How Chobani Used Paid Search Advertising to boost sales by 9%

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The Brand: Chobani The objective behind paid search campaign Chobani’s strategy for paid search The Success: 9% increase in yogurt sales and a 1.3% lift in market share Words by Chobani Chief Marketing and Brand Officer Peter McGuinness

The Brand: Chobani

Chobani is an American brand of strained yogurt produced by Chobani, LLC. The Yoghurt brand wanted to rationalize search ad efforts by aligning it with impact on in-store sales for which it collaborated with Nielsen Catalina Solutions and achieved 9% lift in yogurt sales and a 1.3% increase in market share.

The objective behind paid search campaign

Chobani, which is US’s leading Greek yoghurt brand, wanted to carry out a measurement study for providing the brand with right insights into how paid search was impacting the in-store sales. Although the yoghurt brand had the idea about how important it was to identify the customers’ behavior as to what drives their buying decisions. However, they needed help in figuring out how their search advertising efforts were impacting in-store sales and if the returns they were getting from it actually justified their spending. So, the brand teamed up with Yahoo on a new campaign as well as an exclusive closed-loop sales measurement study for honing their strategy and gaining more detailed insights.

Chobani’s strategy for paid search

While bidding on search advertising terms, the yoghurt brand focused on three main categories that included branded keywords, yogurt category keywords and competitors. They wanted to measure the efforts simultaneously with intent to figure out which one had the major impact & which one had the least impact on driving consumers to the store for yoghurt purchase so that they could incorporate these insights into their marketing plan. The team tracked every activity of the households right from their use of the Yahoo search engine through to actual grocery store checkouts during the paid search campaign and not just if someone clicked on an ad. Yahoo and Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) conducted testing keeping the household data in mind that included buying cycles, demographics, purchase histories and regional purchase behavior.

The Success: 9% increase in yogurt sales and a 1.3% lift in market share

It was found that consumers who saw ads for the yogurt brand while searching for yogurt-related keywords spent 9% more on Chobani than those who didn’t see the company’s ads. The test methodology according to Yahoo & NCS helped them to track the actual spike up in sales through the search ads without intervention from other factors including the external marketing campaigns the yoghurt company was running at the time. However, it was also found that once the campaign was over there was a drop in sales and that purchases increased the more while the campaign was running and the consumers were exposed to its search ads. It hints that a persistent search marketing campaign might be useful for an unremitting sales lift.

 Words by Chobani Chief Marketing and Brand Officer Peter McGuinness

“It’s yet another proof point that advertising in any form, on any channel, has merit and effectiveness. It just helps further justify budgets overall, and specifically in search.”