Cottages4you
Challenge:
The online self-catering market has become fragmented, with consumers becoming more sophisticated and demanding, with ever increasing choice. Cottages4you had been experiencing increased competition from smaller, regional holiday cottage operators, which, given their specialist local knowledge maintain some advantage in the regional search markets.
With over 10,000 holiday cottages within its UK portfolio, Cottages4you had historically been equipped to promote cottages on a nation region level, (e.g. England, Scotland) and county level (Suffolk, Dorset, etc). The search campaign had been structured to include specific keyword ad-groups for each region with keywords and creative messaging relevant to that region. As creative can only be assigned at an ad group level, this prevented creative messaging being served to consumers searching for specific towns within a region. The challenge was to think local, but act national.
The objectives set to the agency were:-
- Compete with regional cottage operators at a regional level
- Increase campaign click through rate by 20% YOY
- Increase propensity for consumers perform holiday searches by 20%
- Increase campaign bookings by 20%
Solution:
- To design and build a regional search campaign to run at a national level
- To structure the campaign to allow specific regions, areas, cities, towns to be individually promoted, based on available cottage inventory at any given time
- To review and expand the keywords to include a greater number of search terms at a city and town level
- To produce creative messaging targeted at city/town level, ensuring that consumers searching for specific cottage locations, are presented with exact and relevant ad creative
The result of this work transformed the old cottages4you search campaign introducing 734 ad-groups rather than 178 and 4,753 ad creatives in place of 1,850.
Results:
The restructure of the campaign meant that despite a fall in market search volume of 7%,
in a maturing marketplace, the new structure generated
- An increase in click through rate of 29% directly attributable to the targeted and granular regional campaign structure, delivering highly qualified traffic to the website
- The propensity of users to search for a holiday cottage, uplifted by 33% YOY
- The increase in the quality of users to the site, delivered 27% more bookings YOY, whilst also ensuring that the cost per booking remained within targets.
