• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, August 22, 2016

Advertising messaging in driving consumers to a deeper purchase commitment wasn’t completely working for Ancestry.com.

“We probably were limiting ourselves in terms of how we speak to people,” said Riddhi Goradia, director, display/content marketing for Ancestry.com, in speaking at MediaPost’s Programmatic Insider Summit.

So the company shifted away in part from its advertising messaging about consumers discovering their family history to something a little easier and quicker: Like finding out the meaning of their last name.

“We are not driving them to 14-day free trial page, we are driving them to a page where they are entering their last name and then get some payoff,” said Goradia. “It about about having a real experience on our site.”

All this was a tease to get consumers more interested in finding out about their family history.

As a result Ancestry got big subscriber growth, as well as reducing consumer acquisition costs by 23%. “It had such an impact on our core metrics,” she said.

She also notes Ancestry found better results transitioning from just general digital programmatic media buying to more native-content programmatic media.