Shop Ohio Cheese
The Project
Inspire works with the American Dairy Association Mideast (ADA Mideast), which represents dairy farmers in Ohio and West Virginia, on the holiday Shop Ohio Cheese campaign. It is designed to support Ohio’s cheesemakers in increasing sales of their cheese products online during the winter holiday season.
ADA Mideast first launched its online shopping platform, ShopOhioCheese.com, in 2020 to help Ohio’s cheesemakers in boosting sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was so successful that it is now an annual initiative to promote Ohio cheese as holiday gifts.
Through highly targeted digital and social media ads, coordinated by Inspire, the Ohio cheesemakers have seen increased sales. Additionally, Inspire has led media and influencer outreach to further support the campaign.
The Shop Ohio Cheese microsite is updated yearly to showcase a curated list of Ohio cheese gifts from local cheesemakers. In total, seven cheesemakers had gift packages featured in 2024, including Blue Jacket Dairy, Foris Extraordinary Meats. Guggisberg Cheese Factory, Pearl Valley Cheese, Rothenbuhler Cheesemakers and Snowville Creamery. For 2024, the website was also updated with sections for featured recipes, cheese pairing ideas, cheese board basics and cheese storage tips to provide additional information and pages for visitors to explore.
The 2024 Shop Ohio Cheese digital advertising campaign ran from early November through the end of December. Advertising ran throughout this period on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Pinterest and Google Ads (including YouTube placements), with the goal of driving traffic to ShopOhioCheese.com to promote the cheese gift packages.
The Results
The 2024 Shop Ohio Cheese campaign was the most successful campaign to date.
- ShopOhioCheese.com received nearly 195,000 visits and 221,500+ page views from about 170,850 users
- Paid search was the leading driver to ShopOhioCheese.com, with 84,473 visits from 76,594 new users.
- Meta advertising reached 596,800 users and ads had 1.9 million impressions, resulting in 27,100+ landing page views on ShopOhioCheese.com, with an average CPC of .37 cents
- Pinterest advertising drove 3,000+ clicks and had 369,500+ impressions.
- Google Ads had 12.78 million impressions and resulted in nearly 175,000 clicks, at an average cost per click of .20 cents
- 7,659 total users clicked 16,606 times on outbound links listed on ShopOhioCheese.com
- Overall, ads were responsible for driving 58% of visits to ShopOhioCheese.com in November and December 2024