KG Media, Indonesia’s largest publishing conglomerate, needed a better understanding of their readers to deliver better results to advertisers. They used Google Analytics 360 to learn more about their travel audience, specifically those people who were researching travel, but hadn’t yet bought airline tickets. They then created an audience list to reach these people and ran a Programmatic Guaranteed campaign in Google Ad Manager with an airline advertiser to show highly-relevant ads to them. This approach helped Kompas, one of KG Media properties, increase CPMs by 25 percent and the advertiser lower cost per flight search by 80 percent.
Staying competitive in a crowded advertising market
KG Media wanted to increase their CPMs in a saturated advertising market. Their high-quality content helped them create engaged audience, which loved to spend time on their websites. However, they needed to better understand behaviour of their online readers to improve advertisers' performance on their site. With data, KG Media knew they could provide a better experience for advertisers and readers alike. Advertisers could reach well-defined audiences on Kompas sites, and site readers could see highly-relevant ads.
KG Media started their project with the Google News Initiative (GNI), a program that helps news organizations navigate an increasingly complex digital ecosystem across all platforms. One of GNI’s goals is helping the news industry use data and analytics to deliver sustainable, bottom-line impact on their business. With the help of the GNI, Kompas gained data insights that are helping to drive performance.
Data-led approach
KG Media implemented Google Analytics 360 to learn more about their readers. They focused on the travel segment of their readership, specifically those people who were researching travel, but hadn’t yet bought airline tickets. Analytics 360 helped Kompas analyze reader signals about travel interests and define audience segments based on reader intent. Audience signals included content consumed about domestic or international destinations, hotels mentioned in articles, and frequency and recency of site sessions. It took about one month to understand the two percent of KG Media total monthly active users that made up the in-market travel audience segment.
Bringing insights to advertisers
The company turned to Programmatic Guaranteed in Google Ad Manager to pair their newly-found audience insights with premium ad inventory. Programmatic Guaranteed automates negotiation and sales of direct-sold inventory, and Kompas used this system to work with a regional airline looking to increase conversions while decreasing cost-per-contact for their ads. The airline advertiser ran a campaign on a KG Media assets for four weeks
Results and looking forward
Executing the campaign using Programmatic Guaranteed gave the airline advertiser access to premium ad placements not available in the open auction, which drove higher user attention and response rates. At the close of the campaign, the advertiser saw significantly better performance with their Programmatic Guaranteed campaign versus a conventional programmatic campaign, with their cost per flight search falling 80 percent.
After achieving success with this campaign, Kompas created more travel content as well as new sub-segments for budget, luxury, international, and local travel to drive more revenue. This resulted in an additional 25 percent CPM increase.
Kompas Gramedia is proud to be an early adopter of this data-driven approach to audience selling in Southeast Asia. They’re expanding their approach to other audience interest segments, ranging from entertainment to politics to technology to sports. They’ve also moved to a more sophisticated segmentation model, tailoring their approach for large advertisers and creating sub-segments for products relevant to annual events such as the World Cup.