Dominating Florida Travel Industry with Paid Search
Semetrical’s paid search strategy helped to build Ocean Florida’s brand as the UK’s leading provider of Florida package holidays by championing the Sunshine State to UK holiday markers.
Ambition
Ocean Florida had an ambition to become the UK’s leading provider of Florida package holidays, and asked Semetrical to manage their paid search strategy to help them achieve it.
To help build Ocean Florida’s brand, grow customer acquisition and champion the Sunshine State to UK holiday makers, Semetrical set out to achieve the following:
Objectives:
- Integrate business CRM data into paid search campaign optimisation
- Redefine the campaign structure to align with new business segments
- Integrate paid search campaigns with the wider digital strategy, including: SEO, in-house tech, analytics
- Introduce long term planning of 6 – 12 months into campaign management
- Support the business wide objective of 30% revenue growth YOY.
Targets:
- Increase paid search enquiries from 37,000 to 48,000 YOY.
- Minimise the increases in cost per enquiry.
Strategy
We recognised that working collaboratively and building strong relationships was imperative to the success of our campaigns and represented a significant area where we could provide value as an agency.
Our target audience included the following:
We set out to target UK holiday makers in the consideration stage of their holiday search journey, specifically searching for large package holidays to Florida and / or Orlando.
The client possessed an in-depth knowledge of the target audiences and benefitted from a wealth of valuable data that we could leverage to optimise the paid search campaigns.
The challenges we faced however, was that the crucial information data had not been historically documented, and was only available following numerous discovery sessions, research and correspondence with numerous business stakeholders at Ocean Florida.
We recognised that working collaboratively and building strong relationships was imperative to the success of our campaigns and represented a significant area where we could provide value as an agency.
Our strategy was therefore focused around:
- Finding the best combination of target keywords + landing pages
- Leveraging client data to help inform our optimisation strategy
- Operating as an extension of an in-house performance team
- Longer term planning and moving past last click attribution
Our strategy of alignment and knowledge sharing was centred around the following processes:
Finding the best combination of keywords & landing pages:
- Collaborated with Conversion Rate Optimisation experts to run large scale sustained split tests
- Testing and personalisation of 20 different templates across dozens of keyword categories
- Provided timely and detailed updates via our bespoke reporting interface
Leveraging data in optimisation:
- Daily exports of enquiries, bookings and profit per keyword to discover the most efficient allocation of bids across 4,500 keywords
- Exploited internal data science projects to better understand conversion obstacles
- Leveraged a likelihood of booking score and a target ROAS bid algorithm to boost revenue
Behaving like an in-house team:
- We restructured our account, matching each keyword to a specific business category and built a bespoke report system to provide daily performance insights
- This meant that any client observations around the performance for a specific segment could be easily mapped to our campaigns
- Similarly, any changes we made could be easily linked to changes seen at a business level
- This increased our ability to plan spends efficiently month on month and to effectively communicate how the changes we made impacted their business performance metrics
Longer-term planning:
- We now work closely with the client to plan activity by quarter, improving the efficiency of media budget allocations
- Identify and exploit new sources of data for optimisation, including Sales Qualified Lead data and ‘likelihood of booking’ data
- Move past the last click attribution and drive cross channel uplift
- Launch of Programmatic Display and Video Advertising
Our work with Ocean Florida demonstrates Semetrical’s prowess in adding strategic value in a business environment where the traditional agency role is under threat from automation and in-housing.
Achievements
By improving alignment, planning and use of data, we managed to achieve the following results:
Overall performance:
- +61% increase in enquiries YOY (+21,532) for a -0.2% decrease in cost per enquiry
- +20% increase in attributable revenue YOY (+£211k)
Best performing quarter:
- +79% increase in enquiries (+8,316) generated in Q3 YOY
- +33% increase in revenue (+£93k) generated in Q3 YOY
Best performing category:
- +104% increase in Orlando Villas enquiries (+6,692) YOY
- +55% increase in Orlando Villas profit (£104k) YOY
Our work with Ocean Florida demonstrates Semetrical’s prowess in adding strategic value in a business environment where the traditional agency role is under threat from automation and in-housing.
