YP, The Real Yellow Pages

YP’s digital team in Burbank, CA needed help with launching and scaling a new product, internally referred to as, “Scan”. Unlike the existing BAU products, Scan was envisioned as a free offer which targeted the lower intent and conversions segment. The product launch was expected to help maximize YP’s ROI, while at the same time increase the number and quality of leads.

The goal is to generate leads for the Scan offering, at CPL target lower than BAU’s, while maintaining consistent lead volume from the core revenue generators.
The Scan leads would be subject to up-sell offers via email, direct mail, and sales calls – requiring the support of the Sales Team.
The initial channels to be used for the launch included Search, Social and Display.
Small scale internal tests had been run by the in-house team in Paid Search, targeting a few Brand keywords, as well as handpicked Non-Brand ones. The initial results had shown a promisingly lower CPC and CPL.
Cannibalization among products offerings existed, especially in Paid Search (Google Adwords).
In addition, major tracking issues reported erroneous attribution.

In Search, a meticulous analysis of the Google Adwords account was necessary to help property segment the audience. The team selected low intent and “free” type of terms, while auditing the keyword pool and making modifications to eliminate cannibalization.

• Brand keywords were found to be more effective for the paid offering (BAU); thus, were discontinued for Scan, except when combined with the term “free” or “no cost”.
• The team reduced the pool of Broad match keywords, switching them to Exact and Phrase and as a result observed more leads coming in, at a lower cost.
• Through additional research, a new pool of valuable terms was identified – resulting in even more volume, at below target CPL.
• The team optimized and customized the creative, ad copy, landing page and all factors raising Quality Scores. The result: improved efficiency, and drop in CPL.
• Bid adjustments for mobile, geo and demographics (gender, age) additionally pushed the CPL figures down due to lower cost per click. In terms of targeting by gender, visual site links were tested and the most effective creative was used in Display advertising.

In Display, for the contextual campaigns the team used the same segmentation logic and keyword targeting tactics as for Search. This helped expand the reach and improve targeting.

• New custom creative was subject to multiple A/B testing for the entire duration of the campaign.
• Remarketing was a major volume generator. It peaked in the second part of the campaign, when the momentum was fully built. This strategy, combined with continual optimization tactics drove the CPL figure to below target CPL; thus, exceeding expectations.
• A plethora of unanticipated legacy tracking issues resulting in attribution errors and misleading data was identified and tacked by the team.
• Insightful data and cross-channel learnings i.e. from Search and Social, and vice versa, further brought the desired outcomes in Display.

Once the team reached the target cost per lead, we scaled up and continually optimized based on performance, daily, for the duration of the campaign.

In Social, scalable levers similar to those for Search and Display with main focus on audience segmentation, lookalike modeling and customized messaging were used.

• The team conducted a Social quality analysis of prior tests and current paid product campaigns.
• We tested the audiences to see what we can get out of them.
• The messaging was targeted by vertical then scaled on Mobile utilizing lookalike audiences.
• Remarketing campaigns were a major contributor in reaching the set goals.
• Notably, the team was able to identify efficient strategy and tactics for YP to upsell its Scan product without having to rely exclusively on the Sales team. This was discovered during the testing of user experience flow on the landing pages, when we noticed an opportunity to present an option of paid service alongside the free offer – all done online, saving resources and no Sales team involvement.
• Additionally, segmentation by vertical was tested and scaled – resulting in more personalized messaging, increased relevance and engagement with the YP Scan audience.