Learn How Papa John's Drove Sales and Rose Brand Awareness With a Cross-Device Campaign

Video

David Carey, Digital Marketing Manager at Papa John's, discusses the strategies the food delivery chain used to engage with local customers in the UK.

This clip is from our webcast "From Programmatic Display to Cross-device: How Papa John’s is adopting the latest technologies" in association with Rakuten Marketing. Click here to watch the full on-demand webcast.

Let's start with our objectives. We wanted to run a campaign to support the launch of our first store in the city of York. Our main focus was on raising brand awareness and driving sales through digital devices, and this is where we really leveraged Rakuten Marketing's technology and their expertise in mobile-first and cross-device targeting. We needed to reach a targeted audience within a 3-mile radius of the store, which is roughly our delivery radius. That's why we looked to implement a hyperlocal campaign, meaning we could engage with a specific audience in a specific location at a granular level. We set our catch area to 3 miles around the store using geofencing capabilities, however as we've discussed, mobile does not mean cross-device, and because of the nature of the Papa Johns delivery business, we knew that customer who would be most receptive to the brand message would be those that browse across multiple devices, both at home or on the go, as the process of buying pizza can be both planned or impulsive, whether it's a "I'm hungry" moment or a night in with friends or "that's a great deal - let's make the most of it" - all of the above. Therefore, we knew that we wanted to reach consumers along the path.

So how did we meet these objectives? With over 50% of all Papa Johns pizzas in the UK ordered from a customers' desktop or mobile device, we identified 2 campaign strategies. Firstly, in order to raise brand awareness in the area, we decided a mobile only campaign was crucial due to the high proportion of purchases now made via mobile. This is where we decided to use the hyperlocal solution, and using Rakuten Marketing's propriety DSP, we used highly targeted, location-based targeting to geofence consumers in a desired 3 mile radius. We used a mixture of prospecting and retargeting solutions focused on page level, contextual targeting for prospecting consumers browsing sports, food, online TV guides and other relevant websites on mobile. For the retargeting portion of the audience, we used a combination of IP address and metro-classifications, which for this case was for Yorkshire, which enabled us to get pinpoint accuracy and ensuring we're onlytargeting users within the specific capture area.

The second method we executed was the cross-device campaign and applying cross-device retargeting solution allowed us to reach consusers moving across different devices within a household, and thanks to the advanced algorithms, it enabled probabilistic joining of devices. A higher proportion of our consumer base book online, and through Rakuten Marketing's own findings, we knew that users will often research on their mobile and then go on to order on a tablet or desktop. We drilled further into the data, applying day parting - we chose time frames we knew when users were most likely to purchase, driving conversions for the brand. Both campaigns were set at lunch time, and also targeted users later in the day around dinner time. The thought process around this cross-device, hyperlocal targeting, specific day parting and the display strategy both retargeting and prospecting were considered highly, and they were designed purposefully to reach the optimal customer in the right way and at the right time.

Moving onto performance - so we achieved incredibly strong results based on the granularity of the campaign. We drew a £2:1 return on ad spend for mobile search retargeting, and an impressive £22:1 return on ad spend for the cross-device campaign. We were able to see that customers initial site activity began on a mobile device, which ultimately led through to a purchase on their desktop device. 40% of orders from the cross-device campaign were made on a different device from where the customer saw the ad, and the biggest purchase journey path of these cross-device orders was between smartphone and desktop rather than smartphone and tablet, but it is interesting to see that 38% of people who started on a tablet converted via a smartphone. This tells us that having your brand visible across devices is highly important, because consumers engage more with a brand when they were targeted across different devices. It was a highly successful campaign, not only resulting in a strong performance, but also revealed quite actionable insight into the consumer purchasing behaviour of Papa John's.

So looking into strategy impact and business transformation - the success of the mobile startegy has been embraced positively by us and the marketing team, with mobile strategy now making up a crucial element of the display campaigns that we run. We realised that viewing our digital channels in silos meant that we were missing out on a key targeting opportunity and subsequently a huge portion of our audience. We've obtained insights into how our customers interact between devices, allowing us to have a better understanding in where to invest our budget and what results in higher returns.