Client: Leading Online Travel Agency
Industry: Online Travel Agency (OTA)
Challenge: The client was trapped in a cycle of complexity. Their AdWords account was a behemoth: nearly 900 campaigns, 20,000 keywords, and 16,000 ads. This unmanageable structure led to inefficient budget allocation, internal competition, and a failure to scale. The mandate was clear: streamline for clarity, drive revenue growth by over 50%, and maintain a CPA below $200.
Our In-Depth Approach & Strategy:
This was not an optimisation; it was a ground-up reconstruction based on the principle of “clarity drives performance.”
- The Great Consolidation & Rationalisation: Our first step was a forensic audit. We eliminated thousands of redundant, low-performing, and duplicate keywords. We consolidated the 900 campaigns into a logical, manageable 335, structured around their core commercial themes: Destinations, Resort Chains, Hot Deals, and Vacations by Interest (e.g., Honeymoon, Golf). This new structure gave us unparalleled budget control and strategic clarity.
- Implementing a Sophisticated RLSA Strategy: In the high-CPC travel vertical, competing on generic terms is a fast way to burn budget. Our solution was RLSA. We created bespoke audiences of past site visitors and applied tailored bidding strategies:
- For Brand Searchers: Ensure dominance.
- For Cart Abandoners: Bid aggressively with persuasive “Last Chance” ad copy.
- For Resort Page Visitors: Bid on competitor brand terms and generic resort names, knowing our audience was highly qualified.
- Value-Proposition Led Ad Copy Testing: We moved beyond generic “Great Deals” messaging. We developed a matrix of ad copy testing specific value propositions: “Free Child Places,” “No Deposit Options,” “ABTA/ATOL Protected.” This identified the key messaging that drove conversions for different audience segments, allowing us to tailor the ad experience to the user’s latent needs.
The Result:
The transformation of the account’s foundation led to its best-ever commercial performance.
- Revenue Meteoric Rise: A +1,033% increase in PPC-driven revenue, demonstrating that we were not just generating clicks, but high-value bookings.
- Efficient Growth: Conversions grew by 71% while the CPA was slashed by 40%.
- Unlocked Demand: The cleaner, more relevant account was rewarded by Google with a +351% increase in impressions, revealing a vast pool of demand that the previous structure was too messy to capture.
