Shutterstock localised its EMEA display campaigns based on data insights

Shutterstock, as one of the leading stock imagery brands, has been continuously powering creativity through its millions of royalty-free pictures, stock footage clips, music tracks, curated content, and innovative tools.

By having presence in more than 150 countries and 21 languages, Shutterstock has the challenge to accommodate the wide variety of interests, local habits and cultural differences to be able to offer relevant assets for your target audience.

Competitors such as Adobe and Getty Images are getting stronger in the EMEA markets as well as the growing local platforms with more local asset libraries. We were also challenged to show the value of the localisation and understand through data if this really matters for reaching better performance.

The objectives were to increase the volume of view-through conversions (purchases of image packages) through the display activities on the Google Display network while bringing qualified traffic to the website and raising awareness.

The strategy

Our 77 Agency team, responsible for managing and executing media activations, as well as content and creative campaigns for Shutterstock in Europe, has relied on the importance of localisation, combined with data to customise Shutterstock’s Google Display campaigns for the consumer’s needs in the main European markets.

77 Agency applied the “thinking globally and acting locally” approach to ensure consistency in how Shutterstock communicates with their audience (graphic designers, creative directors, art workers). This allowed us to provide bespoke solutions without moving away from the brand’s personality and beliefs.

By using the Google Analytics internal site search report, 77Agency was able to analyse the user’s main queries made on Shutterstock’s website in 2018 as a starting point to collect insights of what these users were looking for and be able to plan the next year’s display campaign in Germany - Shutterstock’s second main European market.

The data shown on this report has called the attention for another essential variable - the seasonality - which was incorporated into the creative strategy in order to supply the potential 2019 search demand.

From the top 10 search terms in February 2018 in Germany, the Easter term was already showing to be one of the top searches.

The same analysis was done in March 2018 and the search demand for the Easter term became even more noticeable. The demand was also leveraged by some paid media activities during this period, which showed a positive response from the audience.

The campaign

Based on these inputs, together with the fact that Shutterstock values being a trendsetting brand and connected to the market needs, the March 2019 campaign in Germany was decided to be Happy Easter. The Easter campaign ran in parallel with a global concept campaign to give us the chance to prove the value of the localisation.

That localisation effort included translating copy to the local language, along with adding regional Easter elements to the creatives, such as the egg hunt and the Easter bunny handmade dolls.

Compared to the global banners, which had English ad copies, the Easter creatives had even better performance with regards the website engagement: 15% lower bounce rate and 2x times higher average session duration.

The data visualisation dashboard built by the 77Agency team helped us consolidate the cross-channel data from Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Direct Media Buying channels, to measure the efficiency of the media spend per channel, per campaign, per targeting setting, and down to per creative. This helped us in continuously feeding our internal creative team for the next iteration of creative development, as well as the media team for planning and optimisation.

Based on the success of this campaign, we have developed concepts for some of the other top trends we have seen via on-site searches and in general in the creative industry for 2019, such as Abstract Creative, Mother’s Day, King’s Day (in the Netherlands), Wedding Season and Summer concepts, among others.

The results

The monthly results showed a cost per view-through conversions 16% lower for the Easter banners compared to the all global versions. In addition, the engagement rate on the website was also better, with 5% lower bounce rate and with average session duration 1.5 times higher. That can also be explained through the customised landing page, which featured carefully-curated images to bring up an adapted and relevant collection.

This project was highly commended at The Drum B2B Awards 2019. To find out which Drum Awards are currently open for entries, click here.