South African Tourism Reaches Qualified Users with Lookalike Audiences and Lowers CPA by 20%

Category

Travel

Success Story

South African Tourism’s goal is to educate travel enthusiasts from around the world about South Africa as a travel destination.

Overview

Together with their agency, Universal McCann, the tourism group partnered with Outbrain, the leading native discovery platform, to distribute high-quality content to their target audience. The content on their website and the native ads they developed for the “Start your Safari now” campaign showcased the beauty of South Africa. Ultimately, the target was to reach a qualified and engaged audience.

Solution

South African Tourism ran a multi-step campaign. First, they amplified their travel content across Outbrain’s premium publisher network and identified a custom audience of users most engaged with their content.

In the next phase, they used Outbrain’s Lookalike Audiences feature to target more users with similar attributes as the custom audience, at scale, across the Outbrain publisher network.

Results

As a result of this sophisticated targeting approach, they were able to reach a CPA (defined as a qualified lead) 20% lower than the campaign goal.

In addition to this sales-driven campaign, South Africa Tourism also initiated a campaign to drive quality visits to their information pages. With Outbrain’s proprietary interest and behavioral data they were able to reach a Cost-Per-Visit (defined as 20 seconds or more dwell time on site) 44% lower than the initial goal. In total, the campaign delivered several hundred thousand new and engaged visitors from Outbrain in the course of six months. Furthermore, the campaign achieved many newsletter subscriptions and sweepstake participants.

Results by Numbers

  • 20% Lower CPA with Lookalike Audiences
  • 44% Lower Cost-Per-Visit (time on site: >20 sec.)

The Outbrain campaign quickly emerged as the best performer across all our native channels. With Lookalike Audiences, we knew that we would reach users who really are interested in our content. The average time-on-site and the number of page views per session were above average. In addition, we were able to inspire numerous people to travel to South Africa for a very advantageous CPA.“

Luisa Keuler, Group Head Planning, Universal McCann

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