SAS is Scandinavia’s biggest airline, flying 70,000 passengers per day. With just a small team of just three people, and a large number of countries to cater for, the company wanted to find a smarter way of working. They reached out to Google’s DoubleClick team, who helped find them a solution.
THE GOALS
Digitalise the marketing strategy and scale up the marketing activities globally
Reduce operational costs and increase efficiency
Increase ROI through more personalised messages
THE APPROACH
A holistic strategy across display and search
Integration of all different data sources in one place, through DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Google Analytics 360
Creation of user segments to drive personalised messages, through DoubleClick Dynamic Creative and DoubleClick BidManager
THE RESULTS
203% increase in revenues
346% surge in marketing ROI
Decreased cost of sales by 78%
Expanded activities to 16 markets, without increasing the size of the team
Ian Björkdal, Digital Marketing Manager for SAS, reveals that DoubleClick were able to provide them with a complete Tech Stack, which provided platforms for all the team’s needs.
Working with Google and DoubleClick, as well as GroupM and MediaCom, SAS harnessed Google Analytics 360, DoubleClick for Search, DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Rich Media Studio, allowing SAS to serve dynamically generated ads based on real time customer behaviour.
Ian reveals: “For users that have been to our site and searched for flights, say for example from London to New York, but haven’t booked it, we retarget that user with the relevant creative with a New York background.”
Immediate results
Simon Yule is the Senior International Digital Marketing Manager for SAS. He reveals: “We noticed an improvement in performance almost immediately. This was due to the fact that the adverts we were retargeting customers with were far more relevant.”
"We see our partnership with DoubleClick as a logical step in our ambition to move towards a truly data-driven approach to digital marketing. DoubleClick have an impressive suite of technology platforms that can help scale our digital marketing ambitions."
- William Reed, Acting Vice President Brand & Marketing, SAS
Before implementing DoubleClick Studio, SAS only had 400 generic messages; today, they have 1.3million with all possible combinations. Simon explains: “When you’ve got an analytics’ platform that can seamlessly integrate with your search and your programmatic display bid tools, that’s pretty powerful.”
The results were impressive: website revenue increased by 203%, ROI was 346% and cost of sale decreased by 78%. SAS started off with just three markets and DoubleClick enabled them to scale up to 16 markets.
Looking to the future
Simon acknowledges that such scaling would have been more difficult and expensive without DoubleClick: “It would have required more admin, more resources and it would have been more costly for us and we wouldn’t have been as agile as we are now, considering the size of our time.”
As for the future, SAS are working with Google on integrating Google Flight Search and DoubleClick Studio, with the aim of feeding live prices and making banners even more relevant. Simon is looking forward to building on SAS’ success: “The project has been really exciting to work on, and we’re going to look to develop the capabilities that the DoubleClick Technology Stack offers.”
