The Challenge
As a young auction company that accumulates pennies from transactional bids, for10cents.com needed to capture the attention of new customers who have never heard of its unusual “penny auction” business model while keeping a tight rein on its marketing costs. This type of e-commerce is also known as entertainment shopping, because it combines the thrill of strategically bidding on items with the opportunity to purchase brand new, highly desirable products at extremely discounted prices (often up to 95% off retail). Products range from high-end electronics to designer fashion accessories.

Higher traffic leads to more auction activity, which means more excitement for bidders, more credibility with potential consumers, higher prices for happy sellers, and ultimately more profit for the company. Consumers register with the site and purchase packages of “BIDs,” which cost up to 15¢ each. Each successive BID extends the remaining auction time by 30, 15, 10 or six seconds to give everyone an equal opportunity to outbid the last bidder. The last person to bid on the item before the clock runs out wins the auction.

While the company has found success reaching new customers by buying relevant keywords on Yahoo! Sponsored Search, competition for online retail keywords can be intense. “We needed additional ways to get our ads in front of potential customers at a lower cost per acquisition,” says Arthur Gronus, Marketing Director at for10cents.com.

The Solution
For10cents.com used Yahoo!’s My Display Ads, the customizable banner advertising solution that requires no creative development costs, to lower its cost per acquisition. For10cents.com’s Yahoo! account manager set up a campaign simultaneously on Yahoo! Mail, the Yahoo! network, and the Right Media Exchange to see which worked best.

“The price was high in the beginning, but our account manager helped us bring it down by optimizing the campaign and tweaking the creative,” Gronus says.

The auction site saw a dramatic improvement after it started demographic targeting for people over the age of 35. The next significant boost followed the introduction of a retargeting campaign, in which people who clicked through to for10cents.com but didn’t register were served an ad the next time they accessed any site on the Yahoo! network.

The Results
Demographic targeting easily proved its value to for10cents.com by helping it reach only the customers it wanted. When it turned on demographic targeting, for10cents.com’s cost per acquisition plummeted to roughly 10% of what it was before. Conversion rates grew from “just a couple of clicks a day,” to 4.45% on Yahoo! Mail and 7.63% on the retargeting campaign.

For10cents.com says Yahoo! My Display Ads reaches far beyond people who are already searching for auctions. The visuals of a display ad bring in new consumers who are unaware of “penny auction” sites.

About for10cents.com: Launched in July 2009, for10cents.com is an Internet auction service based in Park Ridge, Illinois. It auctions a variety of products, from electronics to fashion accessories at discounted prices.

When your reputation depends on providing fresh, tasty, and convenient products, you can’t dawdle when it comes to customer service. Data becomes important in not only knowing what the customer wants, but also for getting them through the door. So Dunkin’ Donuts went online with a national Yahoo! campaign to gather data to drive in store sales; a strategy that franchisees can also use at the local level.

The Challenge
Dunkin’ Donuts uses purchase data to increase sales and target its consumers. The avid Dunkin’ Donuts customer, for example, visits the franchise several times a week and spends twice as much as the average customer. The light customer, on the other hand, spends less than 25% of the average spend.

The company primarily gathers its purchase behavior data through its Dunkin’ Donuts Perks Card (DD Perks), a rechargeable loyalty card that tracks data such as transaction amounts and time of day for purchases. Dunkin’ Donuts analyzes this data along with the information it gathers about its customers through website enrollments, gift card registrations, and point-of-purchase promotions to drive sales.

“Even if it’s a light customer, the database gives us valuable information about how we should be communicating with them,” says David E. Tryder, Director of Interactive & Relationship Marketing at Dunkin’ Donuts. “Given that opportunity we can grow that relationship and therefore grow the revenue contribution of these customers.” Dunkin’ Donuts thus set out to quintuple its customer database.

The Solution
Although the company has a history of using print and television, Dunkin’ Donuts turned to Yahoo! because online marketing provided more accountability and engagement for the campaign.

“You will know exactly how many people enrolled and how much you spent. You also know that it’s an efficient spend because you know those people are engaged, they opted in to get that communication, so they’re more likely to pay attention. Online is a persuasive tool, rather than a blunt instrument like broadcast,” says Tryder.

