Ramadan Nights Lakemba was back! Following the huge success of last year’s event in 2022, which attracted more than 1.2 million people to achieve recognition as one of Sydney’s most popular cultural events… this year, Canterbury Bankstown Council were ready to take it to the next level and make it even bigger!

Ramadan falls between 21 March – 20 April 2023. Radio, cinema, outdoor and digital all worked together to create a high impact, high frequency campaign – driving awareness, reach and ultimately footfall. Activity began on 1 March 2023, remained on until the last night of Ramadan on 20 April 2023.

Search

Search campaign delivered huge results for a small investment. In order to ensure we did not pay for clicks that CBCity organic results could easily manage, the word ‘lakemba’ was moved into our negative keyword list; meaning anyone searching ‘ramadan nights Lakemba’ would not be served a paid ad. The campaign instead concentrated on paid keywords such as Ramadan 2023, Ramadan Sydney, things to do, local events etc. The Lakemba postcode was also excluded from geo-target area for the same reason.

Opening out to Greater Sydney, with more of a focus on Sydney, Inner West and South West in order to grow reach outside of just Western Sydney – we saw a huge coverage and market saturation. Lakemba (2195) was excluded and left to organic delivery to not waste budget. Mobile phones were key to delivery.

Display

Google display delivered almost 1 million impressions in market. We saw incredible results with an excellent average CTR; continuous optimisations were made to ensure maximum exposure.         

Various audience segments were set up and tested for display delivery – ‘foodies’ adgroup saw the best CTR and volumeclicks (behavioural targeting) as well as ‘food & drink’ segment within ‘topics’ adgroup (contextual targeting). As with search we used blanket coverage across geo-catchment, with the heat map demonstrating more clicks/engagement coming from western Sydney and Sydney CBD.

Our display ads used specific taglines in a series of CALD audience languages such as Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin…This helped to bring the overall community together.

This specific CALD audience advertising had a strong click through and engaged widely with new audiences.

YouTube

YouTube was set up to rotate the 6 second bumper ad version using generic artwork, as well as a 60 sec and 15 sec version of Oz Omar and footage of 2022. The campaign delivered well over average bench mark watch rate at an extremely low CPV.

Oz Omar video versions proving to be most engaging generating higher view rate than generic version even though they are much longer. 15 second version has delivered the most views to date at the lowest CPV. Objective of YouTube is to drive reach and frequency – click rate was naturally much lower, though this campaign still generated 355 direct clicks from video.

Native

Native activity concluded reaching its budget 4 days ahead of official end date. Native distributed more than 600,000 impressions with a great vCTR and high volume clicks. 3 x headlines, images and 2 x article versions were used to engage within an editorial environment to communicate Ramadan Nights Lakemba event details.

Results

Ramadan Nights Lakemba 2023!
Last year saw huge success, attracting more than 1.2 million people over the month long event and achieving recognition as one of Sydney’s most popular cultural events. This year the event attracted more than 1.4 million people! Ramadan Nights Lakemba is an award-winning event that is  now recognised as being of State-significance and with plans underway for 2024’s event.

Ramadan fell between 21 March – 20 April 2023. Radio, cinema, outdoor and digital all worked together to create a high impact, high frequency campaign – driving awareness, reach and ultimately footfall.

Activity began on 1 March 2023, and completed on the last night of Ramadan on 20 April 2023.

End of Campaign Report Highlights

Massive on page engagement.

• 211,410 Page Views (between 1 Mar – 20 Apr) /events/ramadan-nights-lakemba

• 27,288 site map & stall list downloads

• 7,319 shuttle bus map & timetable downloads

• 5,700 clicks to Ramadan Nights Lakemba FAQs

• 5,559 clicks to Taste Tours and 1,983 clicks to TransportNSW

• 5 mins 47 secs Average time on page

Last year, Ramadan Nights Lakemba activity ran over a 34 day period, whereas 2023 activity ran over 50 days.

Page views by year:

2022: 188,005 page views

2023: 217,668 page views

A total increase of +15.78% YoY; with all other metrics also positive when compared to previous year.