Background

Ariens Company, based in Brillion, Wis., is a privately-owned and operated corporation focused on outdoor products that serve the needs of both consumer and professional customers. On the snow side of the business, the Ariens® Sno-Thro is the best-selling brand of two-stage snow throwers in the world, making Ariens the King of Snow®.

Challenge

Ariens Company had observed that sales of their products were subject to weather variability – in particular the snow blowers. Digital Marketing Manager Natalie Nelson understood that she could positively impact engagement and conversions across display and social by automating ads to trigger before, during and after periods of heavy snowfall.

“We needed a solution for producing automated weather targeted ads to increase sales of our snow products. We wanted to serve up one set of ads in anticipation of a winter storm and a different set of messaging through-to-post winter storm. We had been manually creating ads and targeting based on weather news. We wanted a less manual, more automated experience.“

- Natalie Nelson, Digital Marketing Manager at Ariens Company

Solution

Ariens Company used WeatherAds to set up weather based rules for their AdWords display campaigns. The first creative variant ‘pre-storm’ centered around pre-emptively triggering ads several days ahead of an impending snow storm, urging the viewer to "get ahead of the storm" by purchasing an Ariens snow blower.

The second set of creative was activated during the snow storm, and remained live for several days after the event. This ‘post-storm’ ad had a more generic branded creative which did not specifically reference the snow.

‍

Results

Over the 4 winter months that the Display campaign ran, Ariens achieved over 11.7 million impressions and 48,100 clicks, with an average cost of just $0.27 per click. The ‘pre-storm’ ads, which carried the weather targeting through into the creative by directly referencing the impending storm, significantly outperformed the more generic 'post-storm' ads:

‍