Unsuccessful Behavioral Segmentation Case Study

Behavioral Targeting and Retargeting

This nationwide travel agency specializes in high-end cruise packages. It traditionally drove sales with offl ine advertising and display ads on AOL® intended to encourage potential customers to call for a consultation. The company's competitive advantage is that each caller is assigned a local travel agent to fi nd the right travel package best suited for that caller's interest. The agent is expected to build a longstanding relationship beyond the first sale.

• Identify leisure travelers and drive qualified traffic to the company site
• Encourage consumers to call for a consultation
• Remessage site visitors

• Achieve a Cost Per Sale (CPS) of $100
• Sales
• Engagement (Page views and time spent on site)

• Leaderboard, medium rectangle and skyscraper ad units with a customized 800# in the creative and landing page
• Behaviorally target consumers who recently visited a travel site or read travel content
• A portion of the budget was allocated to Run of Category (ROC) media placements:
• Travel Sites
• Retarget all users who visited the site within the last 14 days
• Set automatic algorithmic optimization to shift impressions to the best performing placements, ad units and creative to minimize wasted impressions

Behaviorally targeted Travel Shoppers outperformed ROC Travel Sites by 75% in CTR, 12.7% in bookings, 11.2% in CPS and spent twice as much time on the site, viewing 33% more pages.

Retargeted site visitors outperformed in all measurements, beating the client's CPS goal by 73.5% and providing 383% more bookings than ROC placements. Moreover, time spent on the client's site tripled while page views more than doubled compared with the ROC.