Sandals Resorts worked with Yahoo to promote their annual 2-for-1 sale through targeted native advertising campaigns on Yahoo platforms. Yahoo used their first-party data and audience insights to target Sandals' existing customer base as well as new audiences matching their demographics. The campaign exceeded expectations by driving both online and offline conversions. Post-campaign analysis revealed new insights into Sandals' highest performing customer segments that can be leveraged in future campaigns.

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Yahoo helped Sandals achieve their goal of boosting online and offline sales for their annual ‘2 for 1’
sale through audience targeting across Yahoo Gemini Native Ads and Audience Ads solutions.
Native advertising, such as Yahoo Gemini Native Ads, works by placing audience relevant ads within
a stream of content across mobile, tablet and desktop. By adding Yahoo’s audience targeting,
including Flurry mobile audience insights and Yahoo Audience Ads, a highly targeted performance
solution was executed and results exceeded client expectations.
Turning up
the heat with Yahoo

2. Yahoo Gemini Native Ads and Audience Ads
Boosting sales for Sandals through sophisticated targeting,
tailored messaging and native formats
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Contact your Account Representative, email us at info-yahoo@yahoo-inc.com
or visit advertising.yahoo.co.uk for more information.
ADVERTISING
Sandals are a luxury travel company offering all-inclusive Caribbean holidays. In order to promote
their annual ‘2 for 1’ sale, Yahoo designed a campaign for them to target over 45s, high-income
families and newlyweds.
97% of Sandals’ existing customers appear in Yahoo’s network each month and over 23,000 unique
users receive emails from Sandals to their Yahoo Mail account. This combination gave Yahoo insights into their demography and online
behaviour. This enabled Yahoo to not only retarget Sandals’ existing customer base, to encourage repeat bookings, but to also grow it
through exposure to a like-minded audience on Yahoo and beyond. Sandals were able to utilise Yahoo’s scale, giving them an incremental
reach of 41 million unique users through Yahoo’s ability to plug into all major SSPs, Exchanges and publishers.
The campaign
The campaign ran across two of Yahoo’s solutions:
1. Yahoo Audience Ads — The target audience was comprised using Yahoo’s proprietary data, based on users’ search and mail behaviour,
insights from Flurry mobile analytics and social data from Tumblr. Additionally, a custom segment was created for Sandals, enabling
Yahoo to target users from the client’s own search keywords as well as a hand-picked list of relevant commercial domain URLs. Lookalike
modelling leveraged the depth and breadth of Yahoo data to find users displaying similar behaviour to Sandals’ existing customers who
would therefore be likely to convert. Third party data was also used to optimise campaign performance.
Yahoo also retargeted those who visited the site but hadn’t yet converted. A retargeting pixel was implemented onto Sandals site, in
order reach these customers, at specific times, on specific devices and based on their previous online activity, driving more conversions.
The campaign was optimised throughout to the best performing audience segments using findings from Yahoo’s reporting technologies,
such as the Yahoo Audience Wave Report (AWR). The interactive AWR helps advertisers identify the best performing segments using
existing conversion data. Each report is generated from a success metric, such as conversions or clicks, and ranks Yahoo and third-party
data segments by the lift they provide to increase performance.
2. Yahoo Gemini Native Ads — Worked by displayed integrated ads across mobile and PC targeting ‘Travel’, ‘Wedding’ and
‘Honeymoon’ audience segments, identified in part by mobile ‘Personas’ from Flurry mobile analytics.
The result
Sandals saw a rise in online conversions with the use of Audience Ads and Gemini, which went beyond the client's expectations. The
client also saw an uplift in offline conversions at the same time as the digital campaign was running with Yahoo.
Overall, Yahoo generated the second highest number of all sales in this multi-partner campaign- a great result for the first partnership
between Yahoo Gemini Native Ads, Yahoo Audience Ads and Sandals.
Post campaign analysis from Yahoo also provided new insight into Sandals’ prospects. Although Sandals’ traditional audience is over
45 years old, Yahoo’s campaign revealed that 29% of conversions were from those aged 34-44. Yahoo was also able to establish from
their reporting that the best performing time was 3pm-5pm and the strongest performing day was a Tuesday. Additional conversion
insights showed segments which had a significant uplift included people who fly business class and those interested in fishing, cycling
and finance-related content. These insights will be used in future campaigns to inform Sandals’ approach.
Jenny Anderson, Head of Marketing (UK & Europe), Sandals Resorts
As digital advertising continues to evolve, we’re constantly looking for new and engaging formats to reach
potential customers- across multiple platforms and devices. Yahoo Gemini Native Ads were a new addition
to our digital plans in January and quickly established itself as a highly engaging and cost efficient format.