How Marketers Can Turn Super Bowl Mania Into Sales With Retargeting

Just because your company isn’t among the handful of brands forking over the big bucks for the chance to capture millions of eyeballs during the Super Bowl, doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the interest surrounding the big game.

First, think about the diversity of all the content surrounding the Super Bowl–ad teasers and contests, the Deflate-gate saga, Tom Brady’s love of avocado ice cream, the Marshawn Lynch-inspired #SoIWontGetFined hashtag, how to live stream the game,  etc. Now, consider how many of your customers and prospects are reading, watching and engaging with that varied content this week and what that can mean for your retargeting strategies over the coming days.

“The Super Bowl is a rising tide that lifts everyone,” said Jason Morse, VP of mobile product at Criteo by phone earlier today, “and the amount of media consumed in the two weeks ahead of the Super Bowl is an enormous opportunity for marketers to ride on the back of it.”

For performance advertisers, this flurry of media consumption offers a great opportunity to focus in on the users who have visited your site over the past 30 days, advises Morse. “This year it’s particularly relevant for performance marketers because this is a transitional year for mobile commerce.” Consumers are increasingly engaging with mobile ads and converting on their smartphones, which means those past site visitors aren’t just in research mode anymore when they’re on their phones engaging with all that Super Bowl-related content.

According to Criteo’s Q4 mobile commerce report, 30 percent of ecommerce transactions came from mobile devices globally, and in the US, that level is expected to soon reach 50 percent. The majority of mobile transactions now happen on smartphones, not tablets, as they did a year ago. For example, in retail, smartphones accounted for 53 percent of mobile transactions and in travel, smartphones drove a whopping 66 percent of purchases.

The transition to smartphone commerce intersects with the broad media usage around blogs, social media and sports sites leading up to the game, says Morse. And in that intersection is big opportunity.

Marketers Still Have Time To Adjust Their Strategies To Harness The Buzz

Morse says his teams are focusing on bidding and segmentation strategies. “Particularly now that smartphones are viable not just for research but for driving sales,” says Morse this is the perfect time to be sure your bid strategies take into account the surge in media consumption–particularly around products that are most likely to have high purchase intent leading up to the game.

For example, consumer electronics retailers should probably be increasing bids on certain TVs over the next 72 hours.

In regards to audience segmentation, consider that nearly half (46 percent) of Super Bowl viewers are women, according to Nielsen. While it may not correlate precisely to content consumption rates, you can be sure a sizable percentage of those consumers driving up page views this week are female.

It’s not too late to ride the Super Bowl wave with your retargeting strategies. The surge of interest is still on, as the Google Trends graph below shows, and will continue into next week when we’re all Monday morning quarter backs–reading about the game, the commercials, the half-time performers, the social media campaigns, what celebrities are saying and so much more. Harness all that interest to re-capture your site visitors and turn Super Bowl mania into sales.

“Super Bowl” interest hasn’t peaked yet, and is forecast to reach last year’s levels. Source: Google Trends