How a global VPN brand built presence across Europe and the Middle East.
With DESSY's audience targeting and inventory discovery, Hotspot Shield ran display campaigns across multiple European and Middle Eastern markets - reaching 14 million new users and lifting landing page visits across MENA.
Read the resultsA privacy product sells differently in every market it enters.
Hotspot Shield's audience isn't defined by demographics - it's defined by motivation. Some users want privacy on public networks, some want access to content, some want security while travelling. Those motivations vary sharply between markets, which makes a single regional message hard to land and a single audience definition hard to build.
Running across both Europe and the Middle East compounded it. The two regions differ in supply availability, content environments and category maturity, so placements that perform in one often underperform in the other. Managing that through separate regional buys meant fragmented reporting and no consistent read on which markets were actually driving subscribers.
Hotspot Shield needed broad presence across many geographies at once, with enough audience precision that reach converted into landing page traffic rather than passive impressions.
Wide regional presence, market by market.
Target on motivation, not demographics
Build audiences around the behaviours that signal genuine VPN intent, so delivery concentrates on users with a reason to subscribe rather than the broadest available pool.
Find supply that works in each region
Surface available inventory market by market across Europe and the Middle East, accounting for how differently supply behaves between the two regions.
Run every market from one platform
Activate all geographies through DESSY DSP, giving consistent measurement across regions instead of stitching together separate regional buys.
Optimise toward landing page visits
Shift budget toward the placements driving users onto the site, treating landing page traffic as the signal of qualified reach rather than clicks alone.
Presence across two regions. Traffic that followed the reach.
new unique users reached
brand impressions delivered
clicks recorded
CTR
increase in landing page visits across MENA
across multiple markets in Europe and the Middle East