How to increase search traffic using hourly digital billboards and CPC optimisation

One of the main challenges of advertising on billboards, be it print or digital, is to properly track the impact of your campaign. In this case study, we’re going to share what worked and what didn’t – so you can learn and adapt your future Digital Out of Home campaigns.

The company bfound is a local digital marketing solutions agency based in Dubai, UAE. Their clients are mostly local small to medium businesses that are trying to increase the number of leads and potential clients.

Now, more than ever, running a digital agency is a huge challenge. Clients are bombarded with options and despite having a superior product, sometimes you don’t manage to break through the clutter in order to reach your audience with the right message in order to build the trust you need for them to choose you.

bfound created a very simple animated visual to showcase the variety of services.

This ad ran between 9-10 AM, 12-1 PM, as well as 1-3 PM on select days for only two weeks – meaning the company could optimize their spend and not book hours that they didn’t consider relevant for their target audience. The campaign ran on 50 screens in various indoor locations in Dubai, targeting mostly entrepreneurs and a general white collar audience.

How can you measure the impact of this small 10 days campaign, you might ask. It’s an extremely valid question. To isolate, we looked at search and direct traffic on campaign days compared to the previous month. Here’s what worked:

• +31.95% CPC search traffic in campaign days (one month before, search CPC campaigns were optimised, yet results increased considerably in the campaign period compared to the previous month)
• +2.85% overall traffic in campaign period compared to the month before

And since the purpose of a case study is to show learnings, meaning things that did not pan out, here’s what didn’t work:

• Direct leads calling the unique phone number – as expected, digital billboards, unless they go viral online, do not provide direct leads. However, they can support online or mobile ads by building brand trust, leading to higher CTR and even lower CPC due to increased ad score
• Direct traffic – similar to direct leads, people remembered the company, but not the website name, so they searched for the name online, then ended up on the website via their preferred search engine

This was bfound’s first digital billboard campaign. It managed to treat the campaign as similar as possible to its online marketing efforts and saw that together with a traditional performance campaign, Digital Out of Home can provide a significant uplift despite using a small optimised budget.

This campaign was made possible through Elevision’s “Support your Local Community” fund and was programmatically planned through Blindspot’s DSP platform, supported by Broadsign‘s SSP.