Holiday Extras is a company that helps people travel better. They offer a range of products such as airport parking, airport hotels, airport lounge passes, travel insurance, car hire and more. The aims of the Holiday Extras marketing team are to acquire new customers and drive profitable incremental bookings across all available channels.
About Holiday Extras
Ancillary travel services
Founded in 1983
Rundown Goals
Acquire new customers
Drive profitable incremental bookings
Manage cost per acquisition
Rundown Approach
Implemented Smart Display Campaigns
Rundown Results
Gained incremental direct bookings and clicks
Increased incremental impression volume for display by 24%
Reduced cost per acquisition by 25% compared to manual search campaigns
Recorded 1% better click conversion rate than manual remarketing
By working with their Google account team, Holiday Extras learned about Smart Display Campaigns as a way to grow incremental traffic profitably, especially before the important high seasonality period of summer. To get the new campaigns set up, they simply used their existing AdWords feeds, uploaded assets to allow the dynamic creation of relevant display ads and set a cost per acquisition target.
Smart Display Campaigns used the power of Google’s machine learning to automatically connect Holiday Extras to prospective customers likely to be interested in their products, dynamically creating ads to fit anywhere across the Google Display Network.
"Impressive incremental volume at our cost per acquisition target for minimal effort! Liam Thompson, OA Technical & Display Manager, Holiday Extras."
To measure success, the team looked at direct bookings on a last-paid-click attribution model. As well as incremental direct bookings and clicks, the new approach delivered a 24% incremental uplift in impression volume for display. At the same time, Holiday Extras recorded a 25% lower cost per acquisition than manual search campaigns and a 1% better click conversion rate than manual display remarketing.
“We tried Smart Display Campaigns for the volume boost, but a surprise was the higher conversion rate”, says Holiday Extras OA Technical & Display Manager Liam Thompson. “The Google brain picks the right potential customers!” They’ve now expanded their use of Smart Display Campaigns, and are looking to extend the approach across more products and brands.
