National Geographic Used PPC Tricks To Gain 193% More Subscription Requests

About National Geographic

National Geographic, formerly known as National Geographic Magazine is the official magazine of the National Geographic Society. The first issue was published in the year 1888, since then the name is accoladed as being amongst the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions all across the world. The different spheres that are being covered in this world-renowned magazine are geography, history, archaeology, natural science and world culture. National Geographic magazine caters not only to the need of the readers who are looking for extensively exhaustive articles, but it is also pleasing for those who wish to flip through the magazine’s pages simply to have a look at the stunning photographs, detailed illustrations as well as the outstanding world renowned maps.

National Geographic’s Business Objectives

National Geographic was not running any of its own PPC campaigns outside the USA. Also, they wanted to seek and generate more number of subscriptions. Besides this, the prime objective was to lay emphasis on the quality subscribers who would ensure a string lifetime value to the National Geographic magazine.

Approach/Strategy Adopted by National Geographic

With a view to increase the volume of subscriptions, National Geographic took the decision to work with Jellyfish in the year 2007. For this, the basic approach comprised of setting-up dedicated PPC campaigns across three of the major networks viz. Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Besides this, Jellyfish strategized to accomplish the PPC campaign to a fixed CPA for the annual subscriptions as well as the gift subscriptions to the National Geographic magazine. Moreover, the approach towards achieving the desired result aimed at yielding campaign site that would use a combination of several articles as well as downloadable PDF, so as to facilitate the traffic generated from the campaign. Furthermore, the company’s approach also involved to allot a dedicated Account Manager who would be entirely dedicated towards managing not only the campaign performance and analysis, but also aspects such as ad copying writing, generating keywords and much more.

Results Achieved by National Geographic

Within a time-frame of a few weeks, the Jellyfish National Geographic campaign was launched in the UK. During this time-frame, the research, development, site-building, testing, personalized fulfillment and set-up on the search networks could be done and the efforts paid off remarkably. The results were remarkable which is evident from the whopping numbers. First and foremost, since 2007 till 2011, the subscription volume has grown by 193%. The number of subscriptions that were achieved in the year 2011 was 31,000.

Apart from this, in the year 2011, the targeted search inquiries were shown the National Geographic ads for more than 33 million times. Moreover, National Geographic magazine witnessed 2,50,000 unique views in 2011’s campaign site. Furthermore, to maximize the scope for subscription volume, Jellyfish’s client introduced several incentive schemes. Jellyfish launched this campaign around the Christmas which turned out to be in its favor. This is so because the sales volume during this time-period was remarkable, which is evident from the fact that nearly 1,000 extra subscribers subscribed for National Geographic’s magazine in the month of December.

The results of this campaign turned out to be so impactful that within merely a week’s time of launching the Jellyfish campaign in the UK, the National Geographic Society (NSG) asked Jellyfish to operate it’s paid search campaigns in the world territories of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. In lieu of this demand within a week, Jellyfish framed site versions for all the six regions which were launched across all the regions.

The result generated out of this effort was that these international campaigns further generated 202 subscriptions for its client, National Geographic. Jellyfish turned out to be a sustainable supplier to National Geographic as it continued to provide substantial support and helped to fetch as much as 350-400 subscriptions in the first few months in the year 2008.

Learnings

It was evident that through the use of PPC tricks, National Geographic was able to gain 193% more subscription requests. The campaign site created by Jellyfish for its client National Geographic had specific landing pages especially targeted towards countries outside the UK, which was a good signal. The ultimate motive of getting good subscription volume was achieved as the PPC trick applied by Jellyfish worked really well in National Geographic’s favour.