Yahoo! helped Dunkin’ Donuts run a 41 day display campaign with promotions to encourage customers to enroll in its DD Perks program. Yahoo! Account Manager Steven Schmitt worked with Dunkin’ Donuts to implement behavioral targeting and to continually optimize the campaign to increase its performance.

The Results
The campaign garnered over 16,000 sign-ups and through continual optimization, enrollment increased 300% between the first 14 days and the last 14 days of the campaign.

“Although we’ve had more experience advertising offline, over the years Yahoo! has done a great job of helping us make that transition to online marketing,” says Tryder. “I am confident that we would have seen an even greater increase in enrollment rates if the campaign had continued to run.”

Local franchisees can leverage the success of the national campaign. “It’s critically important that franchisees use targeted local marketing channels,” explains Tryder. With demographic, geographic, and behavioral targeting, Yahoo! can help Field Marketing Managers and franchisees go online and provide that relevant and local messaging for consumers. He continues, “There will be even more CPA improvements when we introduce additional enrollment benefits. I can’t give you any details yet, but there will be some real perks in Perks.”

About Dunkin Donuts: Dunkin’ Donuts is the largest coffee and baked goods chain in the world providing customers with high quality coffee, bagels, donuts and other baked goods since 1950.

— Christine Tseng

Whether it’s picking the right resolution for a LCD TV or the perfect color for a couch, savvy shoppers know that “one size fits all” doesn’t always apply. So it’s no surprise that Getprice, Australia’s leading independent shopping comparison site, uses Yahoo!’s new Network Distribution tools to obtain optimum results by tailoring which Yahoo! sites and Yahoo! partner sites its ads appear on.

To read the rest of this article, switch over to the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

— The Team

Riffing on our case study on Value City Furniture (“Getting Your Offline Online”), MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan writes:

“Advertisers have finally begun to consider search retargeting as a way to increase accuracy when targeting ads. They’re still not ecstatic about the increase in price, compared with serving up plain old ads, but how can they ignore talk of campaigns that begin with $168 cost per acquisition and fall to $29, and .93 percent conversion rates that rise to 6.93 percent within one month?”

Sullivan interviews David Zinman, vice president and general manager for display advertising at Yahoo!, who notes, “It’s becoming easier for advertisers to take a data set and activate it against all inventory in the company’s target markets.”

And our own Gabe Elliott, the Yahoo! account executive who was essential to Value City Furniture’s success, leaves this comment:

“This is strong evidence that search marketers should not disregard display advertising as a performance solution. With the limited scalability of search, many of my clients here at Yahoo! are looking for additional solutions to efficiently increase revenues, and are finding great success with targeted display ads.”

Read the full article on MediaPost.

— The Team

How do you get across the idea that a century-old brand is even more relevant today than it was 100 years ago, and to an online audience? Quaker Oats worked with Yahoo! to reach consumers with that message, and found that online exposure led to better awareness—and more intent to buy—offline.

The Challenge
Almost everyone has heard of Quaker Oats. It’s one of the most venerable food brands in the United States, having registered its first trademark in 1877. But while Quaker Oats’ “Old Quaker” logo and its iconic oats canisters are easily recognizable symbols (in fact, according to the company, they have about 100 percent household recall), the brand wasn’t always seen as having relevance in today’s culture. “People tended to think of Quaker Oats as their mom’s brand, and we wanted to change that,” says Janice Tennant, Sr. Marketing Manager, Quaker Equity at PepsiCo, Quaker Oats’ parent company. That’s why Quaker hired the firm, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to create its “Go Humans Go” integrated campaign, designed to show the nutritional value of the Quaker oat to today’s audience and to create new relevance and customer loyalty for the brand. Yahoo! partnered with OMD Worldwide to execute the digital campaign.

The Solution
Quaker and Yahoo! ran a U.S.-targeted campaign across the Yahoo! homepage. The floating ad featured an animated and interactive champion flying a jet pack, fueled by Quaker Oats canisters, across the page. The campaign ran for two half-days, a week apart. To help track the campaign results, Yahoo! partnered with media measurement specialist The Nielsen Company.

