Contextual Targeting during the FIFA World Cup
Meghana Rangarajan, Senior analyst, MiQ, Shashank Bharadwaj, Senior analyst, MiQ, Anirudh Dev, Senior analyst, MiQ
Did you tune in to the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar? If so, you were one of 3.572 billion viewers who watched the competition unfold. With half the world’s population engaged in this tournament, marketers looked for opportunities to capitalize on their interest.
As a programmatic media partner to brands and agencies, MiQ formed a strategy to enable clients to monetize the huge amount of attention the event received. One part of this was contextual targeting powered by MiQ’s partnership with Similarweb.
Here’s how our clients were able to tap into World Cup audiences:
What is contextual targeting?
Contextual targeting is a form of targeted advertising that displays ads based on the content of a website. For example, say you found yourself inspired by the quality football you saw and searched online to learn how you could join a local team. Whilst reading a blog that takes you through the process, you might see an ad for 5-a-side pitches on the same page. Here, the advertisement is contextually relevant to the content of the website. The relevance of this ad increases the chances of attracting potential customers who are already engaged with the topic, leading to a higher likelihood of click-throughs and conversions for the advertiser and therefore more efficient ad spend.
And by using website content to understand which ad to show, contextual targeting is not reliant on third-party cookies. This makes it cookie-less and future-proofed — perfect for Google’s impending cookie deadline!
Enriching the data with Similarweb
Similarweb is a digital intelligence provider. The platform provides web analytics services and offers its users information on their clients’ and competitors’ web traffic and performance.
Through our partnership with Similarweb, MiQ elevates basic contextual signals with vast amounts of granular data collected directly from website owners and internet providers. We sort through the data by building out a matrix of similar sites from any seed domain and score the contextual categories into high, medium and low volume relevant websites using a mixture of site and audience data.
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Examples include:
- Top performing websites or domains in an industry
- Total website visits
- Website audience
- Top organic and paid keywords leading users to a website
At MiQ we have found that using this rich contextual strategy for ad targeting can improve the scalability of campaigns by 1–4X and decrease the average CPA by up to 66%, versus the traditional method of using cookie-dependent site pixel overlaps & lookalike modeling.
What are the top domains in the field of soccer?
Similarweb’s data showed that fifa.com was the top browsed domain in the soccer industry in the US in November 2022.
Deep dive into fifa.com
There was a 9.1x increase in traffic to fifa.com once the World Cup kicked off in November. We also monitored web traffic to similar sites to identify other domains suitable for placing ads.
We can see the difference in the session metrics for fifa.com before and after the World Cup.
A lower bounce rate during the World Cup tells us that fewer users are browsing only a single page before leaving the website. Users were also visiting more pages and spending more time browsing during the World Cup.
We used Similarweb data to view top keywords during the World Cup. We searched for websites that contained these high-ranking keywords using Intelligence Hub, MiQ’s pre-campaign planning tool, to identify domains that were likely to receive higher volumes of quality traffic during the event. Placing ads on pages that are receiving a lot of attention means that the ads are more likely to be viewed by an engaged user.
Similarweb data also showed that adverts looking to tap into this opportunity should be focused on appealing to a primarily male audience, with users most likely to be 25–34 years old. This data was useful to MiQ’s in-house creative solutions team, who used it to inform the ad creative and copy.
Similarweb data also revealed that 65% of traffic to fifa.com came from mobile devices. We identified the top apps related to fifa.com as ideal places to serve ads to reach relevant users.
How Similarweb data informs our targeting strategies
Data on top keywords and the most popular entry points for websites allows us to perform optimizations based on keywords that have historically driven users to websites similar to the brand’s.
By understanding the brand or industry’s audience demographics, we know what type of person to consider when designing campaigns. Another great way of using Similarweb for targeting is by focusing on the top apps and devices used by the people visiting these websites and optimizing campaigns accordingly to reach the right audience.
There are a variety of different insights available on Similarweb which provide brands with countless opportunities to grow their traffic and online presence in a cookie-less world. At MiQ we have adopted an agnostic approach to best respond to the fragmented and increasingly cookieless programmatic landscape. As such, Similarweb is just one of our data partners and this targeting method is one of many that have been implemented to ensure continued campaign performance despite cookie deprecation. To learn more about MiQ’s multi-faceted approach to cookieless campaigns, read our previous blog on cookieless measurement.
Meghana is a senior business analyst in MiQ’s data and analytics team. Outside of work, you’ll find her singing (she’s trained in Indian classical music), watching films, or exploring a new city! Anirudh is a senior business analyst in MiQ’s data and analytics team. He likes gaming, and watching sports and movies. Shashank, a senior business analyst at MiQ, apart from crunching numbers, loves being on the field or in front of his gaming PC!
