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PetSmart Charities Case Study
National Adoption Weekend Campaigns
Overview
PetSmart Charities is a non-profit animal welfare organization that saves the lives of homeless pets. The
organization grants more money to directly help pets in need than any other animal welfare group in
North America. One of PetSmart Charities’ anchor programs is National Adoption Weekend (NAW),
which is a quarterly weekend-long adoption event across the United States and Canada. PetSmart
Charities is responsible for over six million pet adoptions to date, and the National Adoption Weekends
are a very large part of this accomplishment. Off Madison Ave began working with PetSmart Charities in
February 2014 to support the ongoing digital advertising efforts to drive adoptions and awareness of the
organization.
Target Audience
Our efforts on behalf of PetSmart Charities are focused on three key audience segments:
• PetSmart customers, specifically women aged 25-64
• Pet owners
• Pet enthusiasts
Research also shows that people are most likely to adopt a pet during three main life stages: newly
married, new homebuyers and recent pet owners. Off Madison Ave layers in the life stage attributes as
secondary filters to capitalize on interest level and segment audience groups in a more targeted fashion.
Approach
Based on the goals of each NAW campaign, Off Madison Ave creates strategic recommendations for
each campaign. These campaign plans have a unique and tailored media mix that aligns with the
seasonality of the campaign, budget and creative approach. The following are the main elements of this
strategic approach:
• The foundation of each campaign is top performers from the past campaigns. These specific
tactics are optimized based on learnings from the previous campaigns, so we continue to see
these tactics expand in their efficiency. Facebook, Google Display Network and YouTube
• Each campaign also includes new awareness building tactics to expand the reach and
efficiency of the campaign. Important examples include native advertising campaigns with
AnimalPlanet.com and People.com as well as a successful influencer campaign featuring
celebrity heartthrob Kellan Lutz.
• Off Madison Ave plays an active role in optimizations to the digital efforts during each
campaign, ensuring the budget is spent as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Results
Over the past year and a half, PCI and Off Madison Ave have partnered on eight National Adoption
Weekend campaigns. The key performance indicators for these campaigns are:
• Impressions
• Click Through Rate
• Use of Find a Pet
• Use of Store Locator
• Unaided Awareness
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Through strategic optimizations and great collaboration with the PetSmart Charities marketing team,
each campaign has built on the success of the previous campaigns. The original benchmark for CTR
was set at .10%. After the first campaign, the agency raised the benchmark to .30%. In 2015, the
average CTR for a PetSmart Charities NAW campaign is 1.12%
In February 2015, Off Madison Ave made a strong recommendation that the traditional two-week
campaign flight be reduced and concentrated to seven days. This single change allowed PetSmart
Charities to be more efficient with their marketing dollars and drive a true sense of urgency, which
resulted in an increase across all key performance indicators, especially the Find A Pet and Store
Locator searches.
In total, these eight campaigns have produced incredible results for PetSmart Charities and helped the
organization adopt out nearly 17,000 pets per event.
PetSmart Charities 2014 & 2015 Cumulative Reporting
Campaign Impressions Website
Visits
Unique
Sessions
CTR Budget
2014 NAW
Campaigns
74,352,603 301,448 131,262 0.41% $431,105
2015 NAW
Campaigns
141,924,962 1,076,090 579,254 1.12% $741,147
5. CLIENT:
SITUATIONAL
ANALYSIS
TACTICS USED
RESULTS
PETSMART
CHARITIES
CAMPAIGN:
FEBRUARY NATL’
ADOPTION WEEKEND
PetSmart Charities is a nonprofit animal
welfare organization that is committed to
helping prevent pet homelessness by an
adoption program, adoption events and
spay/neuter services.
PetSmart Charities hosts four National Adoption
Weekends each year. February 14-16 was its first
weekend of 2014 and PetSmart Charites wanted to
drive traffic directly to PetSmart stores with
strategically placed, emotionally connecting creative.
Pandora radio and banners
Online banner displays
18,240 pets were adopted
during PetSmart Charities’
first National Adoption
Weekend of 2014—
14% more than
the original goal.
Results
Total campaign impressions: 26,826,300
Total clicks from Pandora: 27,434
Creative banners click-though rate: .20%-.30%
Campaign Objective
Increase brand awareness of PetSmart Charities
Drive store traffic during February’s National
Adoption Weekend to reach a goal of 16,000
adoptions.
Men and Women across the USA and
Canada in three different life stages.
