Using Geo-Targeting to Compete in Search

Peapod tasked our team with creating and implementing a search-centric digital campaign across all devices to raise awareness, generate new customer acquisition and increase sales in the greater New York area during summer 2017.   The campaign’s target audience was NYC-area grocery shoppers seeking convenience without sacrificing quality.

The

Challenge

Peapod is a grocery delivery service available in 23 urban markets; each with distinct media plans, promotional cadence, and unique calls-to-action.  The grocery delivery space is also ultra competitive and fast growing, in which American consumers are expected to spend upwards of $100 billion a year on food-at-home items by 2025, according to FMI-Nielson.

To raise awareness, generate new customer acquisition and increase sales, we developed and implemented a hyper-localized digital search campaign across all devices with extreme audience segmentation comprised of three key components:

1. Geography – We targeted 5 distinct hyper geo segments across 200+ zip codes and created specific messaging appropriate to time of year and shopper location. For example, Manhattan residents received messaging about avoiding the heat with at-home grocery delivery, while outer borough residents received messaging about backyard BBQ recipes.
2. Keyword Intent & Landing Page Customization – We customized each shopper’s search experience from beginning to end. Using 137 popular summer recipe terms and more than 2,000 grocery terms, we built specific subcategory campaigns that focused on different interests and key terms in the targeted geo-areas. From there, we segmented each group and created 10 custom landing pages for each group. This robust customization enabled us to land all users on a page that exactly aligned with their initial search term, which increased engagement and conversion rate.
3. Audience Segmentation & Device Behavior – On top of the above strategies, we used RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) to re-engaged users who were not converting on brand terms. To boost the efficiency of our broader search terms, we used Google Match to upload current customer lists in order to generate “Similar Audiences” and build a new audience similar to Peapod’s current customer.  Finally, to ensure maximum visibility to our desired audience, we increased our mobile bids for max impression share in key zip codes in which out-of-home messaging was present.

The

Results

A huge success, we overcame the challenges of the highly competitive NYC grocery delivery market by increasing orders for Peapod far beyond the planned goal while simultaneously achieving improved efficiency.

Orders:  +262% YoY

CPA:  -47% YoY

CTR:  +20% YoY

“Peapod needed to reach and engage a highly specific audience in order to drive new traffic and revenue. January Digital's strategy of robust segmentation and highly targeted messaging led to incredible results in a highly competitive market. We couldn't be happier with the outcome, the team and our longstanding partnership with JD.”

- Carrie Bienkowski, CMO of Peapod