AKC Registration Campaign
Awards Submission
“Declare Your Love” — Campaign Overview and Results | 2025
Project Description
In 2025, the American Kennel Club and Leap Group launched “Declare Your Love,” a full-funnel paid media campaign built to grow purebred dog registrations. The campaign extended AKC’s national brand platform, “Everything We Do, We Do for Dogs,” into a dedicated registration effort designed to reach prospective and
current dog owners at every stage of the decision to register.
Rather than treating registration as a single ad unit, Leap built a three-stage media funnel, spanning awareness, consideration, and conversion, each with its own creative, channel mix, and goals. The campaign ran across YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Google, and Microsoft from January through September 2025, supported by :06, :15, and :30 video along with static and responsive display creative.
Objective
Grow AKC dog registrations by building awareness of the registration process and its benefits among a new tactical audience, then converting that awareness into completed registrations through search and retargeting.
Target Audience
The campaign targeted Lola+: Millennial and Gen Z adults aged 18 to 44 who were aspiring to acquire a purebred dog within the next 12 months, with a bullseye target of Lola, a 23 to 26 year old woman. A secondary audience included existing purebred dog owners who had not yet registered. Messaging tested five reasons to believe, in priority order: breed pride, breed preservation, ancestry and pedigree, AKC’s not-for-profit status, and breed-specific advice, alongside practical benefits like AKC Reunite microchip access and a personalized registration certificate.
Strategy
The media plan mapped directly to the customer journey, moving prospects from broad awareness to a direct call to register:
- Awareness (YouTube, Meta, TikTok | May 27–Sept 30): Build awareness of AKC Dog Registration among a broad audience likely to have recently gotten or be planning to get a dog, using :06, :15, and :30 video.
- Consideration (Meta, Google Responsive Display | June 10–Nov 30): Retarget people who engaged with the brand campaign video or landed on the site through it, encouraging them to learn more about registration.
- Conversion (Google Search, Microsoft Search, Google Display retargeting | Jan 1–Dec 31): Capture demand from people who had engaged with registration content or visited the registration page but hadn’t yet converted, with a direct call to register,
Results
Awareness
87% of 21M goal
15% below $5.00 benchmark
$0.03 cost per view
87% of 21M goal
75% below $12.53 benchmark
Breed Researchers segment
More than half of YouTube in-stream views came from Connected TV, AKC’s fastest-growing device by year-over-year growth, and 15-second creative drove 58% of Meta ThruPlays at $0.03 per view.
Consideration
606% of 2.4K goal
80% below $5.00 benchmark
272% of 11K goal
77% below $2.25 benchmark
Display outperformed video by a wide margin in this stage: display placements saw more than 10 times the available spend, more than five times the engagement, and roughly 25 times the click-through rate to the registration landing page. On Meta, video creative generated more than 93% of all campaign link clicks.
Conversion
106% of 3K goal
119% of 3K goal, CPA -33% vs. benchmark
Up from 32% in January
Over the course of the year, the search program shifted deliberately from brand to non-brand targeting to capture new demand rather than re-buy existing users. Combined Google and Microsoft non-brand spend grew from 32% of budget in January to 82% by September, moving the program toward its 90/10 non-brand-to-brand goal.
Full-Funnel Impact
Down to $0.63
Year over year
Est. 3.15x with attribution gaps closed
Paid media generated $2,875,221 in tracked revenue from January through September ($2,601,692 from Google, $198,933 from Microsoft, and $74,597 from Meta). Registration cost per acquisition averaged $10.01 against a $9.30 benchmark for the February–September flight, with CPA down an average of 5.8% across all AKC verticals over the same window.
Key Insights
- Non-brand search built new demand at scale. The shift toward non-brand search cut CPC 79% year over year, and non-brand CPA landed well below the vertical benchmark, at $9.92 versus $143.16, confirming that the move away from branded terms built new demand without sacrificing efficiency.
- Upper-funnel investment paid off down the funnel. Registration YouTube campaigns launched in the spring grew impressions 665.6% year over year and sustained audience engagement even through a fourth-quarter attribution disruption that temporarily suppressed reported conversions.
- First-party audiences outperformed cold prospecting. AKC’s own Breed Researchers audience consistently delivered a disproportionate share of video views and completions relative to spend, reinforcing the value of AKC’s owned data.
- Display, not video, carried retargeting. In direct testing, display retargeting drove dramatically more engagement and landing page clicks than video retargeting, a signal that shaped media planning going into 2026.
Source: AKC Registration Reporting Deck (Oct. 2025) and 2025 Year in Review — Registration Vertical (Google & Microsoft Ads).
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