During Ramadan, the times of the evening meal (iftar) and the morning meal (suhoor) change every day and are different for every city. This results in a significant increase in Ramadan-related search queries on a daily basis. Is there a way for brands to capitalize on consumers’ need to check these times and make useful connections with them?
The transnational consumer goods company Unilever Turkey teamed up with media agency Mindshare Turkey to find out. The team's brief was to increase website visits by addressing this specific cultural need as well as direct users to buy Lipton Çay for Sahur times from e-retailers. The team designed an ad campaign to provide users with countdowns, running search ads across 81 different cities and two brands, Lipton and Yemekte Keyif Var. By capturing users’ attention by sharing relevant iftar and suhoor information, they aimed to encourage traffic to the brands’ Ramadan recipes pages and boost brand recognition.
The team selected two separate landing pages, one for Unilever's food recipes content website, Yemekte Keyif Var, and another for a retail website where consumers can buy Lipton tea.
The Yemekte Keyif Var ad was served to women, while the Lipton campaign was aimed at all audiences. Why women?
"During Ramadan, 70% of Yemekte Keyif Var’s visitors are female and we found that women are more inclined to search for iftar recipes.” said Nazlı Eda Kırali, Foods & Beverages Digital Strategy and Transformation Team Lead at Unilever Turkey. “Tea is also an integral part of Turkish dining culture, where it is consumed both after dinner (iftar) and during breakfast (suhoor)."
Managing multiple brands at once
Needing a way to automate ad text to stay relevant in every search result for “when is iftar,” “when is suhoor,” and similar queries, the agency team built a business data table in Search Ads 360 to store iftar and suhoor times.
We were able to save more than 930 hours that would have gone towards manual text updates
By implementing automated rules, they were able to maintain correct times in all ads, even outside of working hours. The approach saved them time and improved accuracy, allowing them to manage multiple brands with a single automation task and reducing the reliance on manual inputs.
Save time and impact the bottom line
With this simple change, Unilever Turkey enjoyed a 185% uplift in click-through rate (CTR) within the same budget when compared to non-automated campaigns during Ramadan. Their recipe web pages also experienced 15X more visits.
Automation drove much higher click-through rates (CTR) and site visits with the same budget
Generic keywords (i.e. keywords not necessarily related to Yemekte Keyif Var) getting CTR above 20% is uncommon. The campaign displayed a sophisticated mix of ad relevance, informative text and automation. It is also a testament to reaching the correct audience at the correct time (for example, women for suhoor) while providing helpful information.
What’s more, the “Mindshare team was also able to save more than 930 hours that otherwise would have gone towards manual text updates,” according to Dilara Özegeli, Senior Performance Marketing Executive at Mindshare Turkey.
With many more brands in the Unilever portfolio, the automated approach can now be extended to other holidays as a way of supplying useful information in consumers’ moments of need and making valuable connections with users.
