Case Study: Pro AAA Baseball Team Tracks Online Ticket Sales and Stadium Visitors with Simpli.fi

Agency Overview
•  Award-winning integrated advertising agency
•  Two-year partnership with Simpli.fi and 200% YoY growthBrand Overview
•  Professional AAA baseball team
•  Wanted to reach local baseball fans with a season-long advertising campaign
•  Goals to increase both online ticket sales and stadium visitorsResults
•  14,615 Total Gameday Visits
•  7,859 Online Actions (ticket sales)
•  131% Geo-Conversion Lift
•  $2.06 Cost Per Gameday Visit
•  $9.38 Cost Per Online Action

Today’s sports teams have a unique sales environment where they need to operate sales both online and in traditional brick-and-mortar environments. For sports marketers, this results in the need to be able to measure tangible campaign results for both online and offline actions, such as ticket sales and in-stadium attendance.

Check out the case study below to see how Simpli.fi, in partnership with an award-winning ad agency, helped a pro AAA baseball team increase both online ticket sales and physical stadium visits. Thanks to Simpli.fi’s Addressable Geo-Fencing solution and suite of other online targeting tactics, the team saw increases in online and offline actions, all at a low CPA.

DRIVING TICKET SALES AND ATTENDEES

Today, many businesses operate in both online and traditional brick and mortar sales environments. Sports teams are a prime example, where tickets are most commonly purchased online prior to a physical, in-person experience. For advertisers in this type of organization, it’s important to be able to measure tangible results for both online and offline actions ‚Äì such as ticket sales and in-stadium attendance.

Over the course of the 2019 season, a AAA minor league baseball team was looking for an advertising solution to help them reach their target audience, drive ticket sales, and grow gameday attendance. They turned to their advertising agency to build a strategy for increasing ticket sales and stadium visitors throughout the season, from the beginning of March through August. The agency had a strong partnership with Simpli.fi on behalf of other clients and recognized that Simpli.fi’s unique targeting capabilities and unmatched measurement for both online and offline conversions would benefit the baseball team.

REACHING A DIVERSE AUDIENCE ACROSS DEVICES

From local families with kids in little league to young professionals to out-of-town visitors, baseball fans in town come in all different forms. The team knew they needed to use a variety of solutions to find the right people who were likely to buy tickets and go to games. Simpli.fi and the advertiser established a strategy to reach a relevant audience of baseball fans via both geo-targeting and online targeting tactics:

Geo-Targeting

• Addressable Geo-Fencing with first- and third-party data lists to reach local baseball fans at the household level. The team provided a proprietary list of approximately 175,000 contact addresses and Simpli.fi also curated a list of 15,000 households with people interested in watching baseball and matching other demographic criteria. These lists were then uploaded to the Simpli.fi platform where GPS data paired with plat lines automatically matched the addresses to the exact physical location, shape, and size of each household. The system built a geo-fence targeting zone around each address to capture users for retargeting across all of the devices within the home.
• Geo-Fencing to target users who visited relevant local sites such as entertainment venues, parks, restaurants, sporting goods stores, hotels, apartment complexes, and more. In order to compare performance across location types, these geo-fences were categorized into six different audiences such as families, young professionals, and travelers.

Online Tactics

• Keyword and Category Contextual
  Search Retargeting to reach users who were searching for and reading about baseball and related topics in the DMA.
• Site Retargeting to serve ads to people who visited the team’s website, with a focus on users who visited the shopping cart page and then dropped-off before purchasing tickets.
• CRM Targeting via first-party lists of previous ticket purchasers provided by the team.

The team featured OTT/CTV video creative to reach users with immersive streaming content primarily on large screens, in addition to display, mobile, and pre-roll video.

MEASURING ONLINE AND OFFLINE CONVERSIONS

The team was enthused with Simpli.fi and the agency’s ability to granularly report on online actions, defined as purchasing a ticket online, as well as offline conversions. By building a geo-fence conversion zone around the stadium, the team could measure the number of individuals who were delivered an ad and then visited the ballpark on a gameday, while ignoring visitors on non-gamedays.

Simpli.fi’s cross-device matching allowed the advertiser to attribute physical conversions at the stadium to users regardless of what device they were served ads on, including desktop, tablet, mobile, and/or OTT/CTV streaming device. Simpli.fi and the agency focused on regularly reporting key metrics to the team and also making mid-flight optimizations to improve campaign performance. For example, the team shifted budgets to the highest performing tactics, removing poorly performing geo-fences, and adding more granular geo-fences to mitigate wasted impressions throughout the entire lifecycle of the campaign.

STRONG RESULTS THROUGHOUT THE SEASON

The baseball season is long, and the team expected the campaign to deliver ticket sales and in-stadium attendees at a high rate throughout the six-month campaign. Over the course of the campaign, the Cost Per Action decreased significantly due to Simpli.fi’s machine-learning and optimizations. The results clearly indicate an increase in online ticket sales as well as game attendees at a low CPA. The online CPA for ticket sales was $9.38 and the Cost Per Gameday Visit to the stadium was $2.06.

Most notably, the team experienced a 131% surge in incremental stadium visits from the targeted locations, as measured by Simpli.fi’s Geo-Conversion Lift metrics. This increase reflects the percentage difference between users who visited the stadium after being delivered an ad versus those who naturally visited the stadium without being delivered an ad.

Overall, Simpli.fi and the agency teamed up to deliver tangible and valuable results for the pro AAA baseball team. With the ability to track both online and offline conversions from a variety of targeting tactics, the results were clear – more ticket sales and more gameday attendees.

Interested in taking your programmatic advertising to the next level? Get in touch at hi@simpli.fi or contact your Simpli.fi representative.