SeatGeek Overcomes Search Targeting Challenges With Yahoo
by Laurie Sullivan@lauriesullivan, November 9, 2016
Omnichannel campaigns remain one of the biggest challenges that marketers face today, especially for retailers, along with understanding 13- to-24-year-olds and the overlapping Millennial 18- to-34-year-olds.
Add mobile to the top of the checklist, which some say marketers are still not ready to tackle. Courtney McKlveen, VP and industry lead for retail and travel at Yahoo, believes the burdens that brands will endure during the fourth quarter in 2016 will pay off big in 2017. McKlveen referred to how brands, especially retail brands, can address a number of trends including omnichannel marketing opportunities now in the fourth quarter to set them up for success in 2017.
McKlveen said SeatGeek already sees improvements since they began to combine search campaigns with custom audience targeting. And even that required a change in thinking.
When SeatGeek looked for new ways to expand its search advertising strategy it turned to search ads via Yahoo Gemini and custom audience targeting to reach live event fans in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 65 who purchased event tickets online in the past 12 months.
SeatGeek, a ticket marketplace for sports, concert, and theater tickets, sells tickets from third-party vendors and takes a cut of the sale. Although the company is known for being an innovator, it had a difficult time leveraging competitive brand search terms and was focused on a very specific subset of ticket sales to drive traffic to the site.
The goal was to encourage new, high-value customers to visit SeatGeek online and drive purchases. The company processes about $1 million in transactions daily and takes a commission of 8% to 14% on each ticket sales, according to one report.
SeatGeek’s campaign through Yahoo Gemini using audience targeting focused on attracting consumers interested in sports and concerts. The results saw a 107% increase in click-through rates for when first-party data was laid on top of search ads to create audience-targeted traffic and a 16% savings in cost-per-acquisition.
MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily
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