Sandals: THE LUXURY INCLUDED VACATION
Challenge
The Caribbean luxury travel operator had over 5 years of history with ESV when they began to look for ways to improve efficiency without impacting revenue volume. Sandals wanted to optimise their search activity so that other marketing channels – such as RTB – could be implemented while maintaining the overall online marketing budget and CoS target. Sandals also wanted to maximise impression share for exact match keywords. Broad match keywords appeared to have been cannibalising traffic in other areas of the account and were negatively affecting phrase match efficiency as well.
Solution
We began by changing all US broad match keywords to Broad Match Modified. This involved placing “+” signs in front of key terms within each keyword. Words like “of”, “and”, “to” and “in” did not have “+” added to them, but all meaningful terms in a phrase were amended. We did this in the most mature parts of the account in the US market only. Using the Broad Match Modifier opted us out of the full broad match behaviour (i.e. matching similes, and matching against in-session searches that were unrelated to the site). In addition, we added a host of search queries in exact match that had been triggering broad match and converting.
Results
A Caribbean luxury travel operator increases conversion rate by 45% YoY and revenue by 26% YoY with ESV Digital.
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