case study
American Lung Association's Vaping Education Campaign Attains 25% Conversion, 80% User Retention
The Ad Council, American Lung Association and Llama Lead Gen collaborated on a “Youth Vaping” Facebook and Instagram Ads campaign to educate parents of teenagers on the real health risks of vaping. With a goal of driving traffic to the site, we needed to drive users from Facebook and Instagram Ads to a landing page where they could read about the facts behind the vaping epidemic and #DoTheVapeTalk with their teens. The primary objective of this campaign was the expansion of the “Get the Facts” page within the landing page. The campaign wrapped with 28K total website sessions, retained 80% of all clicks from Facebook and Instagram Ads to the landing page and achieved a historic high in conversions at 6.6K.
Introduction
Research shows that vaping is dangerous, highly addictive, and harmful to a child’s health and brain development. Yet 14.1% of U.S. high-school students and 3.3% of middle schoolers currently vape as of 2021. E-cigarettes have created a new trend of youth nicotine addiction, and it has been declared an epidemic by the FDA.
The American Lung Association (ALA) is a health organization whose mission is to save lives by improving lung health and preventing lung disease through education, advocacy, and research. Its initiatives and campaigns, particularly those related to smoking cessation, air quality, and lung disease prevention and management, have significantly impacted public health awareness and policy. The ALA's reputation as a leading health organization makes it a credible and influential voice in public health discussions, especially concerning lung health issues.
The ALA, along with the Ad Council, partnered with Llama Lead Gen to launch the “Youth Vaping” campaign aimed at educating parents of teenagers to better equip them to #DoTheVapeTalk. As e-cigarettes and vapes are relatively new to the market, there are still a lot of misconceptions about their actual danger. A vape pod can contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes, and in liquid form they can deliver a larger quantity of nicotine, making it much more addictive.
The campaign ads and landing page “Talk About Vaping” provided comprehensive information to make parents aware of the facts behind vaping and to talk to their kids about its danger despite its popularity. The landing page included information and facts about the vaping epidemic, reasons why kids may vape, as well as guides to help parents navigate the conversation. The goal of the campaign was to drive conversion defined as parents going to the landing page and expanding to the “Get the Facts” page.
The Challenge
The ALA and the Ad Council came to Llama Lead Gen as a trusted marketing partner to strategize around the “Youth Vaping” awareness campaign. They needed to reach parents with children ages 10-14 who may be exposed to or have tried vaping.
One main challenge in this campaign from a media perspective was the multi-step process to get the parents from the Facebook and Instagram Ads platform to the landing page to then expand on the ”Get the Facts” pages. Although this was an important page for the campaign, it was at the time one of the least engaged pages on the website. Often times there were significant drop offs as users moved through the funnel. Additionally, historic campaigns inevitably reached a high majority of users 65+ who had a high bounce rate on the landing page in prior activations. For this campaign we decided to preemptively negatively target A65+ in order to hone in on parents with younger teens at home.
Strategy
In order to achieve mass reach and leverage advanced targeting in platform, The Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen chose the Facebook and Instagram (Facebook and Instagram) Ads platform for the Youth Vaping campaign.
Across Facebook and Instagram Ads, we targeted parents with children 10-14, retargeting users who have visited the landing page as well as lookalikes of those site visitors. For the parents of children 10-14 audience group, we also implemented AB testing. We targeted two groups of parents, one with broad targeting while the other leveraged data from Acxiom to overlay the demographic with “Smoking Interests”.
The hypothesis behind this A/B test was that parents who have an interest in smoking likely mean that there is a higher propensity for their children to be exposed to smoking at a younger age. Therefore they would be more in need and receptive to information around this topic.
We monitored the campaign performances and made weekly budget optimizations, moving budgets based on audience performance. The main creative concept for this campaign was #DoTheVapeTalk with 4 different time variations for the video creatives (15s, 30s, 45s, 60s). The creative featured a dad who struggled to find ways to relate to his teen as he tried to #DoTheVapeTalk. The call to action at the end of the ad positions the landing page as part of the solution, as it provides tips and facts to get this conversation going. Llama Lead Gen worked with the team to develop various video ad descriptions to help parents understand the different effects that vaping can have on their teens’ developing brain to contextualize the importance of this issue.
Solution & Implementation
After gaining a full understanding of the strategy and goals of this campaign, we collaborated with the Ad Council and ALA to align on the finalized ad copy and ensured that the target audiences were appropriate for the campaign. The Llama Lead Gen team took full ownership of the execution of the campaign set up within the Facebook and Instagram Ads platform.
The campaign was launched after careful QA to ensure that our campaigns, audiences, and ads were set up properly. Our team monitored the performance daily and adjusted the budget accordingly based on what ads and audiences were performing well. Shifting dollars into more efficient audiences and ads.
For this campaign, we also set up an A/B test for our main audience group of parents with teens ages 10-14. In one audience group, we leveraged broad targeting with no interest overlay, but in the second audience group, we also layered on “Smoking Interests”. We carefully monitored the performances between the two audiences for the initial week in order to see the difference in results. Shortly after the campaign launch, we noticed that the “Smoking Interests” overlay underperformed against the broad targeting audience, and therefore media spend was shifted out of this group.
