StubHub partners with Smartly to drive higher brand lift and conversions through full-funnel strategy

Can we leverage brand and performance marketing together to reach even wider audiences and benefit both?

StubHub’s media team has successfully optimized their performance marketing campaigns’ efficiency, and now the team wanted to find ways to scale their strategy and widen their reach to new audiences. To achieve this the team wanted to explore leveraging the brand and performance marketing together to increase the size of high-intent audience pools and this way drive more conversions while improving brand awareness.

To define if this new strategy is successful, Stubhub wanted to see improved conversion rates, a decrease in the cost of conversions and lift in brand awareness. In addition, the team looked to understand how different creative choices for each funnel step can support such a full-funnel campaign implementation.

Full-Funnel Campaign with Funnel-Step Optimized Creatives

By partnering with Smartly.io’s team and leveraging their campaign and creative automation, StubHub was able to efficiently implement a full-funnel marketing approach where the upper-funnel brand agency and lower-funnel media team worked together to align on creative, messaging, rationale, and audience strategy. To accurately measure the effects of upper and mid-funnel tactics, they conducted an A/B test, with one cell solely containing lower funnel campaigns and the other running a full-funnel strategy. In addition to this, the team also ran multi-cell conversion and brand-lift tests.

In addition to adjusting their campaign strategy, through a creative strategy and testing framework with Smartly.io, StubHub found that the top-performing formats were different in each stage of the consumer journey. Instagram Stories performed best for their upper-funnel ads, Carousel Video Collections performing best for their mid-funnel ads, and they continued to invest in Dynamic Carousels for their lower-funnel ads. This highlighted the importance of considering each funnel step’s objective as a part of the creative strategy for a full-funnel campaign.

Through StubHub’s findings on their full-funnel campaign, the team also saw an 82% increase in CTR and a 51% decrease in CPA, furthermore proving how impactful this approach has been for their overall strategy.

With the findings in how creative performed across all funnels, and the return of in-person events, the team at StubHub is positioned now more than ever as the platform to connect fans to unique experiences, globally.