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KOBTV's juicy campaign for New Mexico Beef Council

Click through rates above 0.2 percent for Native ads

Posted

Media: Hubbard Broadasting KOBTV

Market: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Client: New Mexico Beef Council

Agency: Marketing Solutions

Digital Marketer: Kurt Christopher

Platform: AdCellerant

 

Objective:

New Mexico Beef Council has a mission of promoting the purchase of New Mexico Beef and has been an advertiser with the KOBTV for several years. “We were contact by the agency for the Beef Council, who was looking for a unique  way to get the word out and get people thinking about buying more beef.”

Strategy:

After brainstorming, the team that included the client, agency, sales person and digital team realized that the New Mexico Beef Council's website already had great native content - a digital cookbook with mouth-watering photos of beef dishes. They came up with an online-only campaign of both native and display ads for recipes to drive traffic to the site and engage the audience.  The agency helped flesh out online recipes and magazine-quality food shots to give the campaign an extra kick. Readers looking for recipes could click to  print them out, so that, ideally, the first ingredient they went to the store to buy would be genuine New Mexico beef. The two campaigns were distributed using AdCellerant's programmatic platform.


Native ads

The first campaign was Native  - that is text ads placed in the native content network to exactly match the look and feel of the editorial of the site on which they appear, except for a small "brought to you by" acknowledgment.  Each ad featured a delicious beef recipe, such chipotle burgers,  ribeye steak kabosb, and steak grean bean salad. The ads ran on contextually relevant food sites, as well as those concerned with women's fashion and/or parenting. Tracking codes were placed on New Mexcio Beef's site to track both cick-through traffic and "look back" traffic, ie people returning to the site after being served an ad without cicking, but later returning to the site on their own. 

Here is how the ads appear on a variety of platforms: 

Standard display

The second campaign was a standard display campaign in responsive ad sites with the same message, “Find beef recipes.”    These targeted the audience by additional characteristics: adults 25 to 44,  showing a behavioral interest in food and dining, family and home and garden, content (see the ad at the top of this case study). 


Results:

Results for the native campaign were click through rates of .21 and .26 percent, probably higher "because they don’t look ads, but the content people are looking for," Christopher said. 

"We're able to measure folks going to pages had a high bounce rate but made sense, since people were looking for a specific recipe. The CTR for Native ads were by far the best."

Of the standard banner ads, “Find a recipe,”  the  300 by 250  ads did best with a click through of  .2 percent  after 4.5 million impressions. Even the 729 x 90 did will at .12.

There was a ratio of about 50% of "look backs" to clicks providing more engagement and views. 

From the total buy of 7 million impressions,  the final results was  12,500 clicks directly from the ads. Since there were some delays in tracking the customers returning post click, there were "at least another 7,000". 

"The client came away pleased.  The overall the traffic on their website exploded. They had never had some much traffic to the website and engagement with their brand," Christopher siad.  The campaign has since been copied by another state''s Beef Council. 

Technology used 

AdCellerant.com

Editor's Notes

We like so many things about this campaign. First, it recognized the assets the client already had - food-related content with a fantastic visual component - and worked with this content. Native ads  for recipes are a perfect match with the media placement on the native ad network, and we recommend to any sales team to be on the look out for large advertisers in their market with this type of content. The click through rates are extraordinary, and finally, the codes were correctly placed so that "look back" clicks could be "counted." And the best flattery is imitation as another beef council is already copying the idea. Congratulations to Kurt Christopher and Marketing Solutions for their good work. 


hubbard, native, kurt chrisopher, kobtv, food, dining, grocery, meat, non-profit