Key to the campaign’s success was its integration into the Yahoo! homepage. This helped Quaker to “fill the top of the funnel” of the campaign with the mass audience on Yahoo!—a homepage audience of more than 156 million users in the U.S. when the campaign went live. “FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC. It’s almost as if Yahoo! is the fifth network,” Tennant says.

The Results
Reaction to the campaign was swift and positive. “Best ad by far in the longest time!” said one Yahoo! user. “I loved opening my computer and seeing ‘Go Humans Go’—what a way to start my morning at work. Will need to try a Quaker Oats product in the morning. Sold me!” The numbers back up the user feedback. Quaker had more than 70 million impressions each time the ad ran, well beyond their expectations. Moreover, search volume on Quaker Oats on both days went up 28 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

For Quaker, though, the numbers describing the impact of the ads offline were what really mattered. According to Nielsen:

• The campaign showed a marked increase in incremental sales as ad exposure brought about more buyers, greater purchase frequency, and higher quantities on the average purchase occasion.
• Dollar and ounce sales for the brand were 77 percent greater among households exposed to the advertising when compared to households that were not exposed.
• The short-term sales impact to the brand was more than $1.2 million.

Overall, Quaker Oats’ campaign on Yahoo! yielded greater awareness and reach, deeper penetration and increased sales. It also demonstrated to Quaker, which hasn’t traditionally done much digital marketing, the effectiveness of Internet advertising. “We found we could get similar exposure to users online as we could on some television networks,” says Tennant. “And what we showed them online directly affected their behavior in the stores.”

About Quaker Oats: Quaker brands have been around for over a century. They are symbols of quality, great taste, and nutrition. It is among the four largest manufacturers of cereals with popular brands like Cap’n Crunch® and Life®, in addition to Quaker Oats. Quaker is a wholly-owned subsidiary of PepsiCo.

About OMD Worldwide: OMD specializes in direct marketing campaign planning, digital media, and consumer research and metrics. The agency is a unit of Omnicom Media.

About Goodby, Silverstein & Partners: A unit of the Omnicom Group, G.S. & P. is one of the world’s most respected and most awarded advertising agencies. The company has over 500 employees serving a broad array of national and international accounts.

About Nielsen: The Nielsen Company is a global information and media company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information.

— The Team

What if you could increase the performance of your next ad campaign without spending an additional dime? Well, you can. Recent Yahoo! analysis of Nielsen data suggests that’s what will happen if you shift part of your television ad budget online. For traditional broadcast TV advertisers, online sometimes remains a mystery. But carefully integrating online into a traditional TV ad campaign can lead to greater returns for no additional cost.

Television is still a great way to reach a large audience. But the cost to reach TV audiences has risen dramatically even as audiences shrink. In 2000, TV cost per thousand (CPM) per household was around $14. In 2008, it was just above $26. Additionally, TV viewing remained flat between 2004 and 2009 while Internet usage among North American households has increased 117 percent over the same period. With numbers like that, it’s no wonder why advertisers are spending more on the Internet. But how should you spend online versus TV?

TV and Internet work together
The answer to that question lies in the synergy of TV and Internet. Academic and market researchers have proven that when TV and online ads are used together, the combined effect is more than the sum of its parts. For instance, a study from Nielsen IAG shows that brand and message recall is twice as effective when using both TV and online advertising.

Nielsen data also showed that frequency of online ads improved TV brand recall. If a user sees just one online exposure prior to the TV ad, brand recall increased by 18 percent. If a user sees 20 or more online exposures prior to the TV ad, brand recall increased more than 50 percent.

A smarter TV-online mix
Now let’s apply this synergy to a real-world scenario. According to a recent Yahoo! analysis of Nielsen data, based on four specific test cases of brands in the entertainment, auto, consumer packaged goods, and retail sectors, a shift in ad allocation from national broadcast TV to online can help you reach more people nationally with the same budget. According to our analysis, a 10 percent to 15 percent shift from TV to online increased reach and significantly lowered cost per point (CPP). A smarter TV-online mix enables you to do all of this while reaching more people simultaneousl in different media.

