For several years, we has been managing advertising campaigns consisting in the large-scale announcement of MAKS Aviation and Space Salon taking place every two years. In 2021, the Agency was given a global task for boosting sales of tickets for a show via the website by means of paid sources and assessment of their contribution into the total sales volume.
The most important stage in launching any advertising campaign is elaboration of detailed campaign settings.
Website and analytics settings
As the basic KPI of the campaign consisted in selling tickets via the website, we prepared the website and analytic system globally, we also integrated the ticket purchasing module parter.ru into Google Analytics. The scope of the agency’s operations at a stage of preparation for an advertising campaign included:
- GTM setup and installation of pixels of advertising systems for audience collecting
- Purpose and event tracking in Google Analytics
- Sales funnel setup
- Integration of Google Analytics and parter.ru payment gateway. At this stage we adjusted receipt of postback request from parter.ru containing information on the structure of a ticket order/purchase
- Development of UTM tagging templates for obtaining the detailed statistics
Advertising campaign settings
Advertising campaign was managed in the middle and the lower parts of the sales funnel, working with warm and loyal audience.
The main channels used in media split:
- Contextual advertising (branded traffic, targeted traffic (requests connected with aviation and space industries, competitors, related requests, etc.))
- Advertising in social networks with targeting by interests (competitors, aircrafts, where to go for the weekend, entertainments, professional interests, etc.)
- Remarketing – winning back the audience who visited the website but did not finish target action
For the period of planning, the target audience in all traffic sources was segmented according to the following criteria:
- those who visited exhibition in the previous years
- the website visitors
- subscribers of social media groups
- segmentation of audience by social and demographic characteristics (different age groups)
- by devices
- by interests (general, professional, interest in aviation)
- by parental status
- LAL for the most converting audiences
Search advertising
The semantic kernel was grouped in several directions according to the segmentation of target audience:
– branded requests, including conversion requests connected directly with the air show
– requests for competitors
– thematic professional requests
– information requests: “where to go with children”, “things to do on weekend”, “cool places to go in Moscow”, etc.
In the second phase of advertising campaign we used remarketing for all visitors of the website, as well as for the segments of incomplete transactions, abandoned cart, etc. The big contribution to the positive results of the campaign was made by Yandex and Google placement according to interests in leisure, aviation industry, outside activities, etc. It allowed to acquaint the new potentially interested audience with the show.
Having launched the advertising campaign, we made additional segmentation after obtaining analytical base on the basis of which conclusions can be drawn and advertising campaign can be adjusted in the context of the traced KPIs.
Creatives
When promoting events, it is important to convey emotions, therefore, at the first stage of an advertising campaign, we used videos.
Today, everyone agrees that video advertising is in most cases more effective than banners and allows to present an event interactively and in detail. We used creative HD videos up to 20 seconds. In the text of the post, we used an additional CTA (call to action) – go to the website and buy tickets for the air show
At the second stage of the campaign, we used banners calling to buy tickets on the website leading to the page with a special offer. Banners consisted of the name of the event, short description, a photo from the event and a call to action.
The integrated approach to the website preparation and analytics settings allowed to get from the advertising campaign results above expected, to evaluate systemically the contribution of each source into the performance split, to lead new audience to buying tickets and to estimate audience volume in paid sources.