Newlywed
New Homeowner
New Pet owner
PetSmart Charities first National Adoption
Weekend of 2014 exceeded its goal by
14% and found homes for 18,240 pets.
TARGET
AUDIENCES
TARGET
AUDIENCES
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MEDIA POV
CLIENT: PetSmart Charities
TO: Ashley Moore
CC: Pam Nedwetzky, Lindsay Willis, Patrick Murphy and Sasha Howell
FROM: Ryan McDaniel
SUBJECT: Digital Media Ad Fraud
DATE: 3/20/15
__________________________________________________________________________
Background
With the rise of programmatic buying, ad fraud has become a more wide spread problem. It is
estimated that between 36-50 percent of all web traffic is non-human and ad fraud steals $6
billion annually from advertisers. To combat fraudulent traffic and impressions, Off Madison
Ave imposes strict policies to reduce fraudulent impressions which include the following:
• Practice Safe Sourcing
o We work with premium networks and sites that have earned our trust and have
measures in place to detect and prevent fraud.
• Tracking at publisher and site level
o By monitoring the site engagement and actions, ensure that the traffic from a
particular source is quality traffic. For example, if you see a high click through
rate but very poor time on site, it is likely that a large majority of clicks are invalid
or fraudulent.
• Set clear objective for media campaigns
o Fraudulent traffic cannot typically falsify an actual conversion point on a site.
For example, fraudulent traffic will most likely not be able to use find a pet or
store locator search.
What is ad fraud?
“The potential for digital advertising fraud exists everywhere that media spending is significant
and performance metrics are ambiguous or incomplete. Nefarious groups have found ways to
profit by infiltrating legitimate systems and generating false ad views, ad clicks, and site visits
using robotic programs.
Robotic traffic, popularly known as “bots”, is driven by code, not humans so it has no ability to
generate real conversions or purchases. Bots are smart enough to mimic human behavior,
making them difficult to detect. The activity generated by these bots muddles the engagement
metrics driven by real, human traffic, which dilutes the value of legitimate publisher inventory.
In addition, advertisers end up paying a material portion of their campaign dollars to fraudsters
who deliver specious ad impressions that are never seen by humans1
.”
Negative impacts of traffic fraud
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1!http://www.iab.net/media/file/IABDigitalSimplifiedUnderstandingOnlineTrafficFraud.pdf!
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1. Brands waste money on ad campaigns that include a material portion of fraudulent
impressions.
2. Fraud complicates campaign performance analysis when human and non-human
activity for ads and site visits are mixed in reports.
3. Brands lose confidence in digital media.
4. The supply of inventory is inflated artificially, reducing the value of legitimate publishers.
Example of ad fraud2
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2!http://www.iab.net/media/file/IABDigitalSimplifiedUnderstandingOnlineTrafficFraud.pdf!
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How the ad industry combats ad fraud
Publishers have a variety of tools and solutions for eliminating ad fraud. Below are some of the
most common solutions:
• Fraud detection tools and companies
o Many publishers have direct relationships with companies that have software
focused on finding and eradicating fraudulent traffic. Some examples of these
companies include White Ops, Telemtry, The Media Trust, and Forensiq. Below
is an image3
that illustrates how fraud detection tools function before during and
post campaign.
• Work with premium, trusted sites
o Many companies are fully transparent with their vetted site list and only run with
sites that are trusted and do not source inventory. Moreover, most publishers
have strict guidelines and frequent quality checks to ensure sites are not driving
fraudulent traffic.
Conclusion:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3!http://forensiq.com/!!
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The problem of fraudulent traffic is a significant problem for all online advertisers today.
However, by understanding what fraudulent traffic is and how it works, we can implement safe
guards and processes such as working with trusted sites, using verification tools, and
monitoring traffic to greatly reduce the risk of fraudulent traffic.
