EyeforTravel.com Exclusive – Pleasant Holidays and Yahoo! case study

Published: 01 May 2007

EyeforTravel.com Exclusive – Pleasant Holidays and Yahoo! case study

Yahoo! Search Marketing recently worked with one of its key travel advertisers, Pleasant Holidays, on a multi-channel keyword effectiveness analysis that provided very insightful results to the established provider of discount travel packages.

According to Brad King, Senior Director, Travel Category, Yahoo! Search Marketing, in partnership with Who’s Calling, a third-party provider of cross-channel marketing analytics, Yahoo! helped turn a giant spotlight on this area and illuminate what was working for Pleasant Holidays – and what was not.

After digesting all the findings, Pleasant Holidays adjusted its search strategy in a number of different ways.

Pleasant Holidays adjusted its search strategy in a number of different ways – one of which was to increase its investment in sponsored search.

The company now routes search-generated calls to a group of sales-oriented agents, having observed that roughly 85 percent of these calls present opportunities to make sales (as opposed to calls for customer service) and can convert better than calls from other sources.

With its new, holistic view of all sales channels driven from search marketing, Pleasant Holidays laid the foundation for intelligent online advertising analysis beyond bid management tools.

The company changed the way it managed its ad groups, putting more of a focus on its travel destinations versus simply its top online keyword performers, after discovering that some lower-performing keywords were generating strong call volume and conversation. And, it applied a unique cost-per-acquisition metric to destinations that do not book well online, recognising that while the company can grow into new markets, each market will have different attributes.

So how does it signify the benefits of being flexible enough to quickly implement changes based on measurement results?

According to Yahoo!, within a very short time of receiving the results, Pleasant Holidays had a much clearer understanding of its overall cost-per-acquisition through online channels. The company looked at the keywords it was bidding on in a whole new way and was able to set cost-per-click limits based on a holistic analysis of online lead-generation to online and offline sales.

“The marketing team at Pleasant Holidays determined that certain keywords and destinations drove a great deal of booking activity through the call center and they adjusted and tested keyword descriptions to optimize their search campaign based upon this new data. Additionally, more detailed tracking provided a better understanding of day-to-day business demand and how Pleasant Holidays could better structure its operations to meet this demand,” said King.

“Creating an optimised search marketing program is really only the first step in using the Web to help build your business. Just as important – if not more – is maintaining an understanding of how your strategy is working over time,” said King. “By using analytics like these, we can work with our advertisers to more effectively fund their search marketing campaigns and ultimately, play a role in helping them be more successful in closing business.”

“From the first day we were provided access to the Who’s Calling data, we began confirming assumptions we’d made for years about online visits that generate calls to our call center. Specifically, we learned that certain keywords and keyword combinations can generate call volume and conversion, even if they don’t necessarily drive a lot of online sales,” said Todd Castor, Staff Vice President of E-Commerce at Pleasant Holidays. ClickPath from Who’s Calling was the missing piece in our online analytics toolset that proved the value of our search marketing campaign beyond just clicks.”