lastminute.com links data to search

The Goals

Reduce daily manual tasks, manage campaigns and ad copy more efficiently
Uncover new insights by monitoring performance on lastminute.com group’s own business dimensions
Rationalize reporting activities

The Approach

Integrated lastminute.com group’s internal business data into DoubleClick Search
Added in-destination and product data to improve reporting
Automated and made prices adjust dynamically in ad copy

The Results

35% overall time freed up for team (70 hours)
Reduced time spent on reporting by 10%
Reduced time spent on account management by 25%

Published April 2017

Lastminute.com group sells travel and leisure to thousands of destinations across the globe. Hotel bookings are a key category and an important source of traffic to the brand’s websites.

The ad copy for lastminute.com group’s campaigns includes the product type (for example, a hotel), destination name and a price. The hotel price to be displayed in the ad is calculated on a regular basis by the lastminute.com group trading team and updated in the internal business data systems.

In order to create a dynamic link between this internal data and search campaigns, lastminute used business data with DoubleClick Search. This allowed parameters such as product category, destination and price to be pulled into the campaign and ad copy directly from the internal data source. This enabled lastminute.com group to both create new pivots in reports and produce more timely and content automatically, all while leveraging and preserving historical data.

Business data helps us improve efficiency and allows us to be more responsive in an increasingly competitive environment.
- Yannic Pluymackers, CMO at lastminute.com

With the ads now showing the most recent price set by the lastminute.com group trading team, the performance metrics for campaign alterations can be analysed more quickly.

Segmentation based on destination allows more granular analysis as reports show how an overall destination or product is performing. The result is more rapid optimization.

At a time in which automation is a key area of focus for lastminute.com group, the integration of our business data in Doubleclick Search helped the team free up a significant amount of time to dedicate to other, higher value added activities.
- Yannic Pluymackers, CMO at lastminute.com

Using these approaches, lastminute has been able to realize significant resource savings – a 25% reduction in time required for campaign optimizations and a 10% reduction in time required for reporting. Overall, this means the team has 35% additional capacity each week to devote to strategic tasks.

AnadoluJet sales take off with cross-device insights in DoubleClick Search

AnadoluJet is the rapidly growing, low-cost branch of Turkish Airlines. It offers affordable routes between dozens of cities throughout Turkey including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir. In just eight years, the company has grown its fleet of airplanes from 5 to 32 and currently achieves an average occupancy rate of 85% across its flights.

Aiming for a mobile, cross-device strategy

By mid-2015, AnadoluJet's paid search activity had grown to a point where it was too much of an operational burden to continue to manually adjust bids for all keywords and campaigns across devices. In addition, AnadoluJet's paid search strategy lagged behind the growing mobile search opportunity in Turkey where 66% of smartphone users who purchased a travel product in the past 12 months have researched or purchased products on a smartphone, according to data from Mobile in the Purchase Journey.

AnadoluJet's digital marketing team partnered with Starcom Mediavest Group and VivaKi to implement a cross-device search marketing strategy that would streamline operations, increase ticket sales while maintaining mobile traffic and help them gain a full understanding of the path to purchase on mobile in order to allocate their marketing budget most effectively. To achieve these goals, the team looked for a solution that would help them automate, optimize and measure all of AnadoluJet’s search campaigns across devices.

Implementing a mobile, cross-device strategy with DoubleClick Search

AnadoluJet, Starcom and VivaKi turned to the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite as the perfect solution for their objectives because it offered automated bidding and measurement capabilities, which would help the team save time, boost conversions and gain insights about consumer purchase behavior. The team implemented DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding to automatically use cross-device conversions to intelligently bid on clicks across devices, ensuring campaign dollars were being allocated most effectively across each device.