Appendix
Articles
• http://digiday.com/platforms/no-sliver-bullet-advertising-fraud/
• http://digiday.com/platforms/advertising-fraud-iab/
• http://digiday.com/publishers/ad-industry-gets-systematic-fixing-ad-fraud/
• http://digiday.com/publishers/confessionsFbotFtrafficFbuyer/
• http://www.iab.net/media/file/IABDigitalSimplifiedUnderstandingOnlineTrafficFraud.pdf
• http://www.iab.net/member_center/antifraud
• http://www.adweek.com/topic/adFfraud
• http://www.google.com/ads/adtrafficquality/
Glossary of Terms
• Online Traffic Fraud: Visits to publishers’ site(s) which occur without the knowledge of a
user, or driven by non-human actors; Can be initiated by a person’s online actions, or
fully controlled by a bot that has infected a personal computer
• Fraudster: A person, company or organization that knowingly engages in the
perpetration of online traffic fraud
• Bots or Robots: Any non-human or automated user-agents that produce HTTP web
traffic
• Botnet: A network of robots consisting of PCs that have been infected with malicious
software that turns them into slave computers managed by a botnet controller
• Bot Node: A single infected PC within a botnet
• Click Farm: Hiring individuals to manually click ads
• Non-Human Traffic: Online advertising traffic that is artificially generated from machine-
initiated or other non-human activity
• Hidden Ad Impressions: Ad impressions that are not observable because they are
hidden behind other ads or content, displayed in tiny iFrames or served in other ways
that prevent them from being seen by consumers
• Laundered Ad Impressions: Ad impressions where the original traffic source or other
delivery characteristics are obfuscated, altered or misrepresented by the seller!
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Harkins Theatres
Search Campaign Restructure POV
Overview
In the movie-going decision making process, more than 80% of people who research
films do so by watching video trailers on Google or YouTube. These “micro-moments”
before show time provide advertising opportunities for Harkins to capture the attention
of moviegoers and influence their decision on where to see a film.
In order to efficiently capitalize on these moments, Off Madison Ave suggests
restructuring Harkins’ current Google search campaign to optimize budgets and more
effectively reach target audiences in the most important decision-making moments.
With the recommended restructuring outlined below, Off Madison Ave expects to:
• Eliminate branded keyword competition due to duplication
• Increase ad quality scores
• Establish historical performance
• Decrease the overall cost for Harkins’ search campaigns
Search Structure Recommendation
Currently, new movie releases are given individual campaigns with separate budget
allocations. This current structure leads to keywords bidding against each other and
prevents Google from recognizing historical performance. Historical performance is key
in determining ad ratings, which ultimately impacts the performance of the campaign.
To improve these campaigns, Off Madison Ave recommends implementing one
overarching evergreen and new movie release campaign. By including all new movie
release and branded keywords in one campaign, Harkins will be able to capitalize on
an increased quality score and decreased keyword competition as branded and new
movie keywords are the most commonly clicked. The new campaign structure would
break out new movie release and branded keywords as their own ad groups, each
receiving respective ads.
Budget
The budget will be determined on the campaign level and cost-per-click bids will be
allocated at the ad group level. Shifting the budget to the campaign level will allow
budget to be optimized toward performance and keyword demand, thus spending
more efficiently.
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Additional Opportunities to Consider
Below are additional opportunities that complement the new account structure
optimizations:
YouTube Overlay
Knowing that 81% of moviegoers who watched trailers online did so on YouTube, and
that more than half are more likely to watch a trailer on YouTube than on TV, this
powerful platform provides another opportunity for Harkins to reach prospective
consumers. YouTube Overlay ads are either banner ads or semi-transparent text ads
that appear on the lower 20% portion of movie trailer videos on YouTube, reaching the
moviegoer audience at a critical point in deciding which theater to go to.
An example overlay ad would include a 480x70 display banner or the text from a
Google search ad. An example of the placement is below.
Video Production Recommendation
Off Madison Ave recommends creating a 15-second Harkins Theatres brand video
asset for YouTube and Facebook to capture the attention of moviegoers through sight,
sound and motion. The branded video would highlight what separates the Harkins
movie-going experience from the competition. The end result will increase brand
awareness and ultimately influence movie attendance at Harkins Theatres.
Video ads would be served before movie trailers on YouTube via TrueView ads and in
the NewsFeed on Facebook targeting frequent moviegoers.
Upon approval of this recommendation, Off Madison Ave will scope the creation of a
15-second branding video for consideration. Should Harkins have an existing brand
video, Off Madison Ave will review the current assets and determine if elements can be
repurposed. Off Madison Ave estimates that production of video using Harkins’ assets
would be in the $1,500-$2,000 range.
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Next Steps
• Harkins to provide approval on search restructure.
o Pending approval Off Madison will immediately alter the campaign
structure.
o If approved, Brandon, Alex, and Ryan to discuss updated online budget
tracker.
• Harkins to provide feedback on additional opportunities including YouTube
overlay ad and branded video production.
Additional Resources
https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/the-micro-moments-before-showtime.pdf
