National Senior Living Chain Expands Web Traffic With Localized Targeting From TEGNA and Simpli.fi
Overview
ADVERTISER OVERVIEW
A national senior living chain with communities in the Northeast, South, and Midwest wanted to promote 26 of its locations to users in nearby areas
KEY FACTS
Sought to (1) increase traffic to the advertiser’s website to generate leads, (2) leverage localized targeting for 26 senior living communities, and (3) capitalize on behavioral targeting from Simpli.fi to reach users interested in senior living options.
Devising a Localized Programmatic Strategy
A national senior living chain with communities in the Northeast, South, and Midwest wanted to promote 26 of its locations to users in nearby areas. It hoped to reach users who were already interested in senior housing options and showcase the luxury amenities its communities offer by using pre-roll video ads. With vast differences between each location, the senior living chain recognized that a one-size-fits-all strategy would not work and that it needed a customized approach to each individual market. Therefore, it collaborated with its local TEGNA station and Simpli.fi to serve localized pre-roll ads to relevant users based on their online behavior and track online conversions.
The advertiser wanted to increase traffic to its website at a low cost per visit (CPV) to generate business leads, and it hoped to review its digital performance metrics on a location-by-location basis. Simpli.fi and TEGNA crafted a localized strategy of Search Retargeting, Keyword Contextual targeting, Category Contextual targeting, and Site Retargeting. They knew that these tactics would allow the advertiser to reach users who were interested in senior living facilities, while also providing significant flexibility to optimize each community’s performance.
Targeting With Localization
TEGNA and Simpli.fi set out to execute the senior living chain’s strategy as 26 individual campaigns—one for each location. This allowed the advertiser to highlight specific facility amenities to interested users in nearby postal codes using 30-second pre-roll ads tailored to the corresponding market. It also enabled the Simpli.fi team to provide the advertiser with digital metrics on an individual community basis.
Keyword-Level Transparency
Together, Simpli.fi and TEGNA implemented Search Retargeting and Keyword Contextual targeting by deploying custom lists of 1,400+ keywords per market to retarget users based on the keywords they were searching and the content they were reading. These included terms such as “retirement home,” “nursing home,” “seniors,” “retirees,” and more.
Simpli.fi’s and TEGNA’s approach provided full transparency into the data guiding each impression, including why users were targeted, the key- word-level costs to reach them, and when they searched for, or read, relevant keywords.
Simpli.fi’s unstructured data network targeted users at the keyword-level rather than relying on pre-packaged segments, thereby ensuring precise targeting without impression waste. With pre-packaged audience segments, the senior living chain would have had no insight into who was in the segment, when they were added to it, or why they were added, making it easy to serve impressions to irrelevant users. In contrast, Simpli.fi’s and TEGNA’s approach provided full transparency into the data guiding each impression, including why users were targeted, the keyword-level costs to reach them, and when they searched for, or read, relevant keywords.
With transparency into exactly when a user searched for, or read, a relevant keyword, Simpli.fi and TEGNA could optimize each campaign based on its recency setting. Recency determines the length of time between users completing relevant actions and when they are served ads. Therefore, Simpli.fi adjusted each campaign’s recency setting anywhere from one week to one month in order to reach relevant users within an optimal time frame to generate website visits.
These keyword-level insights also helped Simpli.fi optimize each community based on local differences in keyword performance. For example, the term “retirement” performed poorly for a Texas community, while “elderly” performed poorly for a Kansas
community. Simpli.fi removed these terms from their respective campaigns to improve their performance. Without this localized approach, the advertiser would not have been able to take into account the differences in keyword performance across each property or see these distinctions reflected in each location’s reporting metrics.
Additional Behavioral Targeting
For all 26 communities, TEGNA and Simpli.fi also implemented Category Contextual targeting and Site Retargeting. The former enabled the senior living chain to reach users on relevant webpages, such as those related to senior health, retirement planning, arthritis, and more. Much like with Search Retargeting, the localized approach enabled Simpli.fi to adjust each community’s targeted page contexts as needed to improve the performance of individual communities.
Furthermore, Site Retargeting reached users who indicated interest in the senior living chain by visiting its website. The localized approach made it possible to serve website visitors with ads for the communities that were located closest to them, thus helping the chain re-engage consumers at the bottom of the sales funnel.
Generating Leads
The ability to target users based on their online behaviors and individually optimize each community’s performance delivered far better results than a broad national campaign. Over the course of 11 months, the campaign produced 12,267 visits to the advertiser’s website for a CPV of $4.06, making it ideal for lead generation. In fact, the chain confirmed that it saw a 107% increase in internet leads and a 17.5% reduction in its cost per lead year-over-year. It also reported a 75.7% increase in website sessions Furthermore, the campaign produced a CPC of $1.35—44% lower than Simpli.fi’s average CPC for the same industry—and a CTR of 0.42%—triple the industry average.
The advertiser particularly appreciated TEGNA’s and Simpli.fi’s granular reporting capabilities and the detailed analytics it received for each individual community. The chain was so pleased with these results that it increased the campaign’s budget by more than 700% and renewed the campaign for all 26 senior living communities for the following year.