Questex Drove Nearly $6M In Ad Revenue With Its Content Channel Campaign
Project Background
Generating revenue from content has never been easy. But the rise of digital platforms has only complicated the issue: Advertisers need to optimize their strategy and content for a growing number of platforms, all while competing with a growing number of creators, publishers, and businesses.
Today’s winners are the ones that can position their advertisers for success across multiple channels – and help them do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In this case study, we’re highlighting one of those publishers: Questex. Questex used Omeda’s CDP, marketing automation solution and database tools to create content channels, an advertising package that gave its partners more exposure across Questex’s many digital channels and enabled them to reach the Questex audience on email, social, and other platforms.
Not only has Questex driven nearly $6 million in revenue from this campaign, but they’ve driven more rebookings from advertisers and created a stable source of income moving forward.
Learn how they did it below:
About Questex
Questex provides a platform that offers events, digital media, e learning, and powerful branding, lead generation, and business development tools.
Goal
Questex needed to increase revenue and rebooking from its advertising partners in order to secure a more consistent revenue stream and free themselves up to focus on content creation. To achieve this, they needed to:
- help their advertising partners better capitalize on of Questex’s extensive audience and first-party data.
- match each of their advertising partners to best-fit website audiences.
- help advertisers translate single website visits into more sustainable, longer-term engagement across channels.
- retain more of their advertising partners by proving positive ROI and giving them more visibility across their digital properties.
Inside the Content Channel campaign
To address all of these needs, Questex partnered with Omeda to create content channels, exclusive competitor-free contextual targeting opportunities for each of its advertising partners.
The advertising partner’s content was listed on Questex’s website alongside Questex’s topical content, positioning them as a leading authority on a selected topic.
This gave the advertiser 100% share of voice across an industry trend or topic — while also giving prospects content that moved them through the buying funnel.
Content Channels consisted of four advertising placements, including:
- Prelude ad: An ad that stuck to the top of the page and held for 3 seconds upon arrival.
- The partner’s logo appeared at the top of the page, next to the headline.
- In-line ad: A 300×250 ad appeared within the middle of the page.
- Custom resource center placement: The client supplied downloadable assets that appear along the bottom of the page.
Turning Website Traffic Into Cross-Channel Success
Advertising partners could further target and nurture new visitors through targeted newsletters and emails. Some examples include:
- Questex was able to launch a special edition newsletter off its content channels, based on the hot topic of “Emerging BioPharma”. The same querying approach was taken to promote the special edition content to readers. Thanks to this precise targeting, the special edition newsletter ultimately built and sustained a readership of over 10,000 subscribers.
- Questex used Omeda’s Audience Builder database to query website tags from promoted articles, then sent targeted emails to anyone who visited those articles using Odyssey, Omeda’s marketing automation solution.
- Questex used Omeda’s CDP to track impressions, clicks and conversions on each page — and attach tags to each content channel page. Using these tags, Questex and its advertisers could evaluate success by topic.
Results
Content Channels have generated more lucrative, longer-term advertising partnerships for Questex: 53% of their advertising partners rebooked after participating in the Content Channel campaign. Customers with a content channel in their package have also driven $5.7 million in revenue for Questex — and tend to have higher spend year-over-year.
Finances aside, this stability empowers the Questex team to spend more time on creative tasks, rather than continuing to replace all of their churned advertisers with new ones.
Watch the full session here:
Want more hands on help? Please reach out to your Client Success Manager or schedule a demo to learn more about how our end-to-end audience management solution can work for you!
