Scotts sees 95pc jump in high-value users via programmatic mobile ads
NEW YORK ? Lawn and garden care marketer The Scotts Co. achieved 60 percent beyond its goal for application installs through a programmatic mobile advertising campaign that relied on data for better control, according to an executive from Fiksu at the MMA Mobile Automation and Programmatic Leadership Forum.
The executive explained that the app install push was supported through thousands of smaller campaigns targeted to various groups, and surprised Scotts Lawn when consumers outside of its goal demographic showed much more positive results. Scotts Lawn immediately readjusted its strategy to target these new demographics, and ended up with 95 percent more high-value users.
"Native worked best, not necessarily with Facebook but within RTV," said Spencer Scott, chief revenue officer at Fiksu. "But video crushed it, being able to explain to the consumer how the app worked, what they would be doing led to the best performance from a KPI perspective.
"So our programmatic integrations are all about video," he said. "So we want access to native and we want access to video."
Fertilizing success
Scotts launched a mobile ad campaign to prompt more app downloads, attempting to get users to interact with the brand by sending in pictures of their lawn to receive expert advice. The campaign relied on native and video advertising, paired with programmatic data, to walk lawn owners through its mobile app lawn-assistance features.
Mobile video proved to be an effective driver, with many users installing and interacting with the app after viewing step-by-step instructions.
Mr. Scott explained that when the campaign first launched, the amount of new users it generated was much more than expected, causing Scotts Lawn to be overwhelmed with the amount of new user-generated content sent its way. Due to the extensive control the advertising format gave the agency over the campaign, team members were able to immediately scale back until Scotts Lawn was prepared for the massive success the next day.
Mobile push
Scotts Lawn was able to go after consumers most likely to download by updating the campaign along the way through data acquisition and targeting groups who generated the most high-valued users.
"One of the interesting things that came up, is that we had set up thousands of campaigns, and they had a fairly good idea of what their target audience would be," Mr. Scott said. "But we wanted to cast a wide net and one of the things we discovered very quickly is that the best performing audience was outside the original audience they had asked us to target.
"So when we gave that feedback to them, there was a bit of scurrying on their part to change the television buys and the print buys to start to go after that audience more holistically other than just focusing on mobile," he said.