Goodwill used geo-targeted ads to increase store visitation.
Objective and Context:
Goodwill, a workforce nonprofit provider, is composed of local organizations that empower people and help them reach their full potential through career and community services. The revenue from the sale of goods at Goodwill stores funds job placement, career services (such as credentialing and certifications), support services such as childcare, financial education, transportation, and mentoring, transforming the lives of more than 34 million people each year. Driving visitors to Goodwill locations benefits local communities because more than 87 cents of every dollar spent at Goodwill stores nationwide is invested right back into that area to provide job and skills training so people can achieve sustainably better futures through employment.
Goodwill's primary campaign objective was to increase visitation and specifically drive incremental visits to Goodwill store locations to help Goodwill advance its work in communities nationwide.
Goodwill has been a partner of the Ad Council for eight years and has executed many geo-targeted digital campaigns. This campaign, however, was the first to drive incremental visitors to Goodwill locations nationwide.
Target Audience:
The core target audience for the campaign was shoppers between the ages of 25 and 54 within a five-mile radius of a Goodwill location.
Creative Strategy:
Goodwill ran display creative featuring a "Bring Good Home: Shop Now" message with a "Learn How" call to action that directed audiences to the campaign website, where they could learn about the campaign, watch a campaign video, and find the Goodwill location nearest to them.
Custom visitation models used machine learning to identify potential customers with the highest likelihood of visiting the brand. The campaign's targeting worked to intercept the desired consumers (who passed Goodwill locations in their everyday routines) during times when they would have been most receptive to Goodwill messaging.
Overall Campaign Execution:
The Bring Good Home campaign was the first Cost Per Incremental Visit (CPIV) campaign for Goodwill as well as the first campaign designed to drive not only visitation lift but incremental visitation. The CPIV pricing model guarantees that a brand pays only for incremental foot traffic, as verified by a third party. An incremental visit is a physical store visit from a consumer who would not have visited absent receipt of the digital ad, as distinguished from visits which might have happened anyway.
The mobile display campaign was amplified by several custom machine learning solutions. Specifically, Goodwill used machine learning to combine billions of data points to create custom location models to identify and engage consumers with the highest probability of visitation and thereby drive incremental visits. Going further, the brand used real-time geolocation signals to target consumers who were regularly within a given distance of a Goodwill store location. Data scientists used real-time visitation data to focus those models on consumers within the targeting parameters who were most likely to convert and increase incremental visitation throughout the campaign.
Mobile Execution:
The amount of data available on mobile allowed Goodwill to build custom location models based on the geo-targeting parameters. The campaign matched location-based data and ran predictive location targeting to serve ads to audience members who were in certain locations in real time and were deemed likely to take certain actions. This allowed Goodwill to reach the right audience within targeting parameters at the right time and at scale. This approach yielded a superior result to location-based targeting alone.
Additionally, the mobile channel made visitation measurement in real time possible, allowing Goodwill to directly correlate campaign exposure and visits.
The primary KPI for the campaign was incremental visits to Goodwill locations that resulted from ad exposure: The campaign's predictive audience models delivered a 470 percent lift in incremental visitation at 79 percent less than the contracted cost per incremental visit.
