GRUPO PRISA and the Google News Initiative worked closely together for eight months, with significant results across two focus areas discussed above. The outcome was meaningful engagement between readers and brands, helpìng the companies’ advertisers engage in conversations with their consumers. As a result, GRUPO PRISA developed a new self service tool based on audience targeting which allowed partner teams, agencies, advertisers and local sellers to create content quickly while adapting to market demands and consequently increasing the effectiveness and performance of advertising campaigns.

“Regardless of the technological complexity behind an optimization or targeting audience, it’s important to note that the creative itself still has an important weight in the success of a campaign. It’s especially important to have several sets of visual creative assets that help optimize the campaign and provide better results when targeting new customers. Few advertisers are focusing on creative optimization, and it can happen that in the SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) segment they don’t even have any creatives at all. It was obvious for us to design a self service tool to allow our clients to create in a few minutes several creatives they could use in 100% of our display ad-inventory.” explains Brice Février, Video and Performance Director.

Once the creative content was built for a given campaign, GRUPO PRISA developed “buyer personas” via user databases and surveys to help understand customers (and prospective customers) in more detail. Having access to this data made it easier to tailor branded content, improve product development and understand the way users interact with creative campaigns. The creative campaigns were found to have a higher interaction rate because the content was relatable to them. Advertisers have access to their own purpose-built dashboard where they can combine and play with data to discover new profiles to improve campaigns in the GRUPO PRISA umbrella.

“This new buyer persona audience cluster helped us to achieve an amazing improvement on the KPIs” adds Garrido “The industry has always asked publishers to provide much more transparency about the audiences that engage with their campaigns. Thanks to the new tools available and the use of first-party data, publishers can today be much more relevant for our advertisers, creating a strong user content offering all the while keeping users’ privacy safe.”

“We notice that the overall Click Through Rate (CTR) after applying the buyer persona data increased the CTR from 0,09% to 0,19%, this an improvement of 111% with the same creatives reaching the right audience” Février concludes “Thanks to the self service tool we were able to target a large number of smaller markets otherwise difficult to reach. Our goal was to increase our digital presence in smaller regions, acquiring increased value through Cost Per Click (CPC) geo targetted campaigns. Having local products or services promoted to local audiences on our pages, we expected to have better engagement of the users than with national performance advertising.”

GRUPO PRISA plans to develop their project further with the Google News Initiative. The next step will be to build on buyer personas, by applying deep learning and machine models to create an in-depth understanding of news consumption habits which can be used for campaigns in Google Ad Manager. Other aspects to be developed within the project include application of Natural Language Programs (NLP) to the contextual part of the data as well as models that assess how likely someone is to click on an ad based on the articles they read.