The Challenge that Olay Faced

When we were a part of the Brandery accelerator, we got the amazing opportunity to work for a well-known P&G brand – Olay. Olay is a brand that truly believes in and has invested in the power of influencer and affiliate marketing. When we worked with Olay, they were looking to solve one main problem:

Olay used Native advertising to promote influencer content in order to garner more attention and clicks. When a user clicked on the native ad, they landed on the influencer’s web site. The issue? if the user did not end up clicking on the promoted links within the influencer blog post, then the traffic that the native ad had created was lost. Olay did not own the influencer site and hence had no way of retargeting the users that it was sending to the site! They wanted a way to leverage third-party content along with their native advertising efforts and own the traffic that the ads were sending to the third-party blog posts.

 

The Solution

Olay worked with an agency called Hearts and Science. In order to solve the above problem, Hearts and Science used RetargetLinks with 1.3 million native ads that Olay had running in different publishers across the US. Here is an example of a native ad leading to a blog post from a blogger that tried out Olay’s 28 day challenge:

Before, when a user clicked on the native ad, they were redirected to Bethany (the blogger’s) and Olay had no way to access the traffic that was getting redirected. Now, every user that clicked on the native ads, and hence on a retargeting link, was tagged with a cookie and was automatically added to Olay’s retargeting audience. So, if the user does not click on the promoted links within the blog post, they would still be able to see Olay ads when they surf the net.

The Results

407,953 consumers clicked on the native ads and were redirected to 7 different, third-party blog posts written by Olay influencers. Olay, via retargeting links, was able to drop a retargeting cookie on 220,456 consumers (this was 54% of those that clicked on the retargeting links).

RetargetLinks increased Olay’s retargeting audience by 73% (+ 220,000 consumers retargeted from link retargeting vs. 300,000 from Olay website visitors).  A total of 532,032 Olay Whips ads were displayed to the pilot audience. This resulted in a clickthrough rate of 0.17% which is 4x the industry average for non-targeted ads as well as other Olay campaigns using the same ads!

 

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