How the math can work in your favor
The benefits in reach and cost per point were seen in all four test cases. But to better illustrate our analysis,let’s say you’re an automaker and you have a new hybrid car you want to promote. You have a budget of $10 million. If you spent the entire $10 million on TV you would likely reach 68 percent of the potential buyers in your specific marketing target. This translates to 8.5 million adults 18-49 who are also new car prospects. But if you allocated 90 percent of your budget to TV and spent the other 10 percent online, you would reach 70 percent of your potential buyers—which translates to 8.9 million potential buyers–for the same cost! Not only that, your cost per point would drop from $41,610 to $38,290. How’s that for efficient planning?

Summary
TV works. But it works even better when it is paired with online. A 10 percent to 15 percent shift of the TV budget to online improved performance in our test cases without any additional spend. Want to see how shifting advertising budget from TV to online can work for you? Visit us at Yahoo! Advertising.

— The Team

When Chrysler wanted to promote the complete redesign of the Dodge Ram truck, it looked to Yahoo! to provide the scale and scope to achieve results that were as big and burly as the truck itself.

The Challenge
For a vehicle to operate at maximum efficiency, all of its many parts have to work in unison. Transmission, engine, electrical system, tires, and brakes: when all the pieces are in tip-top shape, the result is pure bliss on the open road.

Similarly, when Chrysler wanted to promote its 2009 Dodge Ram truck, the company looked for a marketing solution that offered many parts, all working in harmony to drive prospective customers to the “Dodge Ram Challenge” website.

The “Dodge Ram Challenge” was an overarching campaign in which the Ram tested against competing vehicles to prove its toughness and quality. The 2009 edition of the truck represented a complete redesign, and the fourth generation of the model since 1981. This latest version of the Ram featured a number of major innovations and improvements, including a new hemi engine option, new suspension, a new four-door cab style offering, and the Rambox, a storage system that allows for secure storage inside the bed walls of the truck.

The Solution
Dodge realized that digital and online media would play an important role in building awareness of the new Ram. The company wanted a marketing partner that could deliver a tremendous amount of traffic to the Ram Challenge website, offer powerful targeting and social media capabilities, and the ability to stream videos at different touchpoints. Given these needs, Dodge turned its wheels towards Yahoo!.

“Dodge allocated a significant percentage of its online budget to Yahoo! and the goal of using Yahoo!’s vast online capabilities to complement Dodge’s offline efforts,” says Steve Larson, Yahoo! account executive for Dodge Ram. “We helped Dodge create a branded microsite, RamChallenge.com, that lived on Yahoo!. Webisodes of the Ram Challenge premiered here, and could be viewed 24 hours a day.”

Yahoo! utilized numerous properties to drive traffic to the microsite and to Dodge’s own website, including the Yahoo.com home page on Election Day (one of the highest trafficked days ever on Yahoo!), Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Answers, Flickr, Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Autos. In the same way that a large advertiser would use the top four television networks to reach different demographics and audiences, Yahoo! was, in the words of the client, utilized as a “fifth network.”

The Results
Despite introducing the truck in a challenging economic environment with skyrocketing gas prices, Yahoo! exceeded Dodge’s expectations. The campaign received 1.2 billion total impressions, with 471 million of those impressions from shoppers who were in the market for a car. This drove 770,000 clicks to the RamChallenge.com site and 831,000 clicks to Dodge.com. The term “Dodge Ram Challenge” experienced a 133 percent increase in Yahoo! searches, while the term “Dodge Ram” experienced a 74 percent increase.

There was also a strong correlation between home page impressions and click and search behavior. Users who saw the Ram home page ads were 200% more likely to search on Dodge Ram terms, 213 percent more likely to click on a Dodge sponsored search ad, and 341 percent more likely to click on Dodge’s organic search listings.

“Dodge took the best of what Yahoo! has to offer to create an ecosystem that would drive people down the sales funnel,” says Larson. “Traditional television networks only provide the top part of that funnel; but with Groups, Flickr, Answers and all the rest, we created a total Yahoo! ecosystem to drive awareness of the Ram. That’s what Dodge liked most about our solution.”

About Chrysler
Chrysler is an American automobile manufacturer. In addition to its line of Chrysler and Dodge cars, its brand portfolio also includes Jeep.