Performance & Data
The KPI of this campaign was to drive conversions on the landing page, defined as a user expanding the “Get the Facts” tab on the landing page. Mid-funnel KPIs such as clickthrough rates and landing page views provided additional data points to gauge the success of each audience/creative to guide optimization decisions. Throughout the campaign, we were able to drive a total of 34K click-throughs and 28K web sessions, resulting in 6.6K conversions.
Tracking the flow of users through a multi-step process, we saw that out of the 34K users who clicked through to the ads, more than 80% of those users were retained from the ad to the website. This is a strong indication that we were able to find qualified users who finds this information highly valuable.
From a historical perspective, this campaign had the lowest bounce rate compared to historical performances out of the 4 previous “Youth Vaping” campaigns. We also achieved the highest average time on site at 41 seconds. For comparative purposes, we will take a look at the same campaign executed in 2021 with the same budget level. While the 2021 campaign had a slightly slower but comparable volume in conversion metrics, time on site in 2021 was a mere 9 seconds compared to the current campaign at 41 seconds. This is an improvement of 4.5x compared to the previous marketing team that managed this campaign.
Outside of the lower funnel metrics, this campaign was able to generate mass reach garnering 10M impressions, 2M video views, and 6.3K social engagements (likes, comments, shares, etc.). The creative also generated strong discussions amongst Facebook and Instagram users with 3.6K reactions, 500+ comments, and 2.1K shares on our ad.
34,271
Clicks
27,391
Web Sessions (80% from clicks)
6,668
Conversions (25% conversion rate from clicks)
I’m most impressed by how proactive the Llama Lead Gen team is with managing our campaigns. Deliverables are always on time (with little to no edits needed); recommendations on how to improve our campaigns are expected. It’s truly a breath of fresh air to have partners who are always on top of everything. I also find it very inspiring how involved each member of the team is when it comes to both large and small tasks.
rasheia harris
Digital Media Director @ Ad Council
Retention
Retention is a critical metric, especially in campaigns aimed at social change. The high retention rate achieved in the American Lung Association's Vaping Education Campaign, managed by Llama Lead Gen, highlights a crucial success factor. Retention, in this context, goes beyond just keeping the audience's attention; it reflects the campaign's ability to continually engage and re-engage the target audience with meaningful content. This sustained engagement is indicative of the campaign's resonance with its core audience - parents of teenagers - and its effectiveness in delivering relevant and impactful information.
The success in retention for this campaign underscores a deeper understanding of the audience’s needs and concerns. It demonstrates how well-crafted digital strategies, which prioritize ongoing engagement, can lead to more than just one-time visits but foster a continuous interaction with the content. This continual engagement is essential in campaigns that aim to educate and drive behavioral change, as it ensures that the message does not just reach the audience but stays with them, influencing their perceptions and actions over time.
This aspect of the campaign serves as a model for how retention can be strategically achieved in digital marketing efforts, particularly those with educational and social objectives. The ability to keep the audience engaged over time is not just a marker of a successful campaign but also a driver of its long-term impact.
Moving Forward
E-cigarettes and vapes have created a new trend of youth nicotine addiction which has been declared an epidemic by the FDA. As part of a continued effort to raise awareness around this important issue affecting over 17% of American youths, the ALA along with the Ad Council and LLG launched the #DoTheVapeTalk campaign.
The campaign targeted parents with teens at home and drove them to the landing page which is filled with comprehensive information about this epidemic. The goal of the campaign was to get the parents to expand on the “Get the Facts” page. In total, we were able to drive a total of 34K click-throughs and 27K web sessions resulting in 6.6K total expansions of our desired page.
The creative also saw high engagement with 3.6K reactions, 500+ comments, and 2.1K shares on our ad with a majority of comments being positive sentiments as other parents shared their own struggles with their teens who vape.
From a targeting perspective, there were several learnings coming out of this campaign. Firstly, we preemptively negative-targeted A65+ from our audience as we wanted to hone in on parents who have younger teens at home.
Based on the success and improved metrics of the current campaign, this is likely an optimization that helped us further qualify our audience. Secondly, we implemented an A/B test within the campaign to see if a “Smoking Interest” overlay improved performance. This test was quickly decided once we had enough data to determine that broad targeting outperformed the interest overlay, and budgets were shifted swiftly.
Given that this is the 4th in a series of Youth Vaping campaigns since 2021, our team was able to have a more holistic understanding of the campaign performance relative to prior activations by different marketing teams. In 2023, our first time managing this campaign, we were able to reduce the bounce rate by 34% and improve time on site by 5x. From our efforts, we also saw that the conversion rate on-site was at a historic high of 23% since 2021.
The Ad Council and American Lung Association’s satisfaction with the campaign's performance is a testament to its success and the efficacy of our strategic marketing approach. The results speak volumes about our impact together, with the campaign's impressive reach and deep engagement among the target demographic.
Let’s Connect
If you aim to tap into the extensive reach of Facebook and Instagram Ads to engage with your audience effectively, let's connect. Book a call with Llama Lead Gen, and allow us to assist you in utilizing digital marketing to its fullest potential, ensuring your campaign objectives are not just met but exceeded.
