Epitaph supports Kids Help Phone in reaching a new paid search audience with Skai’s Experiments
Challenge
Kids Help Phone provides online and telephone counseling and support to at-risk youth across Canada. The goal of this particular campaign was to reach youth in harder-to-reach communities with less access to online and in-person mental wellness resources, who were not immediately in crisis, but experiencing distress and not finding answers in trusted places. However, most consumers have been under the impression that Kids Help Phone is only for crisis support and thus do not consider the company for more general depression, anxiety, and relationship matters.
With its agency Epitaph Group, Kids Help Phone wanted to run a three-month test campaign to drive 150,000 – 170,000 total new sessions. Kids Help Phone wanted to determine how to drive the maximum amount of site visitors from paid search to newly created landing pages with content geared toward this new audience and learn how to segment spend for future campaigns.
Solution
To reach this new audience with the same monthly spend, Kids Help Phone created three new landing pages categorized as Step 1 and Step 2. Epitaph needed to determine which group of landing pages performed best based on impressions, clicks, and CTR as the main KPIs, and planned to drive always-on traffic to the best-performing page sets moving forward.
Once they were ready to launch the landing pages, they used Skai’s Experiments to determine a winner. Skai’s Experiments offer a flexible solution to seamlessly create cross-publisher A/B and pre/post tests on campaigns and then monitor results in a dedicated and visual grid.
Epitaph determined that an A/B test was the best solution for this initiative since it would allow them to compare performance between different campaign groups. The experiment ran for about three weeks, beginning with driving traffic to the Step 1 landing page URL. Because they saw steady performance, they decided to begin testing whether the Step 2 landing page would be as successful. To do this, they created an Experiment with a test campaign that split 50% of the allocated daily spend among the Step 1 and Step 2 URLs. All other aspects of the campaign remained the same.
Results
Using Skai’s Experiments, Epitaph determined that the Step 1 landing page content fared better than the Step 2 landing pages, with a 24% decrease in clicks from Step 2 versus Step 1. However, we can see that the number of impressions and volume arriving via the second set were more relevant (11% CTR versus 8%). But due to the number of total users driven utilizing the same budget allocation, the first set of landing pages became the better performer.
“Using Skai’s Experiments, we were able to generate valuable insights which benefited future campaigns across our varied client base.”
Mike De’Oliviera
Head of Digital Platforms and Data, Epitaph Group
About Kids Help Phone
Kids Help Phone is Canada’s only 24/7 e-mental health service offering free, confidential support to young people in English and French. For over 30 years, they’ve evolved their response and offerings. Kids Help Phone concentrates on staying relevant to youth, recognizing the complexity of issues they face, and helping to ensure their professional counselors and volunteer crisis responders are ready to address young people’s continuum of emotional and mental health needs, from crisis situations to the everyday concerns of growing up.
Learn more at kidshelpphone.ca.
About Epitaph Group
Epitaph Group is a media planning and buying agency focused on ‘making good growth, every day.’ The agency prides itself on providing the most efficient media campaigns with a human touch.
Learn more at epitaphgroup.com.
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