Brazilian airline Gol Linhas Aéreas wanted to increase ticket sales by engaging the country's thriving online market of 100 million people. The airline and its agency, AlmapBBDO, realized they needed a better understanding of how their online ads were reaching and influencing potential fliers across every channel. Using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, they were able to integrate workflows, create targeted messages and measure the overall impact of their online ad campaigns. As a result, Gol's sales increased by 56% from the previous year, and the company doubled its ad spend return.
Goals
Reach more travelers and increase ticket sales for Gol Airlines
Gain a unified view of its marketing and customers
Prepare to thrive in the fast-growing Brazilian market
Approach
Use the entire DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform for a unified view of its campaigns
Use cross-channel data to analyze the impact of Gol ads
With the new information, make stronger decisions about ads, formats and budgets
Results
Doubled return on ad spend
Increased sales 56% from the previous year
Increased revenue 100% over the same period
Tripled investment in online advertising
With a rich history of fresh thinking and innovation in media buying and planning, AlmapBBDO has been creating successful ads in Brazil since 1993. Today it is one of the country’s leading agencies, with clients such as Volkswagen, Visa and Hewlett-Packard.
For its client Gol Linhas Aéreas, Brazil’s second-largest airline, Almap’s goal was simple: help Gol put more customers in its seats. To do that, it realized it needed a better understanding of how its online ads were reaching and influencing potential fliers across channels.
"Our marketing strategy is to connect brands with people, with messages that speak to them directly," says Kauê Lara Cury, digital media director of Almap. To make those connections stronger, Almap turned to the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.
One integrated view
"Before the arrival of DoubleClick as an integrated platform, we had to implement everything from zero, creating a huge number of documents," says Ana Cester, Almap’s director of insights and analytics. "The bureaucracy was huge. And then when the campaign was on the air we had to collect everything together again to create reports. We never had a single vision of the campaign."
DoubleClick Digital Marketing gave them that single vision by integrating their digital efforts across the creation, execution and measurement of their campaigns for search, programmatic and reservations display, and rich media. The DoubleClick solutions work together, accessible from a single UI and workflow, to help Almap and Gol understand the impact their ads are really having across channels and screens.
DoubleClick helps Almap tailor its marketing message to fit the specific user and moment. In search, keyword-level semantic targeting and realtime bid optimization ensure that when Brazilian users search for "plane tickets to Sao Paulo," they get the right message from Gol. Almap uses dynamic creative to deliver different versions of its ads based on what it knows its audience may be interested in. Then, it uses insights from paid search clicks from DoubleClick Search to remarket to audiences with display creatives via DoubleClick Bid Manager—all with a seamless, tagless workflow.
Streamlined and more powerful
To make all of Gol’s online campaigns work together, Almap uses DoubleClick to streamline the targeting, serving and reporting of its campaigns. And Almap is able to analyze the results of all its digital campaigns with one unified view.
"What’s unique for us about DoubleClick is how easy the tool made it for us to solve complex problems like programmatic buying and search optimization," says Cury. "We save time on analysis and optimization. Instead of needing to produce reports and work with pivot tables and different platforms, all the data is easily accessed and instantly visualized. What used to take us ten hours now takes two, thanks to real-time reporting." And using the DoubleClick attribution tools, Almap is able to better understand the customer journey, and which channels are driving conversions, to help it make better decisions about where to spend its digital marketing dollars.
The changes are a good fit for the highly competitive Brazilian market, which is exploding as more Brazilians come online. "Nearly 100 million Brazilians use the internet now," says Cester. "We need to be there and be visible to these people. DoubleClick helps us understand what is really relevant to the future."
A holistic view enables better performance
Is Gol selling more tickets since adopting the entire DoubleClick platform? Absolutely.
"DoubleClick took us to a whole new level in terms of sales, in terms of our results and our average conversion rate," says Florence Scappini, director of marketing and e-commerce for Gol Linhas Aéreas. The airline’s sales for the first half of 2014 were up 56% from the same period a year earlier, with revenue doubled for the same period. Gol and Almap have tripled their budget for online media since adopting the full DoubleClick stack, moving a large share of their offline media budget online.
"The different DoubleClick products help us with everything from the most basic decisions, such as which ads and placements work best, to more complicated decisions, such as what the user looks for most when buying a plane ticket," says Kauê Lara Cury. "DoubleClick brought us a global media vision that previous tools were unable to bring."
And Gol isn’t done yet. "In such a highly competitive market, certain things make us lose sleep," says Scappini. "One of them is finding our competitive edge. DoubleClick marks a new phase for our company, focused on performance and results."