—The Team

(Totally sweet ride image courtesy Dodge.)

Value City Furniture was used to reaching its consumers in a traditional way, through weekly print ad circulars and television. But when Value City used Yahoo! My Display Ads with retargeting, the company was surprised by the success it found in using online advertising to drive customer conversions and in-store sales.

The Challenge
Value City Furniture, owned by parent company American Signature, Inc. is one of the largest furniture retailers in the U.S. with annual sales of $1 billion and 128 stores. The brand wanted to make it easier for prospects to peruse its offerings, register with its website and apply for credit through its online channel. Most of all, it wanted its online activities to drive in-store sales. “Traffic to our website is critical to the success of our business, but what matters most is converting that online customer into an in-store customer,” says Brandon McInnis, Value City Furniture’s Director of Internet Marketing.

The Solution
To attract customers, Value City Furniture developed a promotional sweepstake that offered prospects a chance to win one of six $2,500 shopping sprees. To help promote this effective yet traditional marketing approach online, McInnis turned to Yahoo!

Working closely with Gabriel Elliott, one of Yahoo!’s search account executives, Value City Furniture crafted a comprehensive online campaign across the Yahoo! Network using Yahoo! My Display Ads with retargeting.

Elliot used the display ad templates of Yahoo! My Display Ads to help Value City Furniture develop display creative at no creative development cost. “At first I was skeptical of the value of display,” says McInnis. “But I think a visual representation of our product in an ad is essential to getting people to click on it.” When customers responded to the promotion, Value City Furniture captured data that allowed the company to prescreen applicants for its private-label credit card offering. It also used the data to retarget visitors (who engaged with the ad but hadn’t yet converted) with additional ads.

The Results
Value City Furniture wanted to increase registrations, pre-approved credit applications and in-store sales through its online channel. Using Yahoo! My Display Ads with retargeting, combined with a Sponsored Search campaign, Value City Furniture dramatically exceeded all three of its goals. The company saw its site/sweepstakes registrations increase by 650 percent. Though the campaign focused on Yahoo! My Display Ads with retargeting, it also included a branded search terms component via Sponsored Search that was vital to its success. Here’s the breakdown:

Yahoo! My Display Ads: When the campaign launched, cost per acquisition (CPA) was $168 with a conversion rate of .93 percent. Over the period of a month, CPA fell to $29 and conversions leapt to 6.93% through continual optimization.

Retargeting: When the campaign started, Value City was getting a 5 percent conversion rate, with a CPA of $32. After one month, Value City was getting a 14.5 percent conversion rate and a CPA of just $12.

Yahoo! Sponsored Search: Yahoo! and Value City Furniture developed a Sponsored Search campaign that included some 200 branded keywords to help promote the sweepstakes and its overall business. It found that display drove search activity with a 168 percent increase in branded term searches. As a result, the company increased its display budget by 30 percent.

“From my perspective,” says McInnis, “Yahoo! was instrumental in making this happen. They were always there to help and provide positive suggestions for improving our results. The competition doesn’t do that.”

About Value City Furniture: American Signature, Inc., Value City Furniture’s parent company, is one of the largest furniture retailers in the U.S. with 128 stores and 5,000 employees throughout the East, Midwest and Southeast. The company was founded in the 1930s.

—The Team

Though aimed at Yahoo! Sponsored Search advertisers, display advertisers can learn something from this case study as well—and, let’s face it, the wall between the two is thinning so fast that, pretty soon, you won’t be able to tell the difference. If you’re a big display advertiser, it simply doesn’t make sense not to have a search campaign.

In this case study, mid-market search marketer, Don Tuttle, shows how he uses Yahoo! Sponsored Search’s pay-per-click tools and demographic targeting to achieve a positive ROI.

For more, click over to the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

Sitewire, a digital media agency whose clients include the Darden Restaurant Group, which runs Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and other popular restaurant chains, wanted to ease its search marketing workload. The company expressed its concern to Yahoo! and became one of the first Sponsored Search clients to try the beta version of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, an application that allows users to easily and cost effectively create and manage Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns.

Learn how the company saved time and effort over at the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.