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Background: Happy Drivers. Happy Riders.

Wherever you’re headed, count on Lyft for rides in minutes. The Lyft app matches passengers with local drivers at the tap of a button. Just request and go.

Lyft gives over 1 million rides per day across 300 cities and 40 geographical regions. It covers 95% of the United States and recently expanded into Canada.

Challenge: Scaling Regionalized Campaigns

Lyft advertises to both passengers and drivers. They operate in a hyper-regionalized manner and are constantly expanding into new regions. This requires millions of ads to be launched at one time.

On the search side, each campaign has specific locations, ads, incentives, landing pages, and associated keywords depending on the region. Their high volume made the process of creating campaigns and launching new regions very time consuming and prone to error. Regional search ad creation was 100% manual, and refreshes took 3 people 20+ hours each.

On the social side, Lyft was just getting started with Skai and needed to scale quickly for driver and passenger activations with 3 people in 3 weeks. The implementation would be complex, involving implementing Facebook Dynamic Ads across 40 geos, including integration to Singular. After the implementation, Lyft required fluid strategies due to rapidly shifting performance, aggressive adoption of new Facebook features that needed to be tested, and constantly refreshed creative for new promos and based on performance needs.

Solution: Driving Out Manual Effort

Search

Campaign Mirroring: Lyft mirrored their existing Google campaigns to Bing and Yahoo Gemini to extend their reach and help grow their presence in new service areas.

ProductsUp Integration: The team employed a feed based solution for creating ads with tailored city names, incentive callouts, and landing pages for each region. They used multivariate processing at the ad level so the file-to-action process could ingest multiple files in parallel to speed processing time.

Skai Dimensions: They created dimensions and categories to differentiate each campaign and inform ProductsUp as to which ads are associated with each region. Dimensions and categories were used to tag ads with specific bonus codes, allowing them to be activated or paused based on the promo running at the time.

Social

Creation Flow, Naming Templates, and Build URLs: Reduced manual effort per flow, allowing for impressive scale for a lean team.

Creative Manager: The team tested new Facebook ad types at scale, utilizing a variety of vivid, eye-catching creative – including Facebook Dynamic Ads and video ads – to deliver messages that resonate. Additionally, Skai’s automated creative refresh was key to fighting ad fatigue and improving their storytelling.

Personas: They managed their audiences at scale leveraging Personas to easily create, reuse, reiterate, group, and update their most valuable audiences.

Singular integration: Skai integrated Singular, Lyft’s Mobile Measurement Partner, in just one-week! Via this integration, the team was able to pull in mobile data to further optimize their campaigns, enabling the team to think cross-channel and product line in terms of strategy, and growth.

Cross-channel

Cross-collaboration: The search and social teams communicated regularly to share audience and creative strategies and leverage success from one another.

Results: Amazing Scale!

The scale that Lyft achieved was amazing, allowing them to expand their service coverage from 54% of the U.S. population to 95% and establish a presence in Canada. Search and Social channels have been a major contributor to Lyft’s success in 2017.

Challenge

  • Scale regionalized campaigns
  • Activate high volumes of campaigns at once

Solution

  • Campaign mirroring from Google to Bing and Yahoo Gemini
  • Creation Flow, Naming Templates, and Build URLs
  • Creative Manager
  • Personas
  • Integration to ProductsUp
  • Integration to Singular

Results

  • Expanded service coverage from 54% of the US to 95%
  • Expanded into Canada


Being able to manage high campaign volumes and a hyper-regionalized campaign structure in both our search and social programs was critical to our success. Managing that type of complexity without a partner like Skai would be impossible.”

Russ Brodmerkle, Senior Marketing Manager, Lyft