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How We Helped The Ride Find Ready-to-Buy Visitors with Dynamic Ads and Audience Insights
Clients The Ride

How We Helped The Ride Find Ready-to-Buy Visitors with Dynamic Ads and Audience Insights

Services We Provided:
Content Creation & Strategy, Digital Advertising
Through an iterative approach to targeting and messaging on Meta, CI provided audience insights to THE RIDE focused on visitors most ready to buy.

233%

ROI on Meta ad spend

73%

of website page views from visitors outside the US attributed to Meta

284%

increase in search impression share over 1 year

The RIDE isn’t just a bus tour through New York, it’s an entertainment experience that highlights Midtown Manhattan from the largest passenger vehicle on the streets of New York. THE RIDE—a Capacity Interactive client since 2023 primarily focused on driving online ticket sales to tourists visiting NYC—offers audiences surprise performances along a 4.2-mile route through Midtown and Times Square, including stops at Columbus Circle, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Terminal and Bryant Park. From ballerinas to freestyle rappers, THE RIDE’s performers are scattered around the city, blending in with street life for the ultimate element of surprise. 

Through an iterative approach to targeting and messaging on Meta, CI was able to provide audience insights to THE RIDE that honed in on the prospective visitors most ready to buy. We then made optimizations to their media mix with the goal of focusing on those most-primed prospective visitors.

Data looks at ad spend across Meta (Facebook and Instagram) from February through mid-October 2024 and Google Ads (paid search) from August 2023 to August 2024.

Working with Capacity Interactive has been a transformative for THE RIDE. With no in-house marketing team, I rely on their expertise to make the whole process easy and effective. Their creative strategies have boosted our online presence and driven real and measurable growth. Plus, the team is fantastic to work with—they make everything clear and easy to understand, and their great energy makes every call fun.

Kelly O'Connell
Kelly O'Connell General Manager, THE RIDE

READY TO BUY

Through months of experimentation and refining of website retargeting audiences, the CI team recognized that the biggest return on ad spend on Meta came from people who had looked at THE RIDE’s website in the last 30 days (as opposed to further out). By segmenting this audience into its own high-performing segment (averaging a 500% ROI in 2024 relative to an overall ROI of 233%), messaging and spend could be tailored appropriately.

This insight contributed to a larger, related shift in strategy that focused on making it really easy for the most ready-to-buy audiences to find THE RIDE: investing more in paid search to ensure that THE RIDE stayed at the top of the search engine results page. 

As a super bottom-of-funnel channel, paid search currently has a cost per acquisition that is just ⅓ of the full-funnel Meta CPA. Perhaps more notably, the sustained investment on this channel has resulted in a massive increase in search impression share, from 15.4% in August 2023 to 59.1% as of August 2024.

Example 1 Example 2 Example 3

Beat the Summer Heat

This simple but striking photo has been a top performer for months, giving prospective riders a clear POV from THE RIDE’s unique buses with floor-to-ceiling windows and incredible views. As part of the ongoing dynamic ad for the campaign, it’s been paired with a variety of copy options that emphasize the experience it demonstrates. The most impactful pairings have included “Beat the heat” messaging as well as headlines like the one pictured here—”Sit back, relax, and ride through NYC”—emphasizing that this incredible view is paired with relaxation, which is a hot commodity for tourists on busy, unfamiliar NYC streets.

Over an Hour of NYC Sights

As summer approached, the ads leaned into THE RIDE’s yellow brand color, adding warmth and bold messaging to the visual mix. Calling out summer directly in this example of one of the copy variations made for a powerful pairing as well.

The Ride of Your Life

Putting the bus front-and-center in ads has been a winning strategy for THE RIDE. Folks seeing these ads are either in NYC already and seeing so many busses that it’s hard to select one, or they are being exposed to this particular bus in advance, allowing the real-life bus to be the reminder they need to hop on board. Paired with copy about the ease of buying a ticket today—and literally calling both the IRL bus a sign and this ad a sign—makes for a double impact that was clear in the sales results, too.

A FOCUS ON FAMILIES

In addition to doubling down on the investment in Ready to Buy audiences, the team found that they could drive even more revenue by curating creative specifically for families. In 2024 to date, creative tailored specifically to prospective family visitors averages a CPA that is $5 lower than the more generic creative.

 

READY TO MAXIMIZE YOUR AUDIENCE INSIGHTS AND MEDIA MIX?

Let’s talk about how our team can help you!

Client:
The Ride
Services We Provided:
Content Creation & StrategyDigital Advertising

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