Segmenting The Washington Post’s Online Audience, By Liliana Guzman

Each marketing challenge is different from the others. Sure, there are many similarities across the board, but effective digital advertising is an art form and requires taking a flexible and creative approach.

The Alaska Wilderness League partnered with Canopy to support their high-profile April 2022 Climate Forests advocacy initiative. A primary campaign objective was to retarget approximately 2,000 highly engaged website visitors who had been served ads from The Washington Post encouraging them to visit a dedicated Earth Day petition: https://www.climate-forests.org/earth-day-petition

The first step was to add a site retargeting pixel to the Earth Day petition. This allowed us to collect user audience data from The Washington Post’s April client Forest Campaign. This data was then used to retarget landing page visitors with a followup display site retargeting campaign in May.

Campaign Optimizations

The campaign initially retargeted a primarily Washington D.C. based audience segment who had expressed interest in agriculture and environmental conservation and could be identified from their interaction with The Washington Post campaign.

The campaign was pacing at multiple impression shares for the the first few days after launch. We then added a higher bid cap and by the end of the third week of the campaign we were able to see a stable impression share which allowed us to retarget a wider user base. This shift in tactics resulted in a campaign pacing rate of 100%. In addition, we recommended higher site retargeting bid caps in order to win competitive bids on popular websites which matched our target user base.

In summary, the campaign was a win:

• Results: ~2,000 retargeted petition visitors
• Optimizations: Higher bid caps resulted in 100% pacing
• CTR reached 0.18% which is a significant improvement from initial projections