In January, VIA Rail worked with La Presse to run a campaign re-targeting people who used its service once but did not return a second time in the last year on La Presse’s website. Using data clean room tech, it built look-alike audiences based on its database across the publisher’s footprint, targeting them with ads to book train tickets.
As a result, VIA Rail achieved a conversion rate, measured by an uptick of website visitors, of 0.42%, surpassing its benchmark by 125% when compared to other strategies at the same stage of the sales funnel, where the conversion rate was only 0.17%. This amounted to 10,916 qualified visits, the company said.
Identifying 70% of its readers
For the last five years, La Presse has invested in its first-party data cohorts by directly asking readers to voluntarily share information, such as their age range or summer travel plans in exchange for relevant content.
The publisher also used quizzes and contests to gather sociodemographic data from over 16,000 unique participants who consented to the ad-targeting opt-in.
People “provided information such as their age, gender, family income, and household composition,” said Bernard. “We were also able to use that information for marketing such as personalized notifications.”
Consequently, La Presse was able to directly identify 70% of its 4.2 million reader base through first-party data, according to Bernard.
The publisher has been working with data clean room platform Optable since 2020 to make these audience cohorts available to advertisers in a privacy complaint manner.
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