maximize visitor conversions.