See full transcript
As he mentioned, I’m Josee Archer. I work for Questex. For those of you unfamiliar with Questex, we are a digital media and events business. I am the Director of Audience Development. My team handles audience growth and nurture, as well as lead gen on all our paid programs. Today, I am happy to share a success story with you on our sponsored content channel campaigns, which deserved a happy dance, which is where that came from.This program drove revenue and rebooking while leveraging our Omeda data. As you will see in these examples of our content channels, we take an industry trending topic and position our sponsor to align them as a leading authority on that selected topic. When a user visits that content channel, they are presented with a prelude ad, which is featured at the top and about a third of the way down the page holding for three seconds. This positions them front and center on the topic.Additionally, they are featured with their logo beside the topic headline. They have ads throughout the page, and they also have ads on all the pages that have that same topic tag. Additionally, they have the option to provide us with three assets that are also featured on the page. Our clients purchase these programs because it’s a competitor free opportunity with 100% share of voice. It aligns them as a trusted brand on a topic that’s relevant to their business.In the nurturing process, this would be an early stage in the buying process where it’s more of a brand recognition program, so it does not guarantee any leads, but we do provide them with the leads for any of those downloaded assets if they provide them to us. Common add-ons for these programs are targeted emails and newsletter placements, and honestly, this is a big reason why it drives the success of these content channels. We not only feature them in newsletters that are standard offerings, but for successful content channels we also feature them in a spinoff newsletter, which would be a special addition to one of our newsletters.
As you can see in this example, Emerging Biopharma, which was sponsored by Catalent, is featured at the top of the newsletter before our content. This Emerging Biopharma newsletter grew to and sustained a readership of over 10,000 subscribers. Additionally, we offer email placements as well, or third party emails, and those are very successful due to the targeting that is involved.
So how do we leverage the data in Omeda? We do so by querying on article tag visits. In group 1, you can see that we targeted visitors of the content channel. In group 2, we targeted all pages with that topic keyword. The reason we do that is, as I mentioned, the ads are featured across all tagged pages, so we include it there as well.
Additionally, you might see in both groups what we refer to at Questex as our base query, which basically excludes the opt-outs and excludes any email invalids, and also leverages our exhaustion filters, which are built into our base queries to ensure we’re not over emailing anyone. By identifying these readers, we’re really able to target the right people for the email. We also take a similar approach with our special edition newsletters, taking the subscribers and also making sure that they have visited these pages.
So this example right here is our September Emerging Biopharma special edition newsletter. As you can see, there’s strong engagement with high opens and clicks. It sent to just over 10,000 subscribers, of which 48% opened the email. We also had a unique click rate of almost 7%, which if you received the Q1 Omeda report, the average unique clicks are around 1.5% to 2%. So a unique click rate of almost 7% is really impressive.
These email campaigns and newsletter sponsorships generate such strong success that it fosters a very easy renewal conversation for our salespeople. But at the end of the day, what really matters is how it affects our bottom line. Our clients who purchase these programs generally add other things, as I mentioned, newsletter placements, emails. In this example, a web ads site takeover, et cetera. The customers that include content channels in their programs generated over $5.7 million in revenue to Questex in 2022, which I think is amazing.
Typically, these people renew at about a 53% rebooking rate, but what’s amazing is how they have a higher overall spend year over year. When we took our content channel customers from 2020, we saw a growth in revenue of $800,000, which is really great success. What are they buying? Well, as I mentioned, the content channels are a brand recognition type of program, but many of our customers then rebook and are upsold into lead gen. So written content, webinars, surveys, and our very new custom resource center.
The custom resource centers offer a lead guarantee, and they also position the clients, not only their brand, but also their content throughout our site, allowing many more opportunities to generate leads for them. This has been a great upsell from the content channel into the custom resource centers, and it would not surprise me if next year we’re on the stage discussing that success story.
So just to recap, we take our content channels, we do add-ons such as emails and newsletters and the special edition newsletters. We do other add-ons, whether they be a website ad takeover or content programs, et cetera. As I mentioned, it generated over $5.7 million in revenue in 2022 for Questex, has a high rebooking rate and even higher value buys in the renewal program. The success recipe is simple key branding, positioning the sponsor as a trusted brand on those industry relevant trending topics, emails and newsletters that generate high engagement because we’re only targeting people that are interested in the topic and also have the brand recognition.
And lastly, our sales teams leveraging this success. They’re sharing these stats and the success of these emails and newsletter programs, and it’s fostering a very easy renewal conversation that’s helping them upsell into our more expensive lead gen programs. Thank you.
