Success of the campaign was measured in terms of overall revenue and ROI goals. As a result of the data enhancement, the campaign ROI increased 44% year over year, and overall product revenue increased 31% year over year exceeding the overall revenue goal by 6%.

By making the GamePass product benefits more prevalent in the creative, the campaign was able to generate 106% more free trials than the previous season. Of the people who signed up for free trial 50% purchased the product compared to 42% the previous season. The free-trial offer is for the most premium subscription plan that Game Pass has to offer. By identifying individuals who were best suited for a free-trial we experienced an increase in conversions for the most premium product by 44% year over year. The campaign was able to upsell individuals who were more likely to purchase a lower revenue product, getting them to purchase a product that generates 10x as much revenue per order.

The increased emphasis and usage of DMP data year over year came with the expectations of growth from this avenue. As a result budget in support of this effort expanded 35% year over year, and we overall achieved a net ROI increase of 75% for data driven targeting for the NFL.

Understanding consumer behavior on NFL.com gave us insight into their affinity for the sport. We were able to enhance creative development and distribution in a number of ways including: serving specific weekly match-up creative to individuals who have support a particular team, sending a free-trial creative to new site visitors and to those who live in markets identified as high upside, in-language creative to users whose browser is set to a certain language, and creatives encouraging mobile consumption to those coming to the site through mobile web.

The NFL season is 17 weeks long, and nearly 70% of all GamePass revenue is generated in, roughly, a 4 week period leading up to Week 1 of the regular season. To condense the opportunity even further, nearly 50% of all weekly conversions happen on Sundays. With the utmost objective of increasing ROI, we could not afford to be wasteful with our media budget. With nearly every international market open for targeting, and the target audience loosely defined as anyone who is a sports fan, an approach reliant on first party data was vital to the success of the campaign.

We started by collecting first party data with Adobe Audience Manager from NFL’s owned web properties. We then grouped the data based on site activities, analyzed it, and classified it into targetable segments, which we then utilized to inform creative. We fed the data directly into our trading desk for programmatic purchasing on a DSP. Once in the DSP, additional third-party data was overlayed to create look-a-like segments for expanded data-decisioned targeting. Results were exported from the system and segments were analyzed, optimized, and new ones were tested multiple times a week during the peak season.