LADbible

The company

Founded in 2012, LADbible Group is the world’s leading social publisher with over 120m followers. Their global community engages with entertainment and news content spanning editorial, video, documentary and live – billions of times each and every month. Using all major platforms, LADbible Group has rapidly risen to become one of the web’s most prominent social video publishers. Their brands include LADbible, UNILAD, SPORTbible, Pretty 52, branded content agency Joyride, and licensing arm CONTENTbible.

The challenge

LADbible Group has a very valuable audience of 18 to 34 year olds that is highly sought after by advertisers. However, they realised they could do more to capture, analyze and activate this audience to drive incremental revenue. There were a number of limiting factors with its existing approach.

Firstly, they weren’t maximising the collection of data on their audience and using it for targeting. With a high proportion of traffic coming from social and mobile, the publisher was unable to target users quickly enough with their existing solution.

Secondly, audience segmentation was limited. Previously, LADbible were building segments based on keywords in the URL. This was time consuming and often inflexible when creatively building audience segments and optimizing campaigns based on the types of users who were engaging with a campaign. As a result, most inventory was only sold to advertisers using contextual targeting.

LADbible wanted to be more proactive with advertisers and monetise the valuable audiences they knew they had, which sparked their search for a Data Management Platform (DMP).

234%

ROI in the first four months

~40%

increase in Click Through Rates

5x

increase in targetable inventory

The solution

LADbible assessed different solutions, including those from major technology companies, but were impressed by Permutive’s next generation approach to DMPs built on first-party data. This is what persuaded the team to choose Permutive over legacy solutions.

Scale

After rolling out Permutive, LADbible Group was able to collect data on all their users. Because Permutive doesn’t rely on third-party cookies, LADbible could collect audience data for a much higher percentage of their users on FBIA and Safari. Also, as Permutive is built on edge computing, LADbible was able to target fleeting users from social and mobile from their very first pageview to increase the scale of targetable inventory.

Insights

Beyond increasing scale, LADbible Group could also easily generate rich insights on users to attract advertisers. They did this by collecting multiple data points about users, as well as using cutting edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help create a wider variety of audience pools.

Poll data

Collecting poll data has allowed LADbible to open a dialog with their audience and gather insights directly. Ingesting this poll data into Permutive also allows them to build audience segments using declared data. This is really valuable to advertisers, who can now understand intent to purchase and brand affiliation.

Customer service

Permutive’s Customer Success team worked together with LADbible to package their new insights into an audience offering and train their sales teams. The sales teams were able to go out and have more proactive and strategic conversations with advertisers about reaching and measuring their target audience.

Campaign Optimisation

With Permutive, LADbible could optimise campaigns much more effectively. They could understand which audience segments engaged most with advertiser campaigns and how they index with different audience segments. If the team saw a strong overlap with another segment, they could optimise towards that audience to improve performance. Along with post-campaign insights, this helped LADBible rebook more campaigns.

Results

The greater targetable inventory and audience insights Permutive delivered for LADbible Group has had a direct impact on data-driven ad revenue growth:

Significant Return On Investment

LADbible saw an ROI of 234% in the first four months of using Permutive, and they expect to see this grow as the sales team push more advanced first-party data strategies with advertisers

Improved campaign performance

Better campaign performance – for example Click Through Rates (CTRs) have increased 30-40%, having a significant impact on rebookings.

Vastly increased scale

By reducing their reliance on cookies and targeting in-session, LADbible saw targetable inventory increase by 5x.

Future possibilities

LADbible is now working on using Permutive to develop more advanced and tailored audience strategies with advertisers and agencies. They are working on building the ability to sync their advertiser data to understand more about their audience on LADbible properties. This will enable LADbible to give advertisers insights about what the audience does on LADbible properties, deliver campaigns to drive users to the advertiser site, and use lookalike modelling to target new users.

“If you’re struggling to unlock your audience and deliver them to advertisers, you need to invest in Permutive.” Macauley Lowe, Head of Programmatic, LADbible