We adapt re-targeting, the mechanism that is used to sell products to people by following them through the internet for a good cause – by creating the world’s most loyal ads.

People love dogs for their caring and loyal nature. We focused on these qualities and presented them in a new, surprising way, working with carefully selected target audiences and retargeting ads. When a user visited the shelter’s website we tracked the dwell time per dog and placed a retargeting cookie for the dog that got the most attention. Then this dog would follow his potential master in video retargeting banners all around the web. Just like a dog would in reality.

First we went to the Berlin animal shelter and made short video sequences of each and every dog and a couple of photos for our awareness ads.

Then, starting before Christmas, we put out awareness ads for our target group via Google banners and Facebook ads. They guided our audience to the Berlin animal shelter’s new website showing all 270 dogs. Once they were there, we tracked which dog got the user’s most attention and dropped a retargeting cookie. That way our dogs were able to find 'their' user everywhere on the web. Then we let our digital dogs out to follow the users all over the web.

And from here on, we just had to wait for the results. Which came pretty quick.

1. A year-on-year growth of 25% in placed dogs

2. A unique click rate of 43%

3. A Facebook relevance score 9/10

4. 89% of Facebook users who liked the ads, also visited the website

5. 1.3 mio. website impressions

And best of all:

The costs for rehoming a dog are lower than what a dog costs the shelter each week. So our system was a full on success, which is ready to be used in animal shelters all over Germany.